I’ve been absent from this space for longer than intended. This is mainly due to busy-ness and being on a tight deadline for The Panafold’s fall issue (though for me, ironically, being on deadline for one project often tends to inspire unmatched productivity on another—call it a rebellious streak or the curse of ADHD; there is just something so delicious about working on something other than the thing I’m “supposed” to be working on). But I’ve also been processing a great deal internally. It’s been a strange summer, long and tedious and at times unbearably hot. I’ve been working round the clock and grieving a breakup and trying to help my mother find a home and eking out moments to work on my novel. I certainly wouldn’t call it one of my most fun or carefree or adventurous summers, apart from a few glorious moments here and there—a week-long writing retreat in Big Sur; my dear friend (and brilliant philosopher) Ellie Anderson’s bachelorette weekend in Ojai, where I bonded with some truly incredible women, became a certified “creek freak,” and witnessed two mating dragonflies landing ON MY SHOULDER; a thought-provoking conversation for our forthcoming issue with the Italian author Chiara Barzini (whose new book Aqua, tracing Los Angeles’ fraught relationship with water alongside her own personal history with Hollywood, is an absolute must-read); an inspiring shoot with artist Chris Kallmyer and photographer Mikey Armenta at Chris’ studio in Petaluma, surrounded by gorgeous handmade bells and windchimes and other “sounding objects”). I never knew that Hiroshi bells were missing from my life, but now I do! Designer (and founder / creative director of The Bureau) Sarah Giesenhagen’s Verdant Phenomena, a group exhibition of furniture, sculpture, and art objects staged in the backyard of the Sonoma home she shares with her husband, architect John Umbanhowar, was another highlight from one of my trips up north for work. If you find yourself in the area before the show closes on September 19, I recommend making an appointment to stop by (and then grabbing dinner at the always excellent Valley Bar + Bottle, where I recently discovered the delightful existence of biquinho peppers, which will become a pantry staple from this moment on). Oh, and I got to tour the grounds of the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art! I signed an NDA and can’t say much until they officially open their doors in September, but I will say that the landscape architecture in particular filled me with awe and hope for the future of public spaces in Los Angeles.

During my conversation with Chiara (which you can read in our forthcoming fall issue; subscribe here to secure your copy), who was born in Rome but spent her high school years in Los Angeles, she jokingly referred to her relationship with the city as a “dysfunctional marriage,” and I feel much the same. For all the negative press LA gets—the constant condemnations of its air quality, traffic, wildfires, insincerity, embrace of aesthetic enhancements, lack of real seasons or working infrastructure—there is a vibrant culture here that’s unlike anywhere else. It can be easy to lose sight of at times, and I’ve been grateful to rediscover it through my work on the magazine. I see the singularity of our culture, at least when it pertains to art and design, mostly as a certain freedom of expression, commitment to craft, and openness to trying what hasn’t been done before. There is something very Aquarian about this city. If you want to build something new, you can. If there’s no existing model for it, all the better. I think about Two Rose, the scrappy-transcendent bread and pizza pop-up that chef David Wilcox (of Hail Mary) ran for a spell from his backyard in Melrose Hill. I am currently rationing out the sliced pain de campagne I’ve stored in my freezer, some of the best I have had: a hefty, sour loaf made with organic hard red wheat, with an airy, almost custardy crumb. (Side note: I thank my lucky stars almost daily for my staunch tolerance of gluten). Though I only experienced it a few times, I will miss Two Rose terribly, and somehow I feel that it could only have happened here.

Another LA pop-up I’ve loved this summer: Granada, a coffee shop and informal gallery / gathering space run out of Sydney Wayser and Isaac Watters’ self-designed Echo Park home and garden. Karolina Maszkiewicz’s Mutable Garden, a collection of kinetic sculptures constructed from stainless steel rods and foraged seed pods gathered throughout Southern California, is currently on view there, and very much worth visiting. The way these sculptures converse with the surrounding landscape and tremble at the slightest breath of wind is really something. (It seems that I am having a bit of a sculpture girl summer). The cortados are not bad, either.

“You have to love places even when they’re hurt,” Chiara said to me, of returning to Los Angeles after the 2025 wildfires to see the destruction with her own eyes—and I recalled another version of that sentiment, conveyed to me by a wise friend many years ago, when I was struggling to adjust to a new city, a new life, while adrift on a current of grief after my dad’s traumatic brain injury: “You have to bloom where you’re planted.” There is something to not quitting a place you love despite its obvious drawbacks. But there is also something to leaving when that place no longer feels right. Speaking of leaving, a handful of my closest friends have defected back to New York over the past several months, which can devastate me when I think about it too much. Though I’m constantly meeting interesting new people through my work (a blessing that is not lost on this extrovert), I can’t pretend that it hasn’t been a bit of a lonely stretch, too. I cheer myself up by remembering that I now have people to visit in New York—a fact that became briefly and stunningly untrue when most of those same friends moved here during the pandemic—and that To Everything (Turn! Turn! Turn!) There Is A Season. This, I suppose, is my season for unglamorous heads-down working from my poorly-insulated hundred-year-old bungalow and not, unfortunately, traveling to Hydra or Marseille or Maine or Saint-Paul-de-Vence.

I am also currently well into two separate essays that I initially thought I’d be posting here. Both feel urgent and alive to me. I’m excited and also, honestly, a little scared by what I am writing—but suffice it to say that both pieces have sprouted legs and become much larger beasts than what feels right for Substack. I haven’t submitted work to literary journals in probably six or seven years, mostly because I’ve been working on a longer project that doesn’t necessarily lend itself well to excerpting, but I may try my luck with one or both of these once I finish.

What else? The figs are very good right now, as I’m sure you know if you care about produce the way I do. Once, at Il Buco (RIP) in Copenhagen, a server brought me a perfectly ripe fig from the tree in her backyard on a dish of ice with a sprinkling of flaky sea salt, and I’ve never stopped thinking about it. A perfect dessert. I am looking forward to emerald plums and concord grapes. My friend Cody Delistraty wrote a beautiful New York Times op-ed on awe that you should read. I did not see the Perseids, but I hope you did. I made a playlist that reflects my late-summer mood, if you care to listen. I bought myself a pair of the same sparkly clear jelly sandals I owned as a child; they bring me an unspeakable joy. I’ve been somewhat sensitive to wine lately, which is unfortunate (even one glass often makes me feel terrible the next day; I guess this is my mid thirties?) but I tried this incredibly delicious NA Norwegian sparkling ferment at my neighborhood favorite All Time the other night and was instantly hooked. I am halfway through Julie Buntin’s Famous Men, about a young aspiring writer’s years-long entanglement with an older, celebrated male author, which is magnificent, and also David Plante’s Difficult Women, a triptych of intimate and often quite unflattering portraits of Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, and Germaine Greer. These two make for an interesting pairing—female gaze versus male gaze, both concerned with fascination and proximity and what happens when someone we’ve mythologized becomes intimately known to us. It’s a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

I recently finished a galley of Emma Cline’s Switzy, which follows a man with Alzheimer’s on his way to Zurich for assisted suicide. I would follow Cline to the ends of the earth, and this may be her best novel yet. It is strange and dark and funny and utterly devastating, with precise, crystalline sentences. It was recently shortlisted for the 2026 Booker, and I will not be surprised if it wins. My copy of Rachel Cusk’s Life of M just arrived in the mail, and after reading much of the surrounding discourse (Megan Nolan’s gorgeous think piece in The Observer; Becca Rothfield’s review in the New Yorker and Parul Sehgal’s in the New York Times, both eviscerating), to say nothing of the Natalie Portman speculations (that girl gets around with celebrated novelists, doesn’t she!), I am dying to read and formulate my own opinions. I really loved the film The Invite. I’ve been on an Alain Delon kick lately, and highly recommend La Piscine and Purple Noon (it’s been somewhat of a thriller girl summer, too, I guess).

I have mixed feelings about Bret Easton Ellis—as a native Angeleno, Less Than Zero was a pivotal work for me, yet I often find his renderings of women to be flat and borderline misogynistic—but I ultimately very much enjoyed The Shards, which I read in advance of watching the new Ryan Murphy adaptation. A pulpy, guilty-pleasure LA noir and a real page-turner (despite the fact that it could’ve easily been 200 pages shorter, and the graphic descriptions of sex and violence are, at times, a lot). Re: the show, I thought the first two episodes were delightfully camp, with some iconic needle-drops (and was very impressed by Igby Rigney’s spot-on impression of BEE’s bored-rich-boy drawl), but the random “dance-off” plot and Glee-ification of it all felt somewhat antithetical to how I understood the novel, and kind of lost me, to put it lightly. I went to see Edward Scissorhands at Cinespia (watching movies under the stars at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery has been one of my favorite LA summer pastimes since my late teens), and was bowled over by how heartbreaking that film is?? I somehow hadn’t remembered that. Reader, I… cried.

I also cried while watching this video of Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt singing “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow.” Dolly! I loved her dimples and her accent and the way she saw light in everything and everyone; how easily she laughed at herself. So many singular souls, famous and not, left the planet this month, and it’s hard to believe my long, not-very-exciting thirty-sixth summer is nearly over, and today it began pouring rain in the ninety-degree heat and I turned my face to the sky as I walked to the laundry shed to collect my whites, a strange relief that reminded me of so many things at once.

As we wound our way down Highway One, jagged miles of coastline ribboning out around us, a knot formed in my stomach. I’d been looking forward to this trip for weeks, and I was terrified. I had come to Big Sur to write. More specifically, to get back to work on the book I’d been avoiding—had not seen a way back into—for nearly a year. Now I was here, and I had no excuse.

Traveling somewhere just for myself—not for work or a wedding or a bachelorette weekend, not to attend a workshop or conference, not even to visit anyone in particular—was an electrifying concept. It felt almost taboo. Was I allowed to do this? In fact, I was. We’d just turned in the summer issue of the magazine I edit to our printers, and after a month that had been grueling on many levels, I’d resolved to take advantage of the rare lull. Heading to New York to visit friends was tempting, but proved out of the question for both my wallet and my nervous system. My dear friend M was traveling abroad and had generously offered me a week in her Mickey Muennig-designed cabin overlooking the Pacific. Without hesitation, I accepted.

I had fallen madly in love with Big Sur—and with that house—the first time I visited M there, over ten years ago, not least because it reminded me of a heightened, wilder, more remote version of where I grew up (Las Flores Canyon, in Malibu). Throughout my life, that canyon has remained the place on earth where I’ve felt both safest and most imperiled. I sense the same paradox in Big Sur, with its stomach-dropping cliffs, its unwieldy mountain roads, its redwoods still bearing char marks from the 2013 Pfeiffer Fire. The land holds a similar magic, a similar volatility, a sort of power laced with fragility. You feel close to the elements there, utterly at their mercy. Gazing up at a star-stippled sky, traversing a vertiginous ridge, watching the hungry tide slap like cymbals against Keyhole Rock (even amongst hordes of tourists gaping dumbly from the shore, iPhones aloft), your smallness becomes apparent in a way that can only be described as ecstatic. Muennig's approach to architecture, too, has always thrilled me. His structures feel almost as if they’ve grown organically from their surrounding environs, the boundaries between indoors and outdoors porous. His work reminds me somewhat of the house I grew up in, which burned down in last year’s Palisades Fire—a ‘70s hunting cabin with high vaulted wood ceilings and a river rock fireplace, arched doorways, skylights galore, a sweeping view of the Santa Monica Mountains and the ocean beyond them.

It felt right to go there, to the place that so viscerally recalled the home I’d lost, to face what I was writing about that home.

I’d been yearning for a stretch of uninterrupted time, that elusive holy grail for any writer, for so long. I’d toggled between waking up at 5am to write before work on weekdays (utter hell for me personally, though my respect for friends who manage to do this runs deep—looking at you, Andrea Gale) and devoting entire weekend days to writing (my preference, though it does cut into social commitments, and spending seven days on a computer is hard on the body)—but my schedule was often unpredictable, and nothing had really stuck with any consistency. I finally had the stretch of time I’d been craving, and like clockwork, fear flooded in.

What was I afraid of? That I’d lost my touch. That I’d spent too long away from the project to find my way back into it. That I would somehow waste this time, wouldn’t be productive enough. That I had built up an unrealistic fantasy of “uninterrupted time,” that it wouldn’t live up to my expectations. That the structural framework I’d so carefully mapped out in a brand-new notebook wouldn’t work at all once put into practice. Most of all, that the book I’d spent so many years on wasn’t worth writing in the first place.

On the drive up, I’d been anxious and irritable. Hot, cold, hungry, restless, vaguely nauseous. I’d recently gone through a breakup, had invited my mother on the trip in lieu of my ex, and everything she said grated on my nerves. Even as it happened I could see my sharpness for what it was: a reaction to what my body perceived as a loss of control. It wasn’t just fear that I felt—in addition to the breakup, the month of May had brought a work crisis, a series of unexpected car and dental expenses, and a serious health scare for our family dog, Leo. I felt depleted, wrung out like a wet towel. I hoped this week away would revive me.

We arrived at dusk. Leo bounded happily out of the car, raced to sniff everything in sight. The house was warm with trapped heat, sunlight having flooded in through glass all day long, which did not help my irritability, but we pushed doors and windows open, unloaded our groceries for the week from Elroy’s (a perfect natural market in Monterey; no notes), the loaf of seaside sourdough from Ad Astra (perhaps the best I have ever had? I cannot resist giving food recommendations, even in a mini-essay that is ostensibly about something else entirely). We uncorked a bottle of cold white wine and got to work in the kitchen: pesto pasta (we as a family have long been loyal to Marcella Hazan’s recipe), chicory salad, crispy roasted broccolini. Cooking with my mother is soothing, nostalgic. It reminds me of our time living together just after my father’s death, and again during the pandemic—but also of the eighteen summers we spent living on a sailboat in France, during which I spent my days reading, drawing, writing, swimming in the ocean, climbing the mast (see photo evidence below), and cooking with my parents. What I wouldn’t give! I had very little understanding of just how rare and special those summers were until they were gone, my father brain injured and no longer able to walk, much less sail. A light breeze made its way through the screen door, poppies flickering on the hillside, and fog began to spill through the canyon below, and for the first time all day, I felt my nervous system begin to settle.

In the morning, heart hammering, I opened two Microsoft Word documents. One was the most recent full draft of the book, which I’d barely touched since the Palisades Fire, the subject matter newly unbearable. The other was blank. Into the blank document I typed my working title, which has remained the same since the beginning; then the James Salter epigraph that has somehow also stuck, becoming only more potent. I reviewed the structure I’d mapped out in my new notebook. It seemed so straightforward, honestly; so obvious. Why hadn’t I thought to write the book this way from the beginning? I reminded myself: If you could have at the time, you would have. I felt bolstered by the fact that in the next room, my mother was writing, too. Like me, she was returning to a project that grief had interrupted. We were in this together.

I started working on the book—if you could even have called it that, then—in 2017. What came out at first were halting fragments. I was twenty-seven and had never written anything longer than a twenty-five-page short story. Over time, the fragments began to lengthen into chapters, and a narrative arc began to emerge, and by May 2020, I had my first full draft. In October of that same year, having moved back into my childhood home in Malibu mid-pandemic, during the worst fire season in California history, I signed with my first literary agent. In early 2021, following a series of traumatic events (the worst of which was a fire at our neighbor’s that nearly took our house down with it; waking at 3am to a wall of flame outside my bedroom window) intensified by the isolation of the pandemic, I had a mental breakdown (more on that someday soon), during which time I did not write for months. After surging out of that difficult period, grateful to be alive—an experience that I often describe to friends as some version of rocketing towards the surface after being trapped underwater, taking great gulps of air—I was near manic. I cut hundreds of pages from the first draft, wrote hundreds more. We shopped the book to editors in the fall of 2022. Despite considerable enthusiasm, I was met with twenty-two rejections.

My agent had emailed me each editor’s comments. I read them on my phone while parked outside of an outdoor screening of the ‘90s cult classic The Craft, which I had attended with two friends, all of us decked out in full teenage-witch costume. Then I drove back to Malibu along PCH, ugly-sobbing in goth makeup. Passing Topanga, I pulled into a gas station to fill up, caught my reflection in a window, laughed at the absurdity of it all—how I must have looked to strangers. Editors had praised my prose as evocative, elegant, haunting, stylish, atmospheric, transportive, lyrical, emotionally rich, exquisitely observed—but overall, it seemed, no one could quite figure out how to position the book I’d written. Some wanted a stronger narrative arc; others wanted a bigger hook; still others wished for more overt focus on the climate crisis (this last one somewhat of a head-scratcher, but I suppose my title had given them the wrong idea). Almost uniformly, they worried that memoir was a difficult market; that a meditative, literary book about family, grief, and mental illness would be difficult to break out in an increasingly crowded market. Again and again, I read some version of the same sentence: beautiful writing, but I wouldn’t know how to publish it.

This was normal, my agent insisted. Did I know how many writers had received thirty, forty, even fifty rejections before that one yes? You only needed one, it was true. We would keep submitting, she said, and someone would buy it eventually—she was sure of this. Alternatively, she wondered, would I be open to reworking it as a novel for the two editors who had offered to reread a fictional version? And if so, could I turn in a new opening chapter by the end of the month? I spent a few weeks simmering on all this. If I was honest with myself, my agent had never quite felt like a match—I hadn’t felt seen or understood by her in the way I’d hoped to—but more importantly, I knew somewhere in my bones that the book was not yet ready. It needed more time, more distance, more perspective. I pulled it from submission and left her, reeling.

I know now how common the general arc of this story is, though few writers talk openly about it. The first book one completes is rarely the first one published. Start asking around and you’ll learn the same. At the time, though, it was devastating: all those years spent nurturing a project, believing in it, making sacrifice after sacrifice for it, only to watch the future I’d imagined for it evaporate.

Memoir is just too tough right now. Nearly every editor had written some version of this sentence. A few had added in: But I’d love to read her fiction!

I have never cared much for “genre” as a concept. I’ve always appreciated the French attitude towards it: how the novels of Annie Ernaux and Marguerite Duras and Édouard Louis and Emmanuel Carrère often carry the emotional weight of memoir while still enjoying the freedom (and cultural prestige, for that matter) of fiction. The American publishing industry, however, is far more invested in these distinctions. I studied fiction during my MFA and had never considered myself to be a memoirist, but by the time I'd finished a draft of my book, it was difficult to argue that what I'd written wasn't memoir, at least from an American standpoint. Even so, I resented the pressure to categorize it. Why did I have to instruct readers on how to approach the book before they'd even opened it? Why did it matter whether every event had happened exactly as written if the deeper emotional truth remained the same? And wasn’t memoir, at its core, just another form of fiction—shaped as it was by its narrator’s unique lens and biases?

I did not write for nearly a full year after pulling the book from submission. This was not a conscious choice. I had promised myself that I would get back on the horse, would not let this setback break me. Still, I was shattered. I didn’t feel ready or able to write, despite desperately wanting to. I took some time off, focused on the less personal forms of writing through which I’d built my career (arts & culture journalism, copywriting), nursed my wounds, began to build my confidence back up. At a certain point I began to feel it again—that particular itch to return to the book. I cracked open the manuscript, gingerly at first, and began to revise it. I killed darlings, restructured entire sections, cut what felt like every last ounce of excess. I sent the new draft to a handful of writer friends, incorporated their insightful notes, revised once more. But something still wasn’t right. I couldn’t put my finger on what, exactly. After taking a bit more time off, I started over again, this time reworking the book as a novel. A rush of excitement, then: fiction, it seemed, gave me the freedom to preserve what mattered most emotionally while tweaking the details to best serve the story. It also simplified the complex timeline I’d been wrestling with. Why had I been so resistant to this at first, when my agent had suggested it? If you could have at the time, you would have. I made my way through about a third of that new fictionalized draft. Then the Palisades Fire happened, and I lost my childhood home—a place that functioned as the beating heart of the book I’d written. The boundary between art and life collapsed. I couldn't bring myself to open the document again for nearly a year. When I finally did, I realized with a pit in my stomach that I'd started the story in the wrong place. I could finally see the present-day thread that needed to anchor the book. It was exactly the thread I'd spent years trying not to foreground. Of course it was.

That was where the book stood when I arrived in Big Sur. I hoped the path I'd found would hold. I'd lost so much over the past several years: my father, my childhood home, a fifteen-year friendship, more imagined futures than I cared to count. I wasn't sure I had another heartbreak in me.

Working on the new draft was uncomfortable at first. I kept finding excuses to get up, make a snack, brew a pot of tea, check my phone. This is stupid, I thought. Maybe I’m not cut out for it. I wanted to run away. I wanted to do anything besides sit in front of that laptop. We were in Big Sur, for crying out loud—shouldn’t we be outside? I pushed these thoughts away as best I could, forced myself to sit there. To open my eyes and look, to face what I’d come here to do. And slowly, slowly, it came back. The thing I thought I’d lost. The writing began to flow.

In Big Sur, my mother and I started each morning with a walk through the mountains, Leo trotting between us, just like we’d done back home in Las Flores Canyon when I lived with her during the pandemic. We wrote and read by day, cooked and talked by night. Red-tailed hawks soared overhead. I felt newly energized by what I was writing, in near disbelief at how it was suddenly surging out of me. I understood, finally, that I couldn’t have gotten here any other way, that there hadn’t been some shortcut I’d missed. Every version of the book had been necessary, and I couldn’t have written this version earlier. I hadn’t yet been ready to face the story that needed to be told. Now I was. Now I am. That’s not to say that there won’t be days when I get stuck and want to tear my hair out; that I won’t doubt myself repeatedly throughout the “overwhelming, all-consuming forced march” (as Emma Cline so aptly put it when I interviewed her for The Paris Review Daily in 2020) that is novel-writing. Those things are a given. With a demanding full-time job that often requires weekend work and an active social life (rare extroverted writer here), I’m still sorting out the consistency piece of my practice, finding a schedule that works for me when I can’t spend a week off emails and Slack in Big Sur. But something is different this time around. I have the distance, wisdom, perspective, and toughened hide I lacked before. I am becoming the version of myself that I’ve needed to be to write this story.

The summer issue of The Panafold goes to print in a little over a week, so I’m deep in the “crunch time” stretch of my quarterly work cycle, which is equal parts stressful and exciting. Almost invariably during the month leading up to print, I find myself sleepless, preoccupied by the pieces that have yet to fall into place. There is overwhelm. How will it ever get done? I remind myself that it always has. I think, too, of what I once heard Lena Dunham relay in an interview, quoting her father, the artist Carroll Dunham: “There’s no such thing as an art emergency.” And then, finally, the heady thrill of seeing each spread in layout for the first time, finding the image that will grace our next cover, watching the issue take shape. It’s an emotional arc I know well by now, and I am strapped in for the ride, grateful for every second—even the wildly uncomfortable ones that will later teach me the most (of which, this time around, there have been many).

What better moment than this to scribble something on Substack: my overactive brain’s preferred form of procrastination? Because (in true Capricorn with Virgo rising form) I love a list, and always enjoy when others share these kinds of roundups, I thought I’d try my hand at an abridged collection of what’s been captivating me lately across a few favorite categories: books, films, adornment, and food. I hope you find some inspiration here.

READING

I’ve noticed—and maybe you have too—a somewhat recent wave of contemporary novels that openly build themselves around an older classic, using the earlier work as a kind of structural guide or “north star” text. Two examples of this phenomenon, both of which I’ve devoured with great pleasure: Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love, a scathing and very funny sendup of the New York art world written in a single unbroken paragraph, and Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, a chilling portrait of millennial materialism and the hollow performance of online taste. These authors’ “north star” texts, respectively, are Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters (1984) and Georges Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965)—both of which I’m now eager to read, the latter in its original French.

Though I love the occasional doorstopper tome, especially during the summer months, there will always be something endlessly appealing to me about a slim, elegant novel that foregrounds prose and form over plot. Equally satisfying is the fact that these slip easily into my bag and can be carried anywhere. Not long ago, I had such an emotional experience reading Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed—a wry, tender, devastating, under-200-page novel about addiction, motherhood, generational trauma, and the redemptive possibilities of care—that I suspect coffee shop onlookers may have been concerned for my sanity. Reader, I quite literally laughed and cried. This one was originally recommended to me by none other than Miranda July when I interviewed her for W Magazine a few years back. Miranda knows. Fun fact: Boyt happens to be one of Lucian Freud’s 14 “acknowledged” children (another of which is the fashion designer Bella Freud, who hosts of one of my favorite podcasts, Fashion Neurosis with Bella Freud.

On the topic of slim novels with aesthetically pleasing covers (I know, don’t judge a book by its cover, but I am a magazine editor and judging covers is part of my job), two in translation I’ve adored were Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais—a feverish and propulsive descent into adolescent rage, toxic desire, and class resentment, rendered in hypnotic prose (though if you haven’t yet read Melchor, I’d recommend starting with Hurricane Season; just as heartstoppingly gorgeous and perhaps my favorite of the two)—and Solvej Balle’s meditative On the Calculation of Volume (Book One), in which a bookseller becomes trapped reliving the same November day over and over again. One of the oddest books I’ve read: at times frustrating, undeniably beautiful, deeply philosophical. Definitely of the “no plot, just vibes” variety. (Worth noting that a few very smart reader friends of mine found this one absolutely insufferable. As my late grandfather was fond of saying, “In matters of taste there can be no dispute”).

Currently on my nightstand and enjoying very much: Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai (no relation to the 2003 Tom Cruise film of the same name), recommended by my dear friend Cody Delistraty, a supremely talented writer and editor who has never once steered me wrong when it comes to reading material (I highly recommend his first book, The Grief Cure: Looking for the End of Loss), and Domenico Starnone’s Trust. And because I am a millennial woman in the year 2026, I did, like everyone else, make my way down the Strangers to Famesick to Yesteryear pipeline. Read each in less than three days, and have been gobbling up the surrounding discourse almost as voraciously.

WATCHING

Between recently joining Letterboxd (late to the party, I know) and a friend hosting weekly Sunday movie nights in his garage-turned-twenty-seat-cinema, I’ve been making steady headway on my ever-expanding list of films to watch. In a fit of yearning for a trip to Japan (still at the top of my bucket list), I watched Juzo Itami’s “noodle western” Tampopo (1985) for the first time and understood why so many people speak about it with a fervor that can only be described as religious. I found it utterly enchanting. Funny, sensual, heartwarming. There is a scene during which two characters carefully transfer a raw egg yolk back and forth between their mouths that I… won't soon forget. Caveat: it will make you hungry. Not that scene, at all. But the movie in general.

On the topic of food movies, Laura Gabbert’s 2015 documentary City of Gold, about the late (and dearly beloved) L.A. food critic Jonathan Gold, is pure magic. The film follows Gold as he eats his way through strip malls, taco stands, and tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurants across Los Angeles. A profoundly moving love letter to this city’s rich and varied cultural fabric, to the depth and diversity that so many overlook.

Another urban docu-portrait I enjoyed very much was The Cruise (1998), Bennett Miller’s strange, somewhat mesmerizing stream-of-consciousness film about a highly eccentric New York City bus tour guide named Timothy “Speed” Levitch. Filmed entirely in black and white and absent any voiceover narration, it’s by turns manic and tender (and just might restore your faith in humanity). There’s a delicious dose of ‘90s New York nostalgia here, too. One scene during which the Twin Towers loom overhead is particularly resonant.

As a lifelong Francophile, I’m a sucker for French cinema (the nerd in me also loves that I am technically “studying” while watching). I’ve been a fan of Jacques Audiard’s ever since seeing his glorious Un prophète in theaters when it came out in 2009, after which I made my way through the rest of his filmography. My novelist and cookbook author friend Sanaë Lemoine (whose novel The Margot Affair is another favorite) has impeccable taste in books, films, and food, and shared her French film recommendations with me a while back. On that list was Audiard’s Les Olympiades (2021), a stunning portrait of young Parisians fumbling haltingly toward intimacy amidst the detached landscape of app-era romance, also shot entirely in black and white. Sexy, gutting, gorgeously shot and acted, with an electronic score by Rone that simply destroys me.

Lastly, how had I never seen Robert Altman’s The Player (1992)? (3 Women, from 1977, is a forever favorite). A young Tim Robbins is at his best in this savage Hollywood satire about a studio executive spiraling after receiving death threats from a rejected screenwriter. Vicious and hilarious in equal measure. I had a great time. And I now need to go to Two Bunch Palms, which has a fun cameo here, stat.

WEARING

I recently mentioned to J (who is perhaps Meals Chef Pants’ greatest fan) that I’ve never seen him wear jeans, to which he replied, without hesitation, “Name something less comfortable!” Though my many pairs of vintage Levi’s 501s are on constant rotation, I’ve been taking a page out of his comfort-first book and wearing Deiji Studios’ Loop Pant on repeat for at least the past few months. It’s beginning to be somewhat embarrassing. But I stand by my choice. These are lightweight, ridiculously comfortable, understated yet chic, easily dressed up or down, packable, perfect for petites (at 5’3", nearly every pair of pants I acquire is subject either to my tailor or my scissors, but here, miraculously, no hemming was necessary). I have now worn these while working from home, traveling by car and airplane, running errands, moderating a panel on design, attending art openings and press previews, and more. So far, they seem capable of almost anything. The Ease Trouser, which comes in a range of colors, prints, and fabrications, is also great. And on cooler days, I love the Square Pocket Pant, in a thicker cotton canvas.

Footwear has been a great love of my life for as long as I can remember—my mother likes to remind me that my first-ever word was “shoe.” Repetto Zizi Oxfords, Belgian Shoes Midinettes, and Superga Cotu Classics are just a few styles I imagine I’ll never be without. I have my eye on a pair of Bode House Shoes that will hopefully someday make their way into my closet. Which brings me to one of the simplest and most affordable pair of shoes I own. Plasticana recycled hemp jelly sandals are admittedly nothing new, but over the past few years they’ve become a trusty wardrobe staple. When temperatures drop I swap in the clog version (whose typical wearer is perfectly parodied here). My friend M pairs hers with Japanese shearling inserts for extra coziness, which I have yet to try, but sounds delightful. These shoes have not become ubiquitous for no reason: they are comfortable, understated, and weirdly easy to wear (they go with pretty much everything). Long live “gummy shoes,” as M calls them.

When it comes to jewelry, I’m partial to the kind you can sleep, shower, and swim in. I prefer gold to silver, and rarely take my signet rings or Catbird neck chains off (case in point: have been wearing my high school class ring since 2008; my right-hand ring finger has atrophied accordingly). Interestingly, I am very into seed pearls these days—apart from cleaning, I haven’t removed my Loren Stewart pearl safety pin earring, which my friend S once jokingly described as “avant-WASP,” since purchasing it two years ago. In the warmer months, I also love a seed pearl anklet—a proclivity picked up during my erstwhile days as a copywriter for a fashion brand that used these often in their spring and summer styling. I’ve been wearing this Beatrice Valenzuela version for years (though lovely, it is quite delicate; I’ve now broken and had mine repaired thrice)—but a range of more affordable dupes can be found on Etsy.

ON THE TABLE

The acid queen in me (no, not that kind) craves a squeeze of citrus on just about everything edible. I have been known to panic when running low on lemons. Enter this recipe for Greek lemon potatoes, which J and I have been making nonstop since we discovered it a few months ago. They are tender and bright and alarmingly addictive, especially when made with J’s homemade chicken stock, which riffs on tori paitan. Best paired with slow-roasted salmon or chicken thighs.

A few handy tips from chef friends that have taken my already very good salads to the next level: chill salad bowls in the freezer until just before serving (keeps everything crisp and icy cold); season the lettuce with a pinch of kosher salt before dressing (for a flavor boost); blitz homemade dressing with an immersion blender (for maximum creaminess); add whatever leftover herbs you have to said immersion blender (for an instant Green Goddess effect). A few more from yours truly: lots of tender herbs and shaved fennel make any salad better; radicchio is my best friend (the real ones know); and finally, my go-to dressing is a “lazy Caesar” (somewhat inspired by Gjelina’s lemon-anchovy dressing) made with a single grated garlic clove, 3–4 anchovies, the juice of half a lemon, good olive oil, salt and pepper to taste, and a generous dose of microplaned Parmigiano Reggiano. I prepare this either with a marble mortar and pestle or in a wide-mouthed jar with an immersion blender, depending on what texture I’m after.

Lastly. We need to talk about butter-stuffed dates, which may be the weirdest and most delicious snack I’ve had in quite a while. Apparently this is trending among biohackers—the fat in the butter supposedly balances the blood sugar spike from the dates—but despite that, I am fully on board. Split open a Medjool date (best if kept cold in the fridge, IMO), tuck in a generous pat of good cultured butter (unsalted Beurre Bordier if you can find it; Rodolphe Le Meunier Beurre de Barratte also excellent), finish with flaky sea salt (I like Maldon or Jacobsen, a tiny tin of which currently lives in my purse for non-art emergencies). A little cinnamon does not hurt. Ideal afternoon-slump fare, and almost eerily reminiscent of cookie dough.

That’s all for now. Thanks for being here.

x A

Last Sunday, I hosted my mother and grandmother for Easter brunch. Holidays have been somewhat fraught since losing our family home in the Palisades Fire, and though I’ve never cared much about Easter, honoring it in some way was important to my mother this year. My ninety-seven-year-old grandmother brought tulips, lemons from her tree. I made my “special breakfast” go-to, a riff on Ottolenghi’s skillet-baked eggs with spinach, yogurt, and spiced butter (I substitute labne for yogurt, Aleppo pepper for red pepper flakes, and serve with thick-cut griddled Tartine Country Bread).

We ate at the antique wooden turned-leg table I’d taken from the house before it burned. It had been our dining table when I was a small child, before my father’s mother died in 1995 and he replaced it with the larger, more stately Chippendale mahogany table he’d inherited from her. This table, the smaller one I’d always loved, had been relegated to my mother’s office, where it served for years as a catch-all for papers and files, until I’d moved with no furniture into a one-bedroom bungalow in Beachwood Canyon and asked if she would consider handing it down to me. Its surface is scratched, faintly splattered with candle wax in places, in desperate need of a good refinishing job, but it’s one of a few rare objects I own that feels imbued with the spirit of the home we lost, and I cherish it.

After brunch, we took a short walk up the canyon, then sat on the couch for tea. My grandmother kept embracing me, clutching my hands, her eyes damp. Thank you, honey, she kept saying, This is beautiful. I could feel how much this day, with these three generations of women, meant to her. I’d been a little nervous about hosting in my small apartment, worried that my place wasn’t “enough.” The first time my grandmother visited, a few months after I moved in, she was dubious—Well, honey, it’s temporary—not unlike how she’d reacted when I chopped my long hair into a blunt bob in 2021 (Well, honey, hair grows back), but on Easter, it seemed, she was seeing this space with new eyes. Perhaps it had finally come together, finally felt like me. Or perhaps this modest space felt newly charged with significance after the loss of my grandfather, the fragmentation of our family—our long-standing tradition of big Easter gatherings at my uncle’s house now a thing of the past.

I moved back to Los Angeles, the city of my birth, in 2020, at age thirty. It was the height of the pandemic, and I was jobless after graduating from an MFA in creative writing (one of the best decisions I’ve made for my mind, and one of the worst for my finances). As the pandemic progressed and my fruitless job hunt continued, my share of the rent on the Brooklyn apartment I shared with two others became unmanageable, and I made the decision to move back into my childhood home temporarily while I got back on my feet. That ended up taking quite a bit longer than expected—three years—in part because of a severe mental health crisis. (I’m writing about this experience in more depth elsewhere).

The decision to return home made sense for me at that time, and looking back I have few regrets, especially considering the recent loss of that home, but it was not without difficulty. Though I was deeply grateful for my mother’s generosity—and for the fact of a family home that felt safe to return to at all—I was plagued by shame about living with a parent in my early thirties, while many of my friends were becoming engaged, buying houses, building families of their own. Compounded with the fear and uncertainty of the pandemic, there was the shock of a breakup, of leaving a major metropolis for an isolated canyon, of suddenly living with my mother again after years of independence. I remember googling “failure to launch,” feeling that I’d somehow made all the wrong decisions in life, had squandered my talent and promise. During those three years, as I worked towards stability, I dreamed of my own space, the one I’d have one day. I imagined a light-filled bungalow with hardwood floors, charming built-ins, original details. It would be filled with things that delighted me, furniture and objects I’d chosen myself, books and ceramics I’d collected over the years. It would feel like me.

It struck me on Easter—sitting at my beloved scratched-up dining table with the two most important women in my life—that today, at thirty-six, I have that space. It came later than I’d hoped, and in a slightly different form, as the things we yearn for often do. Still, the sensation of waking up in or coming home to an environment that is fully my own (even if I rent)—in which I can install a bookshelf, hang a piece of art, host friends, cook what and when I want to—is not lost on me. My little 1920s bungalow, poorly insulated and “funky” as it may be, with its outdated appliances and ugly wall heater and baffling electrical outlet placements, its clouds of bougainvillea and night-blooming jasmine at the gate, is a physical representation of what I yearned for throughout those deep-pandemic years: independence, freedom, agency. It’s a reflection, too, of how far I’ve come since the depths of my lowest low in 2021.

I don’t pause often enough to acknowledge this, how far I’ve come. I have a hunch that most of us don’t. It’s more familiar, perhaps, to fixate on where we’re lacking, where we don’t measure up; what we should have accomplished or acquired by now. But that kind of self-flagellation can eat a person alive. Believe me. I’d like to erase the word should from my vocabulary. Life throws us countless inexplicable curve balls. It changes, as Didion wrote, in the ordinary instant. Just five years ago, in the spring of 2021, the simple fact of being well enough to dress myself and drive my car to an appointment was cause for celebration. I remember the way I experienced things in those days: everything a small miracle, infused with impossible magic. The cobalt flash of a scrub-jay darting through chaparral. The veined underside of a leaf through which the sun shone. My hands sunk deep in warm, grainy dirt as I helped my mother garden. My sense of awe and wonder at the beauty of the world I’d been absent from for so long was overwhelming; enough to make me weep. It was as if I’d come up from the underworld. In many ways, I had.

My mother, a psychotherapist in private practice, has been living with my grandmother for a little over a year now, seeing patients full-time as she searches for a new home, attempts to decipher what that might even look like for her. She oscillates between ideas, others’ opinions, shoulds. Should she buy a new house, further east, closer to me? (What she can afford on the West Side, after a laughable California Fair Plan payout, is nowhere near what we had). Put something small—a prefab or an Airstream trailer, maybe—on the land where our home was? Relocate somewhere entirely new? But where? At nearly seventy-three, this wasn’t what she’d imagined her life would look like. At times, she’s told me, she feels shame surrounding her situation—that she lost everything; that she cannot hand family heirlooms down to me or invite my future children over to cannonball into our black-bottom pool like I once did; that, without a partner, she’s alone in it all; that the path forward doesn’t feel clear to her yet. At times, she inevitably compares herself to other fire victims—those who bought new houses almost immediately, those who are already rebuilding, those who have partners with whom to split the weight of these decisions. Most heartbreakingly, she sometimes feels as if losing her home in a wildfire was somehow her own fault. I recognize the feeling—the way grief reaches for control where none exists. After my father’s accident, I believed a version of the same—that if I’d been home that morning instead of away at boarding school, he’d have been making me breakfast, not biking helmetless through our canyon. If I had been there, I thought, he wouldn’t have fallen.

When these kinds of feelings come up, I try to remind my mother of what I know she already knows—It was a natural disaster, none of this was your fault, you couldn’t have prevented it, everyone’s journey is different, it’s completely normal that you need some time to understand what feels right as a next step. Other times, I wish she’d just make a choice, move forward, exit this painful limbo. I want so badly for her to feel hope again, and joy, and comfort—to rebuild a beautiful, dynamic life. And I know that she will, in her own time. I don’t know why this happened to her, to any of us who lost homes in the fires, what “greater plan” this might be part of. What I do know is that in 2021, I survived a crisis—with my mother’s support, within the container of her home. And perhaps my mother, in the throes of her own crisis, has needed the container of her mother. Growing up as one of six children, she remembers, alone time with her mother was hard to come by. It was all I ever wanted, she told me, once, My mother, all to myself. There’s something beautiful about the fact that now, even as a result of loss, she has exactly that.

On weekends, I’ve been accompanying my mother to open houses. More often than not these are swarming with couples around my age, sometimes with babies in tow, and I frequently find myself correcting realtors who assume we’re looking for me. I’m not there yet—though I’d thought I might be at thirty-six, the age my mother was when she had me. There’s a faint pang of longing each time I see one of those couples, each time I explain that no, I’m not in the market for a house yet. I wish I were. Owning a home, having a child, publishing the book I’ve been working on for what feels like forever: at times, these milestones can feel so out of reach. But I do trust, as trite as it may sound, in the divine timing of things—the detours life takes us on. When something I’ve dreamt of finally comes to fruition, always later than I would’ve liked, it tends to arrive with a clarity about why it didn’t happen sooner: what I still needed to learn, how I still needed to grow in order to receive and hold it. For now, there is power in acknowledging that I have what felt beyond my reach just five years ago: meaningful work, a loving partnership, an apartment of my own. I’ll let that be enough, as I move towards the rest.

I was a late bloomer, wrote Sharon Olds, but anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.

Last week, my mother completed her “casualty loss inventory,” a harrowing months-long process required for tax purposes that involved cataloging every item in our home that burned in last year’s Palisades Fire. For months, she’d been calling me to report what objects she’d remembered that day, what in particular had tugged upon her. Sometimes she sobbed. More rarely, she expressed glimmers of hope. This will be over soon, she said, and I will be able to start my life again. Each day, she sent old snapshots she’d stumbled upon while combing through her photo library for images of disappeared rooms, artwork, furniture: “proof,” as it were.

They gutted me, these missives from another life: the one we’d had before. Looking at photos from before had taken on a bittersweet tinge after my father’s bicycle accident and traumatic brain injury in 2008, and then again after his death from pneumonia in 2013, but now everything was gone—the rooms he’d existed in, the clothes he’d worn, the books he’d touched, the art he’d loved. His cameras, his violin, his ship’s models, every last photograph and relic. The contraption he’d built to hang his beloved copper pots and cast-iron pans from the vaulted wooden ceiling above our kitchen island. The twin bed wedged up against a window in the lofted library nook—Cozy Corner, he called it—where he was exiled when he snored.

Here, on my phone screen, was a photo my mother had sent from my college graduation in 2012, a year before my father died. In it, my best friend and I grasped each other, grinning, impossibly bright-eyed and pink-cheeked in our garish purple robes. She has a child now, I thought, of my friend, and that fact—in combination with the one that we had somehow once been twenty-two—felt dizzying; beyond belief. I remembered parts of that afternoon so clearly: the Kelly green silk dress I’d worn, how our polyester robes had amplified the humid fug of June in New York City, the weighty handfeel of my gold Honors tassel. The theatre where the ceremony took place was on the Upper West Side, just a few blocks from the now-shuttered Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, a place my father and I had loved. He had been there, at my graduation, slumped in his wheelchair, blue eyes unfocused—the first and last air travel he would undertake during the years of his brain injury. Beneath the smile in the photo, I’d been reeling.

Here I was at two and a half years old, a weekend morning, breakfast in bed with my father in my parents’ bedroom. That lodgepole pine bedframe—I’d loved to climb it, bare feet grasping sanded pine, and leap from it onto their bed with its Memphis-style geometric-print bedding, an early-‘90s riot of turquoise, magenta, and lavender. The red plastic breakfast tray; the blue-and-white Spode china dish, an heirloom from my paternal grandmother. A wedge of canteloupe. Toast slathered with butter and my father’s favorite St. Dalfour raspberry jam. In the photo I am sitting in his lap, munching my toast, my white cotton pajama top printed with colorful cartoon illustrations of tomatoes, carrots, and radishes. The bangs I’d cut myself that year are pushed to one side. I’d felt safe with my father, protected. I could see that security in this photo and the others my mother sent.

It’s been a year and change since the Palisades Fire took my childhood home, where my mother still lived. A year and change, too, since I’ve written “for myself” (I don’t count journalism here—while that form does genuinely light me up, it scratches an entirely different itch). In 2025 I read less books than ever before, journaled less than ever before. This can be partially attributed to the demands of my editorial duties for The Panafold as we built that publication from the ground up—I’ve been haltingly working towards finding a balance between it and my own creative projects—but there is something deeper at play. I have avoided writing as a form of self-protection. I have not wanted to look in depth at what I’ve known I needed to. I have not wanted to feel the bottomless depth of my grief, have not wanted to dive—again—into the before.

Losing my father was one of my worst fears for as long as I could remember: a gnawing dread that plagued me as a child, no doubt in part because of his advanced age. I remember praying that he would at least live until I turned eighteen. When it happened, sooner than I’d expected (I turned eighteen one month before his accident, when he was eighty-one), there was a strange, thorny sense of—what was it? Relief? The worst fear, the hard thing, had happened. Now I didn’t have to worry about it happening anymore. I recognized a shadow of that same feeling when the phone call came confirming that our home was gone. I was standing in the parking lot outside my gynecologist’s office, and I crumpled to the sunwarmed asphalt. Another hard thing, another worst fear. All physical proof of our life with my father erased.

I logged onto Substack today to delete this page. I’d launched it one year ago, then proceeded… never to post. Remember when I thought I had time for a Substack? I joked to friends, throughout the year. Behind my flippancy was a thread of shame. I may at times move slowly, but I am not a person who starts projects and neglects to finish them. I would rid myself of the evidence of this failed attempt, I thought. Then I read my first post from one year ago, written from a moment in time when I felt my skin had been flayed from my body. I looked at the beautiful logo my friend Briana Hess designed for me; the flower she drew me by hand. I felt a glimmer of possibility, something similar to what I imagine my mother feels at times when she catches a glimpse of the life she might reclaim when all this is over. I started to write.

On a Sunday afternoon in early March, I found myself on the West Side and decided to visit our property. It was perhaps the fourth or fifth time I’d done so since the fires. Driving alone up our winding canyon road—a road I’d learned to drive on at fifteen, a road I knew as well as my own body—felt both familiar and eerie, its logic off-kilter like that of a dream. I passed the empty lots where neighbors’ homes had been, took in the For Sale signs. I pulled into our driveway, passing the place where my father had fallen off his bicycle all those years ago. Weeds snaked up through cracks in the pavement. There was the Pacific in the distance, flat and silver, like always. A smattering of purple flowers on the hillside. Eucalyptus branches stirred. There was a current of warm wind, the kind of wind that would’ve frightened me if I’d had a home to protect.

Our redwood deck had been repaired and treated with fire retardant in the months before the fires, and it had stayed miraculously intact. If I stood in a certain place on that deck, the absence of our home behind me, it was almost as if nothing had changed.

Hi there,

I’m Annabel Graham—a writer, editor, and sometime photographer based in Los Angeles. Born and raised in Malibu, California, I also grew up part-time on a sailboat in Brittany, France—hence my undying love of the ocean and all things French—and spent my high school, college, and grad school years on the East Coast (Massachusetts, then New York).

I’ve been writing about arts & culture for over fifteen years—first in “Can I Borrow Your Fire?,” a blog I shared with two college friends while studying abroad in Paris (which landed me my first “real” journalism gig, for Autre back in 2011), then for a number of different publications, including Vanity Fair, Vogue, WSJ. Magazine, Bookforum, W, Surface, The Paris Review Daily, The Believer, and BOMB, among others. I’m the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Panafold, a print-only quarterly magazine celebrating California arts, architecture, design, and culture, and the co-founder and co-host of the L.A.-based reading series Something Something. I also write short-form literary prose (like this essay in The Sewanee Review), though less often than I’d like of late, and have been working on what I will simply call A BOOK for the past several years (as with most things I care deeply about, it’s a long & winding road).

Editing (and writing for) an arts & culture magazine lights up so many aspects of my soul—my passion for storytelling, visual art, and design; my extroversion, curiosity, and desire to connect; my sincere love of lifting up other artists—but I wanted to create a dedicated space where I could share some of my own more personal, less polished writing. The name of this Substack, coup de feu, is an homage to my college Tumblr (which is, somewhat embarrassingly, still floating around the Internet, still plastered with my early forays into shooting on 35mm). The phrase means “a gunshot” (literal) or “a sudden flurry of activity” (figurative).

For years, friends have been asking me when I’d make a Substack, and for years, I’ve resisted—perfectionism is a doozy. But perfect is the enemy of good, and I’m working on loosening my grip, sharing more of my messy parts with the world. There’s something joyful and nostalgic about returning to a version of my blogging days, when I created freely, irreverently, and mostly for myself.

There is also the fact that my childhood home in Las Flores Canyon burned to the ground two months ago with decades’ worth of journals, photographs, art, and precious mementos inside—so maybe the creation of this space is, in some sense, a reclamation of what I’ve lost. I might no longer have family photo albums or any physical proof of The Talking Rake, the “novel” I wrote and illustrated at age seven (hi, only child here), but I’m still the person who made it, and the girl in those long-gone images; my mind and soul are still here, still churning. As the brilliant Pico Iyer said to me when I interviewed him about his memoir Aflame: Learning from Silence in the weeks after the fires: Home is not where you live, it’s what lives inside of you.

Some of what you might find here (though I’m keeping it somewhat open, as I’m curious to find out what emerges naturally): musings & mini-essays on grief, identity, perception, desire, creativity, containment, mental health, physical and psychological landscapes, language, books, food, art, design, California, and France. To keep things fun I’ll also probably throw in a few recommendation roundups—what I’m reading, watching, cooking, learning, listening to, lusting over, thinking about.

Thank you for being here.

x Annabel