California is on fire; I'm having a hard time. I keep thinking about the opening pages of a novel I tried to write some ten years ago, now, which begins after the fires have ended. (Remember when they ended?) "It is the second week in September and it seems as if all is forgiven, the ash and heat of the last week seen at a soothing distance," the narrator, Isabel, reports. "Everything is candy-coated and lovely, bright blue skies and big spun clouds and hazy neon sunsets, gauzy and light around the palm trees."

Isabel is a senior in high school; in the five pages of the book that I managed to write before I ran out of story, she sits in her car in the parking lot while her best friend smokes a cigarette, and tries to talk to a boy, and writes an essay about Joan Didion's Los Angeles Notebook as part of an AP practice exam. The pages are funny to read, because they're extremely mannered and clumsy, and also full to bursting with things I'm still writing about, trying to write my way through: anxiety about prep school class stuff, the narrator's own girlish intensity, a fierce and grateful love for her better-adjusted best friend. And, of course, LA weather and what it might mean. 

I put Los Angeles Notebook in there very specifically, I remember; I didn't know much about how people wrote books but I recognized the technique of having the main character read something Thematically Relevant to the story you were trying to tell. Los Angeles Notebook is an essay about the Santa Anas, a hot, dry wind that regularly blows through this part of the state in the fall. In it, Didion writes, "The city burning is Los Angeles' deepest image of itself," and also, "Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse."

And: "It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination." 

Perhaps not surprisingly, the fires made it into the first novel I actually finished, and then published, A Song to Take the World Apart. Five pages in, I wrote: "Lorelei first tripped over Chris in the hallway at school. It was the second week of the semester, and she was getting lost trying to find a class. The halls were especially crowded those first weeks because of the wildfires raging around the city, which made strange, dark clouds of smoke and ash, and turned the whole sky orange." 

There are other stories between these two that I began with a burning. It was one of the way I understood the world to start. The fires used to feel like that, like a ritual, and in fact, they are part of the landscape's natural cycle; indigenous inhabitants would spark controlled burns every year in order to keep these kinds of conflagrations from happening.

Now, though, we don't. Now, though, climate change. Now, though, the prisoner fire fighters we employ because they're cheap are too sick from the virus to fight the biggest fires California has ever seen. Now the world feels compacted, stifling, not cyclical but stuck. My therapist said yesterday that when the seasons change but we know our lives won't-- when the virus also means we're trapped in the limbo of quarantine, waiting waiting waiting, endless, changeless-- it messes with our little animal brains, makes us even more anxious than we already are. I nodded and sniffled and picked ash out of my air.

The light changes and it looks like fall, like it always has, but the air is humid and the fires will be a threat through Christmas, at least. Among other things, this means that they don't fit into my stories anymore. I don't know how I could ever cram the enormous, landscape-sized ache of them, the ash in the cool gray sky, into the space of a narrative, much less a sentence. The land is being ravaged and my own personal mythologies are falling apart. I know which one is a bigger tragedy. I am still wrecked, equally, by both.

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Are you ready for a wild tonal shift? I interviewed Bea Koch, co-proprietress of The Ripped Bodice, about her debut book, Mad & Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency, for The LA Times! 

Other than that, I've just been ghostwriting my days away. I am safe and lucky. I hope you are, too.