Philip John Harris: The Novelist Identity in LA
It’s mid-August, and I’m at a birthday party for a screenwriter friend of mine. He lives on the Miracle Mile, just south of Olympic. His small back yard is filled with family, friends and a gaggle of show biz folk—that scruffy guy is an actor, the blond in the jeans is an agent, the tall woman with the brown bob is head of development at NBC.
Leaning against the makeshift bar, a hipster I’ve just met dives headfirst into small talk, asking me, “So, where are you from?”
I tell him I was born at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital in Hollywood, California.
“Wow!” he responds, “I’ve never met anyone actually from here. What do you do?”
“I’m a writer,” I say off-handedly. Everyone’s a writer.
He takes a slurp of his cheap beer and says, “Oh, me too. I’m with CAA. One of my pilots is in preproduction, and next week I’m pitching to Comedy Central and FOX. What show are you on?”
My face screws up as I say, “I’m not on a show. I’m a prose writer, finishing up my first novel.”
“But, you do screenwriting, too, right, to pay the bills?”
I shake my head.
“Oh,” he says.
With a sincere hope of putting him out of his confused misery, I walk away.
In college, where show business isn’t, every writing class I had was based on the workshop model, with the underlying format of community being as paramount and vaguely present as the holy ghost. In Los Angeles, Paramount is the name of a studio. I love my hometown. I still live here. I go to Dodger games. I curse Hollywood traffic during Oscar week. I smirk affectionately at young couples on the West Side who complain about bagels as their children languorously lounge in four hundred dollar strollers. I eat tamales bought off street vendors in Boyle Heights. My senior prom was at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum in Elysion Park. The first club I ever went to was Rage on Santa Monica Boulevard in 1999. And yet, I still feel like an outsider.
Finding other prose writers from LA is near impossible. I’ve heard tales of them, but I’ve yet to meet them, let alone form an actual writing community. There is a disconnection between the industry of Los Angeles and the perceived culture of books. Yes, we have the Yearly Book Festival. Yes, we have entities like the Los Angeles Review of Books; but there is still a cultural stigma that pervades the city, keeping the voices of future writers handicapped from hitting it big, relegating book culture to a few pages in the Art section of the Sunday edition of the LA Times. Why is this?
A friend of mine, Amanda-Faye Jimenez, a blogger and writer, had this to say: “I love this city so much, but as a writer I find it somewhat stifling. I can’t say why exactly. I know a successful novelist who lives in LA, but she travels a lot. Of course, her screenwriting gigs pay the bills in between books.” Gregory Bonsignore, a screenwriter, says, “I think novelists are a little cleverer than to live in Los Angeles, and screenwriters kind of have to.” And Billy Pollina, a self-proclaimed writer and producer, had merely this to say: “What’s a book?”
So, what is it about LA? I checked in with some writer friends on Google+ to see how they would weigh in, asking them specifically if they would ever want to be novelists who lived in LA? Again, the responses were not kindly toward The City of Angels. A writer living in Wyoming said, “[Los Angeles is] the last place on the planet I’d move. Shudder.” A writer living in New York said, “I left LA for that very reason—I didn’t have to be there!”
And yet, this is where I stay. I find moments and instances pregnant with possibility every day in this city. Successful authors do live here. Christopher Rice and Brett Easton Ellis to name but a few. I’m not convinced it’s impossible to be a novelist in LA. I guess it’s just a little harder and a bit more isolating. Why? A state of mind? A perception of Angelenos? Well, sorry. That’s not enough of a reason for me to leave.
Philip John Harris’s “Ghosts of the Canyon” is forthcoming in LAR 10, October 2011. http://authorphilip.com/