Mary Camarillo is one of those who jumped when I asked for Guest Posts, and she suggested this great list. This Guest Post is full of good-looking books (pay particular attention to #6). Be sure to Visit Mary’s website and sign up for her newsletter, “Life With Riley.”
SIX BOOKS THAT EXPLORE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA BEYOND THE BEACH
When I pitched H.C. this idea for a guest post he replied, “There’s more to So Cal than the beach??” [And boy, do I hope my sarcasm came through]
I understand where he’s coming from. When my family moved to Southern California from North Carolina in the late 1960s, we’d heard the Beach Boys on the radio and seen the Gidget movies but we were shocked to learn that not everyone lived on the beach. We landed first in Reseda in the San Fernando Valley and then in Fountain Valley in Orange County. We couldn’t see the ocean and we were confused.
I’ve lived in Huntington Beach for almost 30 years now and I’m still a bit confused by Southern California. So that’s what I write about.
My two novels have been inspired by so many wonderful California authors including the five on this list. Their short story collections, novels, essays and poetry are set in a wide variety of Southern California neighborhoods spanning all of Southern California—from Orange County to the San Gabriel Valley, from North Long Beach to Pasadena, and from South El Monte to Beachwood Canyon right underneath the Hollywood sign.
All of these authors are joining me on a panel at this year’s Lit Fest in the Dena at 5 p.m. on May 4th in Altadena, California. The festival theme is Neighborhoods. Join us at the festival if you happen to be in Southern California then. If not, stop by your favorite indie bookstore and pick up these books.
1. Elsewhere, California by Dana Johnson
Dana Johnson was born and raised in and around Los Angeles and is a Professor of English at USC. In Elsewhere, California, Johnson’s protagonist Avery and her family escape the violent streets of Los Angeles and move to a more gentrified neighborhood in suburban West Covina. When Avery’s cousin moves in with her family, he triggers a series of events that follow Avery throughout her life: to her studies at USC, to her budding career as a painter and artist, and into her relationship with a wealthy Italian and their life in a glass-walled house in the Hollywood Hills.
As a young imaginative child, Avery says she’s from Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, a name she invented with the help of TV. “I loved where I was already, in Los Angeles,” Avery says. “But I still loved my invented place in California even better because it sounded like confetti and long streamers coming down from the sky, caressing my face.”
Southern Californian neighborhoods with their palm trees, swimming pools, and perfect weather can seem like a paradise complete with confetti and streamers, but this façade can also conceal the loneliness, mistrust and fear of change that is often at the center of so many modern lives. A recent Gallup survey found that nearly 1 in 4 adults across the world have reported feeling very or fairly lonely. In many ways Southern California suburbia is designed to be more of a forced community that can make those who don’t quite fit in feel excluded.
But those “misfits” sometimes have the most powerful stories.
2. L.A. Breakdown by Lou Mathews
Speaking of misfits in paradise, Lou Matthews’ L.A. Breakdown offers what another California author Jim Gavin calls “a love letter to doomed knuckleheads everywhere.” Stunning, bleakly beautiful, and laugh-out-loud funny, L.A. Breakdown paints a riveting portrait of drag racing culture in 1960s Los Angeles. Mathews is a master at capturing working class realism in character and place.
Here’s Charlie, one of the knuckleheads in Mathews’ novel, observing an apartment building. “The El Dorado, and its red, green, and white spotlighted tropical landscaping—banana plants, mock rubber trees, Schefflera, and Giant Bird of Paradise.”
Lou Mathews is also the author of another terrific SoCal novel Shaky Town. He has taught in UCLA Extension’s acclaimed creative writing program since 1989 and he lives right underneath the Hollywood sign.
3. Eat the Mouth That Feeds You by Caribbean Fragoza
Caribbean Fragoza is a fiction and nonfiction writer from South El Monte. In her collection of stories. Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, her imperfect characters are drawn with a sympathetic tenderness as they struggle against circumstances and conditions designed to defeat them. But there is still a strong sense of community in this collection, even in death.
“I feel my family shifting,” Fragoza writes in the story ‘Mi Muerta.’ “Moving like weather over the earth. The rumbling of busy tias, loaded down with thick bodies and domestic duties. The rain of young children in chase. The uncles, mountains that won’t lift a finger her except when drunk to dance or fight.”
Fragoza is the Prose Editor at Huizache Magazine. She also co-edited a wonderful compilation of essays, East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte.
4. Letters to My City by Mike Sonksen
Mike Sonksen, aka Mike the PoeT, is a poet, professor, journalist, historian and tour guide. The poems and essays in his Letters to My City combine two decades of field experience, research, personal observations, and stories told to the author, a third-generation Los Angeles native, by his grandfather and other family members. Sonksen is on a mission to help locals learn local history. He writes that this knowledge “helps one become more of an engaged citizen of wherever they are.”
Sonksen’s history lessons are in the form of poems and stories about Los Angeles streets and neighborhoods. His grandmother lived for over 50 years just a few blocks from where Ice Cube grew up. Patty Hearst and the SLA shot up the sporting goods store half a mile away from his grandmother’s house. In my favorite poem ‘Arrival Stories’ he writes “I mastered the art of not hitting the brakes on the freeways of L.A.”
That takes serious skill.
5. The Secret Habit of Sorrow by Victoria Patterson
Victoria Patterson has been described as the Edith Wharton of Southern California. The characters in The Secret Habit of Sorrow feel like people I know. Patterson writes with emotional wisdom and wry humor about human beings struggling with parenthood, relationships, excessive drinking, drug abuse, and trying to fit into suburban life.
In the story ‘DC’ in this collection, Patterson writes “Serena helped Elaine transition into the Palm Garden Apartments in Costa Mesa, explaining how the garbage cans should be set in a specific spot along the sidewalk pre-trash day or the trash men wouldn’t empty them.”
Southern California neighborhoods usually have unwritten rules about where and how folks should put their trashcans, park their cars, and take care of their lawns. It’s mostly about maintaining those all-important property values.
6. Those People Behind Us by Mary Camarillo
Finally, my novel Those People Behind Us takes us back to the beach, although most of the characters never set foot in the sand. Those People Behind Us is set in suburban coastal town increasingly divided by politics, protests, and escalating housing prices—divisions that change the lives of five neighbors as they search for home and community in a neighborhood where no one can agree who belongs. There’s a realtor, an aerobics teacher, an ex-con, a Vietnam vet, and a teenage boy all confronting death, betrayal, financial decline, and loneliness and not realizing until the end how much they have in common.
In these politically charged and increasingly less united states of America, we often make assumptions about “those people” around us, without knowing anything about our neighbors’ hopes, dreams, and heartbreaks. That’s what the characters in my novel do.
“We have the beach,” Lisa (the real estate agent) tells her daughter. “And before you say that I hardly ever go down there, it’s important to me to know that it’s there.”
What’s important to you about your neighborhood?
Mary Camarillo is the author of the award-winning novels The Lockhart Women and Those People Behind Us. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in publications such as Inlandia, TAB Journal, 166 Palms, Sonora Review, and The Ear. She lives in Huntington Beach, California with her husband, who plays ukulele, and their terrorist cat Riley, who makes frequent appearances on Instagram.
