What happens when you write a novel, setting much of it in the real world, and then part of that real world is erased before the novel can be published? This was my dilemma in writing The Impossible Turn, my eighth and newest Cordell Logan mystery.
A fair amount of the story originally took place in Malibu, California, where I drew references to actual streets I’ve driven on over the years, real stores where I’ve shopped, and landmark restaurants like Moonshadows and the Reel Inn, where I’ve enjoyed more than my share of good seafood. I was a couple of days away from finishing and emailing the completed manuscript to my agent when the Santa Anas began blowing last week at hurricane strength. Suddenly, it seemed, much of Los Angeles was burning.
I reside up the coast and far enough away from all the fires that my family and I were not threatened. My greater and more immediate concern, of course, was for the safety of many friends and former colleagues who live in the LA area, particularly those I worked with at the Los Angeles Times. At least half-a-dozen, and likely others I’m not aware of as I write this, lost their homes. I can’t begin to imagine their anguish, nor that of the thousands of other victims of what may prove to be the most expensive natural disaster in modern American history. And so, it is the context of that almost incomprehensible tragedy that I hope you’ll forgive my bemoaning the relatively trivial inconvenience of having to rewrite a work of fiction to keep up with current events. Such, however, is the lot of any novelist who aspires to achieve believability in the make-believe stories they spin.
As the smoke began clearing and the extent of the catastrophe became known, I reread the latest draft of The Impossible Turn and confirmed what I already feared–that neighborhoods I’d included in detail had burned to the ground. My need to rewrite was obvious; how I would go about that rewrite was less so. I figured I had three options:
I could revise the plot and have the story play out well before the fires, making no mention of the catastrophe, but that struck me as contrary to my previous books, all of which were intended to convey a sense of current day. I envisioned getting letters from confused readers demanding to know, “When exactly does this book take place??”
Or…
I could set the story after the fires. But given that it takes at least a year and typically longer before a finished book finally hits the shelves, I realized I could not predict with any accuracy what the aftermath of the fires might look like. Will Pacific Coast Highway, where oceanfront mansions once stood, still be ash and rubble, or will reconstruction be well underway? Hey, I’m merely a humble scribe, not a fortune teller.
Or…
I could erase from my story any reference to Malibu and the Palisades and simply shift that part of the plot a few miles inland to, say, the Hollywood Hills.
In the end, it was this third option that seemed most viable to me. If you’ve ever spent time in the LA basin, you might better understand why I made the choice I did.
The late Dorothy Parker once described Los Angeles as, “Seventy-two suburbs in search of a city.” She wasn’t wrong. The sprawling, amorphous mass known as LA, with its more than 18 million residents, defies the traditional definition of community. If you live in Beverly Hills, for example, or basically anywhere west of LaCienega Boulevard, you’re likely not much interested in what goes down in Compton or out in Pacoima. Indeed, it’s been my experience that Angelenos, figuratively speaking, tend to wear blinders. They embrace a mindset that says, in effect, “Good or bad, if it didn’t happen in my immediate neighborhood, it didn’t happen. Period.”
Believe me, I know of what I speak, having lived there for ten years.
My children back then attended school at Mt. Washington Elementary, which was right around the corner from our house. Every morning after dropping them off, my wife and/or I would spend a few minutes chatting in the parking lot with other parents, our neighbors. On one particular Monday morning, I can vividly remember expressing my concern about a shooting that had occurred the previous Saturday night in nearby Glassell Park. A young family like ours had taken an unfortunate turn down a wrong street, where gang members opened fire on their minivan in the mistaken belief that those in the vehicle were rival thugs. A toddler was killed in her car seat. Two days later, standing there outside our local elementary school, my neighbors seemed not to share my concern about what had happened.
“That was Glassell Park,” one of the other dads said, “not Mt. Washington.” For the record, Glassell Park is more or less adjacent to Mt. Washington, and about a mile away as the crow flies from where we were gathered in that parking lot.
It was that kind of isolationist, denialism thinking, that ultimately compelled my wife and me to decamp with our kids and move away from LA.
My neighbors’ disregard over what had happened to that family in Glassell Park is little different, I’m convinced, than what will likely occur in the aftermath of last week’s firestorms. Many Angelinos not directly affected by them will soon forget they ever occurred. They’ll put their blinders back on and go about their lives in their little corners of those seventy-two suburbs as if nothing ever happened. But who knows? Maybe that kind of collective memory loss is a good thing for novelists. It provides the perfect soil in which to grow fiction, where the rawness of tragedy and fragility are reshaped into something surreal and profound. Amid Los Angeles’ boundless distractions, all that noise and glitter and grime, there exists a canvas on which fleeting events are perpetually swallowed whole by the next headline, the next distraction. And, in the end, it’s in the forgetting where true stories are born: not from the events themselves, but from the way they are erased, reimagined, and left to linger in the cracks between what once was and what could have been.