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The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard

The Good Life

Lies of the Saints

My Latest Book

I admit it: I beat up on Kansas in this book. But the truth is that I like the flyover states, where life seems a fair bit saner than southern California, the place I grew up. Things don't cost so much here, and there are fewer glossy prizes to reach for. Because there is less striving, there are fewer examples of the various kinds of one-upsmanship. It's easy to be comfortable in the middle of the country, and I like to be comfortable.

Nevertheless, my book takes a lot of whacks at Kansas, and I hope the Kansans don't take offense. The Kansas in my book is a mythical place, and it owes a lot to the stories my mother used to tell me about growing up in a small town--in her case, Rock Springs, Wyoming. I heard about coal miners who saved their once-a-week baths for Saturday night, and the Christmas habit of offering a shot of whiskey to each visitor, so that all the fathers in town came back home shnockered. But more than that, I heard about neighbors watching each other, and talking to each other, noticing what everyone else did, and what everyone else spent. I heard about the two blocks of Main Street, filled with company stores. When my mother thought of staying in Rock Springs after high school, her mother took her aside and asked fiercely, "What are you going to do here? Work in the five and dime?" So my mother fled to California, and never looked back. While the book tells my father's mother's story, in many ways it tells my mother's story as well.

We're a family of people who looked at our lives with dismay, then went somewhere else to start again. And so this book, which in many ways I've carried in me all my life, is all about people having a second shot, and getting their choices right the second time around. Isn't this what every American thinks about? When I first learned about Manifest Destiny in sixth-grade social studies, nobody had to explain the theory to me. I'd been breathing it in every day. The difference for me is that I turned the direction of Manifest Destiny backward, and went east, not west. My parents had already gone as far west as the continent allows; if I wanted to kick over the traces, I had to turn around and go back where they came from. Now I like the mild contrariness of choosing to go to the part of the country so often derided or overlooked. When people in New York or San Francisco make jokes about the red states, I just smile. They have no idea.