If Not Now, When?

Thoughts from the Apocalypse that is LA.

Jan 10, 2025

Lying in the dark in my son’s bedroom, staring at the blue-pink-grey sky and hearing the now-normal sound of helicopters, I can’t believe how much everything has changed in just a few days.

Monday was the first week in the new year. We took our son to his first day of preschool on Tuesday (“he was very observant and ate all his snacks” = the official report). Yes, it was windy but we’re used to the occasional Santa Ana’s.

Then came news about a fire in the Palisades. You have to have lived in LA to understand that “I don’t cross the 405” is not a joke. The west side feels like a different state, if not country. So while yes, it was scary, it didn’t feel personal for those of us on the other side of town.

Then someone on my Mommy text chain said something about West Hollywood being on fire. West Hollywood? The land so idyllic, even Chappell Roan waxes rhapsodic about it? What?

I was still going about normal business. Maybe it’s because, well, this is LA, where, as David Ulin wrote quite articulately on Thursday in the New York Times, “The city’s infamous culture of reinvention is a direct outgrowth…of the ongoing reinventions or erasures of the landscape Los Angeles.” Someone can get discovered at Schwabs and have their life changed overnight. An earthquake could knock us out. You never know what will happen.

Sure, uncertainty lurks everywhere but because we’re a town that most residents were drawn to because they were seeking, on some level, uncertainty—or at least non-mundanity—we seem to accept the surreal and go on with our day.

Or maybe I was acting like everything was normal because, as my boyfriend has lovingly joked, I can be “a cold Russian.” Anyway, I was just doing normal things and one of those things was emaiing a friend I’m starting a podcast with to ask him when he’d have the intro music ready. He wrote back that his house was “literally on fire.”

Nothing has seemed normal since. Our house was completely spared. We live smack in the middle of Hollywood—the flats, as it’s known. Which, when you’re walking by a homeless encampment, doesn’t seem great. But, when you’re not near firebrush and the fire is spreading at insane speeds, it seemed quite lovely.

Meanwhile, friends were getting evacuation warnings. Two Legacy Launch Pad team members were texting me from the road right after fleeing their homes. My boyfriend’s sister came to our house after seeing the fire break out in the hill above her house. Our neighborhood WhatsApp group blew up with panicked messages, with the most overtly hysterical neighbor (you know the type because you have one, too) writing things like that we should all fill our bathtubs with water because soon enough we wouldn’t be able to flush our toilets.

My boyfriend—a safety freak to the point that he once gave me Pink pepper spray as one of my Valentine’s gifts—packed the car with various supplies. Friends from all over the world, many that I hadn’t spoken to in years, texted to ask if we were okay.

Our 18-month old son ran around dancing to Baby Shark, blissfully oblivious.

Somehow we went to sleep. I slept great, actually—cold Russian Angeleno that I am.

And then, in the morning, the news was good. The fires were contained. My boyfriend’s sister went home. Even our hysterical WhatsApp chat subdued itself. I went out to run an errand, however, and LA felt, unmistakably, like a Different Place. At Target, in a reminder about the inherent goodness of people, I was surrounded by people buying baby supplies to drop off at shelters.

What’s my point? And what does this have to do with publishing a book and why am I writing it in a dark room? Not entirely sure. I think it has something to do with my being reminded of the fact that you never know what’s going to happen. If it seems insenstive or callous to connect this to asking you why you’re not writing your book when you know you want to…well, know that the person who loves me more than anyone else on earth sees me as the occasional cold Russian.