A Literary Guide to Los Angeles by Michelle Dean
"A woman who inherits a crumbling mansion filled with taxidermy."
I noticed recently that 20% of my Substack readers are in California. So I pestered Michelle Dean to write a literary guide to LA.
I first knew Michelle as a hard-working book critic in New York City. (Vaguely, I’ve always known that she had a career as a hard-working lawyer before that.) She wrote a book called Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion about the heyday of elbowed literary figures in New York.
A lot of writers in New York suddenly make it big in Hollywood, and Michelle was one of those people who made the transition without anyone ever knowing how she did it. (I’ll never figure out this switch! And yet everyone did it but me.) No one, I must say, is more deserving. The Act fucked me up. Here’s her IMDB which has upcoming projects she’s refusing to comment on. From the little she tells me off the record, I’m on the edge of my seat!!
Michelle Dean’s Guide to Los Angeles
Kaitlin asked if I could write about books and Los Angeles, and well, caveat emptor: I am an accidental Los Angeleno. I was lured in during the production boom. I haven’t managed to leave, though largely the markers of success here don’t appeal. But I did love the real estate. And then lately the real estate has been, well, immolated. People here are not in a good mood.
Even before the fires, Beverly Hills had descended into an alt-Titicut Follies, where the measure of madness is an inexplicable devotion to sequined outfits and ’90s interior decor. Erewhon became a reality show casting call, 24 hours a day, and because the shelves are pay-to-play (no one seems to know this here, or maybe they just don’t care), the products are hit or miss. Silver Lake is holding steady as the province of laptop-bound influencers who sit in LAMill hoping to see their heroes i.e. unemployed television writers. If you dress up a shack in Echo Park with Mad Men-type furniture, it’ll rent for at least $6000/month. And all this even though no one here appears to have a job, only “meetings.”
Dignity is possible here, but it can be a struggle.
Books (for the self-driven)
This is not a book town. But the things I have grown to love most about Los Angeles are things I read about and then explore.
For a short piece that tells you Los Angeles is not just an idiot magnet, I recommend Susan Sontag’s one piece of pure autobiography, called “Pilgrimage.” Sontag, for those not acquainted, was a child of Los Angeles, funnily enough, and this essay is the story of her teenaged visit to Thomas Mann in the Palisades. Spoiler: Mann was disappointing. But then what writer is not, in person? You live on the page, you lose social skills. That’s just math.
I can’t recommend Shelley Winters’s memoirs enough. The first is Shelley, Also Known As Shirley, and the second is Shelley II. Shelley was, among other things, Marilyn Monroe’s roommate when they were both starlets. They lived not far from where I live in a building that is still standing. It was kind of a crap place to live then and it is a crap place to live now. But they got to host a dinner party for an extremely drunk Dylan Thomas there, who then drove Shelley up the hill to Charlie Chaplin’s house and crashed his car into the tennis court.
Why don’t things like that happen anymore? Those I know who have celebrity adventures end them with little more than a branded pillow. Very depressing.
Speaking of Marilyn, the best book about her is William Weatherby’s Conversations with Marilyn. He was a Guardian journalist who spent time with her between The Misfits and her death. Though he writes that he approached her initially with snobbish disdain—he was more of an Arthur Miller fan, which, woof—as he got to know her, her layers peeled back. This is the book that finally convinced me that Marilyn has been misunderstood, by the way. It is distinctly undersexed… unusual for male writing about Marilyn. (I have a project I am hoping will show the Weatherby Marilyn but as of this writing it is in development hell, so likely you will never hear of it again.)
I feel like I would be remiss if I did not recommend a book that is strictly about The Business. It is so baroque and hard to understand and few have gotten close to explaining it.