For Fiji, I read A Remarkable Rotuman Woman: A Memoir by Jacinta Tonga. There were not a lot of options for Fiji, but this book was a great choice for my Read Around the World quest.

This book is the author’s memoir of her grandmother Petera Veu, who lived on the island of Rotuma in Fiji. In the prologue, Tonga explains:

I did not research this book, nor did I ask my mum, uncles, aunties, cousins or any other family members for their opinions. I want this book to be my story of how I remember her and her stories that she told me.

I have asked myself if these stories could be possible — could they have really happened or did she make it up — but you know the bottom line is I don’t care. I want to remember her as she would want me to remember her and I want the same for my children, grandchildren and whoever else wants to read her story to know her as I have known her.

A Remarkable Rotuman Woman by Jacinta Tonga, page V.

I appreciated the author’s candor and bluntness, and it set me up for a very enjoyable experience with her book. If you read this book expecting one of the great works of literature, you will be disappointed. But if you read this book with an open mind, hoping to get insights into a different culture in a different part of the world, then you will be delighted by the author’s feisty grandma who raised hell at Catholic school and kept raising hell until the day she died.

On my list, Fiji comes right after Ethiopia, and my pick for Ethiopia was also a memoir written by a granddaughter. I love when these serendipities happen! There was Austria and Azerbaijan, two consecutive books about musicians. Then Bahrain and Bangladesh, two consecutive books that explored Muslim marriage with Bahrian romanticizing and idealizing the subservient wife and Bangladesh burning the institution of Muslim marriage to the ground. For Chile and China, I read a novel (House of the Spirits) and a family history (Wild Swans) but both books told the stories of multiple generations of women in the same family living during tumultuous times. I have no idea when these serendipities will happen, but they are so fun and rewarding when they occur.

The memoirs I read for Ethiopia and Fiji are very different. The Wife’s Tale: A Personal History (Ethiopia) is some of the best writing I’ve ever read. If I was teaching a class about memoirs, I would include it in my syllabus because it demonstrates the best of the genre. A Remarkable Rotuman Woman is much more conversational, and the author was a nurse who felt called to preserve her grandmother’s stories, not a writer who has studied and practiced the craft for years and years and has access to a professional editor and all the advantages of a publisher. But after reading The Wife’s Tale for Ethiopia, I was delighted to read more stories about a bad ass grandma, and I’m glad Jacinta Tonga preserved this slice of history for future generations.

Not every book needs to be Hemingway, folks. Writing and publishing accomplish many different things, and this book saved memories of life on a remote island. I think that’s a wonderful reason to write a book.

For Ethiopia, I read The Wife’s Tale: A Personal History by Aida Edemariam. I recently created my latest list of “Top Ten Faves” from my Read Around the World quest, and this book did not make my top ten, but damn, that was a close call. Every few months, I redo that list, and as time passes, my opinions about books shift and change. I wouldn’t be surprised if this book eventually moves into my Top Ten Fave–and this is an excellent problem to have with my quest! I was so naive when I started this journey in 2023, thinking I would read a few boring books and then happily return to my rut of reading books by American and English authors, but that’s another post. Let’s talk about The Wife’s Tale!

The Wife’s Tale is both the intimate memoir of Yetemegnu, the author’s grandma who lived for nearly a century (1916-2013), and the history of Ethiopia during those decades. The story is lush and gorgeously written with sensory details and a novelistic style that pulls the reader into the setting. Yetemegnu is a child bride, and although the marriage is not consummated until she is older, she still lives the vast majority of her life as a wife. Too often, history recounts the story of the Men in Charge. As a traditional wife, Yetemegnu is very much not in charge of Ethiopia’s government, but her experiences–how she feeds her family; how she keeps her children alive; how she gets them educated– are just as important to know. This is the version of history that my soul craves.

My only complaint about this book is that it made me long to write something similar about my Grandma Shirley, who died at the age of ninety-six in 2022, but my grandma did not like to tell stories about her past. Whenever I tried to tease out her memories, she shared a sentence or two at most and then changed the subject. Shirley was much more interested in enjoying the present, but I would love to be able to share stories about her childhood in New York during the Great Depression; the trauma of seeing friends go to Europe during World War II; her marriage and then divorce from my grandfather; her bad ass single years; and on and on. At least we have a lot of her photos which offer glimpses into her life.

I’m so glad that Yetemegnu shared so many intimate details of her life with her granddaughter Aida Edemariam, and that Edemariam recognized the value and importance of these stories and turned them into this magnificent personal history. The absence of female voices throughout history is regrettable, and books like The Wife’s Tale are crucial in filling those gaps. They remind us that history isn’t just about wars and rulers—it’s about the everyday lives of women like Yetemegnu, whose strength, resilience, and love shaped generations.

For Eritrea, I read Gratitude in Low Voices: A Memoir by Dawit Gebremichael Habte. In this memoir, Habte describes his childhood in Eritrea (before its independence from Ethiopia) and then how he journeyed to Kenya and eventually obtained asylum in the United States. As an adult, he eventually returned to Eritrea to help rebuild the country after it achieved independence from Ethiopia. 

This book sounded like it would be a very interesting read.

Alas.

It was not.

The book ended up being a brutally long thank you note to all the people who have ever helped him in his life. He would stop the narrative, again and again, to share a biography of someone who gave him a library card or a teacher who pushed him to apply to college or an American employer who showed interest in Eritrea, but I was not reading this book to hear about how Nancy from H.R. enjoys singing with her church choir and was so brave when she needed knee surgery in her forties. If I was curious about Nancy from H.R., I would have read her memoir!

When Habte described his journey from Eritrea to Kenya, he focused on the boring logistics and glossed over the interesting bits. Apparently, he encountered a lion during this journey, but this was all he wrote: “For the first time I’d had close encounters with wild animals–his highness the king of the jungle (lion), zebra, giraffe, and, of course, the sneaky snake.” That’s it. That’s the entire lion story. He shares nothing else about that experience, and I do not mean to complain, but–

TELL US ABOUT THE LION!!!

Where were you? How far away was the lion? Was it night or day? Was your life in peril? Did you piss your pants or speak gibberish or beg for mercy from a higher power? Why do I know about who he met at the airport lobby when he was leaving Eritrea and nothing about this lion??? If I ever write a book about the craft of writing, I’ll have to include this guideline: always always ALWAYS tell us about the freaking lion.

Habte is a software engineer, and he has an inspiring story to share. Alas, he just needed a ghost writer or at least a co-writer to help tease out the interesting episodes of his life and downplay the dull tangents. On the bright side, he does know a lot about Eritrean history and he did an excellent job describing how the country was colonized first by Italy and then Ethiopia, making Eritrea the only African country to have been colonized by another African country. He also did a wonderful job explaining the negative effects of colonialism.

I just really wish he had told us about the freaking lion.

For Equatorial Guinea, I read La Bastarda: A Novel by Trifonia Melibea Obono, translated from the Spanish by Lawrence Schimel. This book is a fast read that packs a huge emotional punch while covering a broad range of difficult issues.

The protagonist Okomo is an orphaned teen who lives with her grandparents in a small Fang community with rigid norms and expectations. She is already an outcast by virtue of being an orphan, but then she also dares to be a queer tomboy in a polygamous culture that devalues women. Although her grandparents would like to control and tame her, Okomo rebels against the constraints of her society so that she can walk her own path.

The book’s dedication sums up its themes nicely:

For all those who suffer due to, or advocate in favor of, a way of life adapted to individual and collective freedoms.

La Bastarda is banned in Equatorial Guinea because it has lesbian characters. Ugh. This quest keeps reminding me, again and again, that not all peoples around the world experience the same liberties that I do. That my freedom of speech is a sacred right in a world that often silences the prophets and dissidents.

There were some harsh (even cruel) reviews of this book on Goodreads, but I give this book four out of five stars for being a howl of dissent against a suffocating culture. Not every book needs to be written by Hemingway or Shakespeare to merit a good review. La Bastarda is not the best novel I’ve ever read, but the author spoke up bravely, fiercely, and clearly about important issues and made me think. She did such a good job of undermining her country’s status quo, her book was banned. Bravo! May we all be so brave as to write books that are banned.

Thanks to my Read Around the World quest, I no longer judge or review books based on rigid rubrics handed down by professors who live in towers. This book was written by an oppressed minority in a country whose “government” commits human rights violations to silence any dissent, and the author brought the setting and themes to life. Perhaps the story could have been better developed. Perhaps an editor could have helped the author improve her writing style. But who cares? Not every book needs to impress my old literature professors who were obsessed with Shakespeare and Hemingway.

For El Salvador, I real Solito, a gut-wrenching memoir by Javier Zamora about his harrowing journey to the United States as an unauthorized immigrant. His parents had already moved to the United States, so he undertook this journey with a group of strangers at the age of nine AND HE DID NOT EVEN KNOW HOW TO TIE HIS SHOES.

That detail really destroyed me as I am the mother of a nine-year-old boy who also does not know how to tie his shoes. As I read through Zamora’s ordeals, I kept thinking, How could my son do this? At nine? How?!?! Zamora’s memoir brought me right into his agonizing border crossing and every chapter, sometimes every page, I felt my heart breaking again.

Immigration has been a pervasive theme in my Read Around the World quest. A short story in Uncertain Kin (The Bahamas) completely altered my understanding of the immigrant experience. American Visa (Bolivia) is a madcap novel all about a man’s desperate attempts to join his son in Florida. Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe (Bulgaria) is a work of nonfiction that deftly weaves together the author’s personal journey through the borderlands of Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece with the stories of people who desperately tried to cross those borders. The theme of immigration also popped up in my picks for Belarus, Benin, and Burkina Faso — and that is just the B countries!

Since the beginning of my quest, I have been pondering the meaning of words like “country” and “borders” and “immigration.” Yet maybe “pondering” is not the right word, because “pondering” suggests a mental activity, but this is more than an intellectual exercise. This “pondering” is something I feel in my body in the way my blood moves and my skin tingles, the pressure of some unknown force pushing against my skull, a tightening of muscles in my neck and shoulders, and in my lungs and throat and breath. It is more poetry than prose, and as I write this, I worry that I am not articulating my feelings about immigration coherently — but perhaps that is my former life and training as a lawyer kicking up? Back in my lawyer days, I worked on several pro bono cases for immigrants seeking political asylum, and perhaps that has influenced this compulsion I have to support any statements I have about immigration with evidence, laws, and statistics but UGH, I do not want to talk about immigration from the perspective of a lawyer or a politician.

I want to talk about it as a human.

And as a human, my heart breaks when I read about the difficulties that people like Zamora face when they try to leave their country. Why are we bound and divided by invisible imaginary lines? Why is this such a polarizing political issue?

I don’t know all the answers about immigration. Hell, I don’t even know all the “right” questions. I don’t know all the statistics and I don’t know how immigration impacts the economy, but I do know that Zamora’s story broke my heart. What would happen if all the politicians in Washington, D.C. read this memoir before they issued decrees and laws about “illegal immigration”? Have any of those politicians considered their family trees and their immigration roots? What makes their immigration story legal and Zamora’s illegal?

Solito raises a lot of uncomfortable questions, and it left its fingerprints all over my heart. May my heart, mind, and soul get filthy with the fingerprints of authors like Solito, and may I carry their stories and let them change the architecture of my soul.

I might be starting to understand why my Muse was so insistent that I undertake this quest.

For Egypt, I could have easily read something by Naguib Mahfouz who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, but I have already read (and LOVED) several books by him so I wanted to try someone new (and preferably female). There were many good options, but I was drawn* to the work of Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed, a graphic novel that was written, drawn, and then translated into English by the author herself. The English-language version is printed the same way as it was in Arabic, so it is read “backwards” for the Western reader. For me, this was awkward and weird — and I totally loved it.

The title of this book, Shubeik Lubeik, is the fairy-tale rhyme that means “your wish is my command” and this graphic novel is about a world where wishes are commodified and literally for sale. Expensive wishes are rare, sold in glass bottles at prices beyond the means of most consumers, while cheap wishes are readily available in cans, but buyer beware. If you wish to lose weight, but only purchase a canned wish, you might end up literally losing an arm. Technically, your wish came true but maybe not on the terms you imagined…

I loved so many things about this book. The premise is original and utterly delightful, and from that premise, the author created a mesmerizing story with complicated messy characters. She uses the novel’s fantasy world to explore so many compelling issues including: the history of Egypt; poverty, wealth, and socioeconomics; mental health and the practice of psychology; politics; religion; and colonialism and its aftermath.

As soon as I finished this book, I looked for more work by Deena Mohamed, but alas, she is only thirty (a baby!) and this is her first book. I am now stalking following her on Instagram @itsdeenasaur because I want to consume any and all work she creates. If you would like to peek inside Shubeik Lubeik, check out her gorgeous website.

Bottom line: this was an absolutely incredible pick for Egypt and it’s one of the most gorgeous graphic novels I’ve ever devoured.

* This pun was not intended but I am very proud of it nevertheless.

For Ecuador, I read Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker, and oh my god, this book was so creepy!

Many, many people recommended this book for Ecuador. It was the overwhelming pick of the popular majority but it’s a horror book and I don’t do horror. Seriously. This scientific chart demonstrates where I land on he Tolerance for Horror Spectrum:

So although the description and recommendations for Jawbone were compelling, I really love sleeping at night, so I reluctantly ordered a different book for Ecuador.

Then I sent my newsletter and asked folks to send any recommendations they had for the E countries and Sarah Booker emailed back and said:

Love what you are doing! Might I humbly recommend Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda (in my translation) for Ecuador? And check out Melibea Obono Trifonia’s La bastarda (tr. Lawrence Schimel) for Equatorial Guinea. Happy reading!

Plenty of people ask me to read their book or their mom’s book or their friend’s brother’s book, and alas, there are just not enough hours in my lifetime to read everything that is recommended. As a lifelong people pleaser, I have had to train myself to resist my compulsion to read every suggested book, and by the time Sarah’s email arrived, I had the ability and backbone to say, Thanks, but no thanks! My intuition, however, decided it was time to ignore my placement on the Tolerance for Horror Spectrum and read Jawbone.

It turns out that while I may not have the stomach for Stephen King’s brand of horror, and I certainly cannot watch movies like Saw (unless I actually want to have insomnia for the rest of my life), I do enjoy Jawbone’s brand of horror, which I would describe as creepy and psychologically intense in the context of an all-girls high school. (Yes, my intuition is gloating.)

As I was reading this book, I often had to look up the meaning of words in English and as I did, I marveled at the work translators like Sarah Booker do. Seriously, translation is a sort of witchcraft. I’m fluent in English, but I do not by any stretch of the imagination know every single word in the English dictionary. Now, let’s say I am someday fluent in Portuguese–that doesn’t mean I will have mastered every single word in the Portuguese language. My god! If you consider the vastness of language, it is like contemplating infinity. Even if I am someday fluent in both English and Portuguese, I could be translating a text, encounter a Portuguese word that I do not know, and discover that the best translation for the Portuguese word is an English word I also do not know. Seriously, how do translators navigate these complexities and still pick the words and phrases that best capture an author’s energy???

And folks think that AI can translate.

But I digress! Jawbone has a feral energy that explores teenage anxiety and self-consciousness, and damn, it yanked me back into my own days as an awkward teen at an all-girls Catholic high school. And this feels weird to admit, but I enjoyed this experience, like a literary time-traveling back to the days of acne and bitchy girls in uniforms. (Hypothetical question: is this a red flag that I should mention to my therapist?)

The story is dense with quirky details that brought me into the setting, story, and lives of the girls. There is an intense mother-daughter obsession that makes Norman Bates look like a well-adjusted young man, and oh, just thinking about Jawbone months later makes me shudder but in a delightful way. Maybe I should be concerned, but sometimes, we need to plunge into the darkness to reckon with our humanity.

For the Dominican Republic, I read In the Time of the Butterflies: A Novel by Julia Alvarez. This book came with a ton of recommendations, but I hesitated picking it because Alvarez was born in New York City. If I picked Alvarez for the Dominican Republic, wasn’t I undermining the purpose of my own freaking quest?

But then I read more about Alvarez’s life. Yes, she was born in New York City in 1950, but her family moved back to the Dominican Republic when she was three months old and Julia grew up there until her family fled back to the United States in 1960 due to her father’s involvement in the underground resistance against Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship. Alvarez might have technically been born in the United States, but her life definitely fits the spirit of my quest.

In the Time of the Butterflies tells the story of the four Mirabel sisters. Three of these sisters, who were among the leaders of the resistance to the dictatorship, were found dead on November 25, 1960 in a wrecked jeep at the bottom of a cliff. The story beautifully moves between their four voices, the sisters each taking their turn to tell parts of the story, which was the perfect narrative choice. I fell in love with each of the sisters and even though I knew from page one that three of them would die, I still felt a profound loss when they were assassinated.

I recently created a video of my ten favorite books from my quest (so far!) and as I write this review, I’m struggling to remember why In the Time of the Butterflies did not make the list. It’s so extraordinary! Its omission is just a testament to how incredible the world’s literature is.

It’s February 20, 2025 and I finally managed to record my first episode of the year. We’ve been recovering from the insanity of the Palisades and Eaton Fires and to be honest, I still feel drained and raw, but it was very cathartic and healing to record this episode. Storytelling is so powerful.

Without further ado, here’s the transcript for Episode 54:

Hello, adventurers.

It has been a minute, hasn’t it?

This was meant to be an episode that I recorded in early January, and I would have been saying happy new year, but instead it is February 20th, 2025.

Episode 54, The Los Angeles Fires, or Hello Therapy, my old friend.

I guess we have some catching up to do, because the last time I recorded an episode, it was before the Christmas holidays. I fully planned to be back here in January, but then Los Angeles had an epic natural disaster with insane winds and a fire.

If you follow me on social media, you probably know by now that my parents lost their house, and my sister lost her condo in the Palisades fire at the beginning of January, and that my family, me and the kids and Nathan, we had to evacuate because of the Eaton fire, that two fires happening in Los Angeles same day.

So this episode, I thought I should tell the full story of my crazy January, 2025. It’s just one of those events I can already tell is going to affect me for a long time, which is probably why I decided it was a good time to go back to therapy. I think I’ve been back three weeks now, maybe four. I’ve lost track. It’s been, it’s all of this beginning of the year has been quite blurry.

But I have not done therapy since I want to see September 2020. And back then, it was because of the pandemic, it had to only be Zoom and, you know, online and just the chaos of that time. I felt like therapy was becoming a source of stress and not a helpful tool. So I decided to take a break and have been touching base with myself ever since.

Like, do I need to go back to therapy?

No.

Do I need to go back to therapy?

No.

The fires happened.

I was like, do I need to go back to therapy?

And my whole soul was like, YES.

So, all right, let’s do some catching up.

The kids, we had wonderful holidays.

We went to Nebraska for Christmas.

Oh, well, oh my gosh, I used the word “wonderful” lightly there.

We had good holidays.

Everyone was sick, though.

So, we got, we went to Nebraska. We went the day after school ended. So, it’s the Saturday before Christmas. And we land. We took two flights because of the time of year. Nathan wanted to avoid LAX. That’s Los Angeles’ major airport. And it’s just, it’s a situation you should avoid at all costs. And we decided it would be better to take a connecting flight. So, we flew through Phoenix from an airport closer to us. And we left the Los Angeles area with two healthy children. And by the time we landed in Phoenix, I had a sick daughter.

She had like, her cheeks were just like rosy red on fire, and she was irritable and I had to like find painkiller and fever reducer medicine for her. And, you know, I’m sure there were so many people looking at us as we get on the next flight. I mean, we had no choice. And looking at like, who is this, you know, evil one, bringing the sick child onto the plane? But it was like, I had a healthy child two hours ago.

So, here we are.

So, we each took turns getting sick in Nebraska.

So, the holidays were good, and it was, you know, nice to experience them Nebraska style. That was the first time the kids ever did Christmas there. But also, I’m not gonna be rushing to do it again, because I discovered that traveling for Christmas with kids, especially when you have a younger child who still wants to believe in Santa, I don’t know that he believes in Mr. Big Red, but he wants to. And it was just so much more work than I imagined, because we went for Thanksgiving two years ago, and it was great and easy. So I think Thanksgiving is the holiday I like to travel for. Not so much Christmas. Christmas, there’s a lot of magic to accomplish. And if you throw in a trip, it just becomes harder.

[hi, this is Courtney here. I’m learning how to create transcripts for my podcast. I thought I should clean things up and create paragraphs but wow. That takes forever. So I’ve learned my lesson and I’m just going to release my perfectionism — deep breaths, Courtney, deep breaths — and leave the transcripts in the format that Apple creates]

And then if everyone gets sick, oh my God.

So we, you know, the kids returned to school Monday, January 6, and everyone was once again healthy, so that was nice.

And then Tuesday, January 7, they go to school.

It was super windy.

It’s these winds that we call the Santa Anas.

They’re also sometimes referred to as the devil winds.

If you live in the LA area, you talk about the Santa Anas.

They’re these strong, extremely dry winds.

There’s a fancy word for it that I’ve learned.

I don’t know that I could pronounce it, katabotic winds.

And these are winds that happen, that they, wait, I looked it up.

What is a katabatic wind?

It’s a down slope wind caused by the flow of an elevated high density air mass.

Okay, that was a little more science than I think you guys signed up for when you listen to this episode.

Let’s just say it was super windy that Tuesday morning.

I played tennis on Tuesday morning.

I’ve been taking a tennis class for over a year now, and I actually called because it was so windy.

I was wondering, like, are they going to cancel?

And no, they were still doing lessons, but several people decided to skip, and I went and it was fun. [wow, reading a transcript of my podcast is some next level cringe]

I was there, and my friends and I, we were just cracking up, because you’d have a tennis ball, and it would be on, like, a normal trajectory coming towards you, and then, like, a gust would come, and it would just do a 90-degree turn, or there’d be a blast, and all the balls on the ground would just go, like, you know, like, skittling along the ground, and, like, they were all…

It was very easy to clean up balls, because, you know, the teacher has, like, probably a couple hundred balls, and then we have to clean them up whenever we finish using all of them.

And then, you know, they’re all around the courts.

They were all being blown into just one corner, like little sheep herded in there.

And so it was fun.

It was a cool memory.

And I remember thinking, like, I just, so long as there isn’t a fire, these winds will be okay.

People were nervous about the winds, though.

My mom sent a photo at some point in the morning of dark clouds to a bunch of, like, you know, a family group text, and said, I’m scared.

But it didn’t register with me that the photo she sent was of smoke, because January is not fire season in Los Angeles.

If she’d sent me that same photo in, like, September or October, I would have been like, oh my God, there’s a fire.

Where’s the fire?

Do you guys need to evacuate?

But I didn’t even respond, because I thought it was just like rainy storm clouds.

And I’m like, what’s the big deal?

Like, yes, it’s windy and clouds are moving around, but like, we can handle a little rain.

But they weren’t rain clouds, and it hadn’t rained yet here, which was also weird.

Like, the kids play soccer in the fall and early winter, and there’s usually one game each season, or a couple of practices that get canceled because of rain.

And we didn’t have any rain cancellations for anything, and it hadn’t rained over Christmas break, so everything was very dry.

And later that day, like early afternoon, I find out from people texting, like, have you heard about the fire?

That like, oh, I didn’t realize it was a fire.

But that there was a fire, and that what my mom had sent me was smoke, not rain clouds.

And that this fire had started in the Pacific Palisades, which is the town that I grew up in most of my childhood.

We moved there when I was like five years old, and then my parents stayed there until I was in college.

Then they moved for, no, they stayed there through college.

They just moved to a different place when I was in college.

When I was in law school, they moved to a different part of Los Angeles and lived there for four years.

And then they decided they missed the Palisades, so they moved back.

So since I was five, so for the past 41 years, my parents have lived in the Palisades, which was the exception of four years, a four-year stint.

But they had bought a house in the Palisades 20 years ago, and they’ve been living in that house for the past 20 years since I was about 25, 26.

How old am I now?

I think I’m 46.

I have to do the math sometimes.

So the fire had started in a part of the Palisades called the Highlands, which is a distant part from where my parents lived.

My parents live in like this, lived, oh my God, I still have to get used to this past tense.

Their house was in a very central part of the Palisades.

They call the village, it’s like their downtown area.

It’s not a downtown.

It’s like some shops and restaurants.

Not like, I think of downtown as downtown LA with skyscrapers.

It’s not like that.

It’s just like a town downtown.

And they lived in walking distance of that, a few blocks away.

And so the fire had started.

I’d have to look it up, but it was several, it was, I want to say multiple miles away, at such a distance that I was like, well, like, it’s going to burn like 10 houses there.

Because it’s a very secluded neighborhood that was built when I was a kid, after the main part of the Palisades had been born.

It was just like the town was expanding.

And so they built these more remote houses up on these, like, these highlands.

And they’re not part, they’re like a 10-minute drive from the main part of the Palisades.

So the fire had started there, and I didn’t think my parents were in any sort of danger.

They were so far away, there was no way the flames would reach them.

And when they told me they were getting ready to evacuate, I asked if it was mandatory or suggested because, and I thought there was a realistic possibility that it wasn’t either.

Because the tiers of evacuation here will go mandatory.

You have to evacuate or give up.

Like 911 will not help you.

And then there’s recommended, which usually comes with the explanation of, if you have young children or you have farm animals, like horses, you should start evacuating.

Don’t wait for the last minute.

And then there’s just no evacuation order.

You’re just deciding that you should evacuate.

So I thought there was a good chance that they were just really nervous and anxious.

And they were just evacuating because they’d heard of a few people evacuating.

Or maybe they were just meaning the highlands, the distant part of the Palisades was evacuating.

But they told me that, no, it was a mandatory evacuation.

And so I start watching the news.

Sorry, we’re going to do the obligatory chair adjustment, the mid, you know, can’t sit still in one position.

Okay.

So I start watching the news and I can just hear reports.

And the fire, people were leaving the highlands and there’s just one road to get out of there.

And people were getting out of their cars.

And because like branches on fire were like, the winds were so strong that people like their cars were setting on fire and they were getting out and running for their lives.

So that’s when my adrenaline kicked up a few notches and was like, oh, this is some real stuff going on.

And my parents and sister decided that they would evacuate with their dogs to Pasadena, because I’m on, you know, Pasadena is, and the Palisades are both in Los Angeles County, but on opposite sides of the county.

And that would be like really as far from the fires as you could get and stay within Los Angeles County.

And they, you know, were like, well, we could come near you and they can visit us.

And we’d just have a couple of, you know, silly day adventures before they could go home.

Except that’s not how it went.

So they left the Palisades in one car.

That’s how, to them, unserious it was.

They left my sister’s car at my parents’ house because they thought it was better for them all to stay together and for my sister to drive.

And I remember hearing where they, you know, them like sending a text or saying like, we’re at this part of the freeway and we’re just stuck in traffic.

And I remember like my whole body just relaxing because I knew like, okay, they are so far away.

Like they’re okay because the Palisades is, it’s a town built like right next to, it’s a beach town.

It’s built next to the Pacific Ocean.

So there’s only, and then, so on one side you have the ocean that’s on the west, and on the east side, you have mountains without roads.

Like there are these protected mountains, the Santa Monica Mountains.

So there’s really only one, like a couple of ways out of town.

You can get yourself down to PCH, the Pacific Coast Highway, and that will take you to like Santa Monica and the freeways.

Or you can take Sunset Boulevard, and that kind of is a long, curvy road that takes you past OJ.

Simpson’s house.

And Nathan and I were just watching an OJ.

Simpson documentary, so I have them on the mind.

And that takes you to another major freeway.

But it’s not like where we live, in our neighborhood in Pasadena, if we had to evacuate, we can go in so many different directions.

We do have mountains to the north of us, but every other direction, we can go, and there’s even still some room to the north.

So there’s just so many ways for us to leave this part, like our area.

There’s not a lot of ways for them to leave.

So once I knew that there were evacuations and they were mandatory, and people are getting out of their cars, running for their lives, that was a little scary, because I’m like, how fast can they evacuate this many people out of the Palisades?

But then I heard that they were out, and they were on their way to this nice hotel in Pasadena that was taking dogs.

So I was feeling a little like, okay, all right, we can get through this.

And then a little, I think about 6:30 PM.

So it’s fully dark at this point.

One of my good friends sends a photo of a fire that she could see from her son’s bedroom.

And it was, it was huge.

And I look up the, I’m like, that’s really close to my house, because this friend’s really close to me.

And I looked it up and I’m like, that is a fire like 1.1 and a half miles from my house.

And, you know, me and my few friends were all texting on this group chain and like, should I be packing in there?

And another friend’s like, I’m packing now.

Like you need to start.

And I felt like it was like I should, like I was just sort of panicking and like had adrenaline going because my parents had to evacuate.

But I started secretly packing so as not to alarm the kids.

I was dazed, only taking it like half seriously.

Like, this isn’t really happening, is it?

And then Nathan went outside to our front yard and he could see the fire in the distance.

And he came back inside, found me and said, we need to leave.

So I went from secretly packing to just really packing.

And I, our suitcases are kept.

And we have a basement, it’s called a California basement.

So it’s downstairs and it’s only accessible by an outside staircase.

And it’s dark and the wind, it is howling like Wizard of Oz, like a tornado is coming.

It was and I thought, like, should I go downstairs and get the suitcase?

And I didn’t feel safe doing it.

I was like, so I was just just grabbing plastic bags from the grocery store and stuffing two days of clothes for me, two days of clothes for each of the kids.

The kids went and packed a bag with like their iPads and then they each grabbed so many stuffed animals.

That’s that was their go to.

They’re like, are stuffed animals?

And, you know, I grabbed some prescription medicines and we packed all a bunch of pillows and stuff into both cars because we didn’t know if we were going to get a hotel room at that point because you already had the Palisades evacuating.

And that is a lot of people.

I should have looked up numbers before, but a lot of people had evacuated the Palisades like, okay, we’re just going to do this in real time.

Go into the, my old friend Google.

Oh, God, this is going to be dark.

Is it going to say what the population of the Palisades was?

Population of Pacific Palisades, because right now the population is like zero.

Okay, 23,159 in 2021.

That’s a lot of people who had, like, you know, were filling up hotel rooms.

So I didn’t know if we were going to find a hotel room.

So we were leaving with some pillows, and I think the kids grabbed, oh, they grabbed, like, their quilts that their great-grandma made them.

And I grabbed a few art pieces that the kids made.

There was not, I keep a lot of their art was in our garage, in like a bin, but our garage is not attached to the house.

And the wind was that bad, and it was hot.

Like, the heat from the wildfire was coming down to us, and stuff was flying through the air.

And I was taking stuff out to the car, and just doing that felt dangerous.

There was so much, like, chaff and grit, and, like, twigs and leaves and stuff, and it was getting in my eyes.

And my eyes hurt after this for days.

It felt like there was, like, stuff stuck under the eyelids.

So, Nathan has this idea that we should go to his office and hunker down there for a few hours.

And I’m like, we’re just, we’re going to a hotel.

We’re not spending the night here.

There is a wildfire.

And you can see the news about the Palisades, and you see, like, the progress the fire is making.

It’s like, that fire is moving fast.

This fire is going to move fast.

I’m not, I can’t sleep here, because we might never have to evacuate.

We never did.

We were under advisement.

But we were two blocks from a mandatory evacuation zone.

And we’re like, we don’t know which way this is going.

We will not be able to sleep.

We will sleep in fitful 20-minute bursts.

So, I was like, let’s just go to a hotel.

And I call my dad, and he was able to go to the…

And I told him, I’m like, funny thing, there’s now a fire, and we’re getting ready to leave.

And he’s like, oh my God.

And I’m like, I can’t call…

Like, the hotel’s not picking up because they’re so overwhelmed.

So, he was able to go downstairs, go to the lobby, and book two rooms for us.

So, we get the kids into our cars, and Julian’s driving with me, and Pippa’s driving with Nathan.

And it was like the most surreal, like, hour, one of the most surreal hours of my life.

Like, just something out of a movie, like a natural disaster movie.

It is windy.

That wind is hot.

And the air has, it’s night, but the air has this eerie, orangey glow from, like, the wildfire.

Cars are, so we get out from, like, our little neighborhood and to, like, a main street that I’m gonna take.

And it’s after eight at night.

And at that, and I’ve been out at that time of night.

And the streets, Pasadena, it is not Manhattan.

The streets are very quiet at that time of night.

And there is a steady stream of cars driving south, away from the fires, away from the mountains.

I mean, it is just like, you could see the evacuation happening.

So many cars fleeing the fire.

And, you know, we just, we didn’t know how it would progress.

And I mean, I looked at my home, pulling out of the driveway, was like, I don’t know if I brought the right things.

I don’t know what I forgot.

And I don’t know if this is going to be here in the morning.

And we, you know, so we, I’m driving with Julian.

There’s no music on.

He’s like, can we play music?

I’m like, absolutely not.

I have to focus because there’s stuff flying around in the air.

The car keeps getting hit with twigs and pebbles.

Trees are down, branches just everywhere.

And it felt almost more dangerous to be out driving in the wind in the car than hunkered down at home.

And we get to the hotel, but, or we get to, like, we know we’re within distance of the hotel, but there’s a huge backup of traffic.

And Nathan figures out, he’s a little ahead of me, that a tree must have fallen and was completely blocking the street.

So I’m able to do a U-turn, and I go on to, like, a darkened side street, and I’m about to, like, I’m making a left turn to, like, continue driving towards the hotel, and my headlights immediately show, and all the lights are down, like, so there’s no street lights, and I suddenly illuminate a huge tree that has fallen and is completely blocking the street, and I was about, like, 10 feet away from crashing into it.

So, you know, a quick braking job, backing up, and then weaving my way down other side streets, just like that I don’t know, but that I’m like, I know the hotel’s in this direction.

So we managed to get around whatever tree had fallen and blocked the street, and there’s now a huge traffic jam to get into the hotel.

This is just a random Tuesday night in January, and the hotel was not expecting an exodus of people fleeing two major wildfires.

And the only parking they have at that hotel is valet.

And they only had, you know, however many people…

They probably thought, like, they have four people working valet, and they’re like, well, we don’t need four people, but, you know, we might as well.

And they could not…

They were not flexible enough to, like, pivot and let people park their own cars, and everyone’s just doing their best.

And my dad keeps calling.

He’s like, where are you?

And I’m like, I’m here.

I can see the hotel.

But they’re moving us like, you know, it was like three blocks that took, like, over 45 minutes to travel.

And Nathan, you know, keeps calling and being like, maybe we should just go to my office and wait it out.

I’m like, no, no, we’re checked in.

My dad’s got our room keys.

We’re…

This is going to be chaos till midnight.

We just need to get the kids to the rooms.

Nathan gets in first with Pippa, and then he gives his Carta Vallee, and he walks back and he gets Julian out.

And when I eventually get my Carta Vallee, I go into that lobby and again, like a scene out of a movie, just madness.

It’s this huge, long line of people who just look, you know, scared and tired and they’re like…

And a lot of them had clearly packed like us, like plastic bags, like not their formal suitcases.

Fortunately, we got to bypass that madness, and my dad already had our keys.

So we go up to our rooms and all of us, my parents, my sister, their dogs, and then our Novak family had rooms on the same floor.

So at first, it felt like, kind of like a light-hearted adventure.

We have the kids up past their bedtimes.

They’re obviously not going to school the next day.

I think school by this point was canceled.

All right, we’re going to do a loud sip of soda now.

And we did like a little video that we sent to my brother and nieces and sister-in-law up in Northern California, because it’s like, hey, we’re out in a hotel together.

And then we get the kids settled into bed.

Nathan’s sharing a room in a bed with Julian, and I have a room in a bed with Pippa.

And I’m letting her read in bed, because I know her mind’s going to be busy like mine.

And but we’re quieting down.

So I start catching up on texts, going on social media and checking the news.

And at some point before I go to bed, my sister sees her building on the news burning.

And we hear about the progression of both fires and where it is.

And we realize that it’s just blocks from my parents’ house.

Nathan is assuring me it’s probably going to be fine.

Fires are weird.

They skip houses.

And privately, like he tells me like after this, he’s like, oh, I knew we’re fucked.

Like he just knew like when it hit the there was there’s a high school Pali High.

He’s like, he said once the news said Pali High is on fire, he just was like, it’s all going.

He just knew.

But he was like, he’s being like the supportive husband.

He’s like, my wife needs to like be able to sleep.

And I’m also getting reports about the Eaton Fire, which is the one that’s like by Pasadena.

It’s named after a canyon, which has like this beautiful hike we used to go on with a waterfall.

And, you know, and that’s gone.

So the Eaton Fire is going in multiple directions.

And we hear it’s approaching Julian’s elementary school.

So I’m exhausted, and I go to bed, 99% confident that my sister’s condo has burned to the ground.

And I had already been thinking this because when she, she was at work in downtown Los Angeles when this starts happening.

So she has to like race home, grab a few things that she’s able to grab.

And as she’s leaving her condo for the last time, she takes a picture and she sends it to me.

And I was like, that’s like, the fire’s two blocks away.

Like I had no, I was like, how did it get, and her condo’s like, just blocks from my parents.

I was like, how did it get that far that fast?

But for a while, it was like, well, maybe the way the winds are blowing, maybe the fire was gonna move in one direction that where it would get my sister’s condo, but not necessarily my parents.

But by the time I was going to bed, I felt like my sister’s condo is already burning, and my parents’ house is probably going to burn unless there’s a miracle.

And I’d also went to sleep having heard that the houses across the street from Julian’s school were on fire, and that grass at the elementary school was catching.

I’m getting more emotional about this than I thought I would.

So also, that a park near our house had grass on fire.

So somehow, I fell asleep, and I actually slept relatively well, all things considered.

Not my best night of sleep, but it was enough.

And you know, as a side note, throughout January and this month, I have been sleeping actually very well.

There was a lot of just crashing at the end of the day, utterly depleted and exhausted, but thankfully, I was able to sleep.

So I wake up that morning, and the news was just of like utter devastation that the Palisades was gone.

And I just felt this void inside of me, like a black hole in my mind and like, or in soul, and like a whole place that was so important to me throughout my life is just gone.

And the news from the Eaton Fire was not good either.

You start hearing about people, I start hearing about people I know who lost their homes.

And then I’m hearing that like 30 or 40 houses by Julian’s school had burned.

But our neighborhood, we hear is fine.

And then we found out that the one really good piece of news was that the firefighters, Julian’s elementary school is a very sprawling campus with a lot of a couple of really big field areas.

And that’s where the firefighters were able to take a stand and stop the Eaton Fire’s progression into Pasadena.

And they saved the school.

He’s there right now as I’m recording this.

So I got out of bed and I went to look outside our hotel window, and the sky was just this eerie color.

Everything hazy and, you know, orangey and just smoke filled air.

But the sky was never black.

The sky was black.

There were these fires in 2020, and the sky was black for several days.

That was like, it felt like end of time stuff then.

But with these fires, there was so much wind that most of the smoke had already been blown away.

There was this lingering smell of smoke, and there’s smoke being produced because it took them like ages to get the wildfires under control.

But the skies were never black.

The day was surreal.

We were going from hotel room to hotel room.

I was taking my parents’ and sisters’ dogs on walks, just around the hotel grounds.

I once took the dogs outside of the hotel to like, walk around the neighborhood.

And, I mean, the sidewalks are just covered in branches and twigs and leaves, and the dogs were so, you know, these are just two happy dogs who just love to walk, and they were so scared, and they were like walking as close to me as they could.

I was like, it’s all right, babies, let’s go back to the hotel.

And Nathan went to the office for just a few hours, and I remember realizing late morning, the kids were trying to watch, maybe it was even the afternoon.

The kids had been watching TV, like the hotel, which has like limited TV.

And I’m like, oh, hey, do you guys want to watch YouTube on your iPads?

And they’re like, yes, please.

And that began three weeks of unlimited YouTube, because you know what?

When your life is upended by a natural disaster, it’s like COVID, you just got to survive.

There was a lot of crying that day.

I cried the first time I woke up, and I saw how the Palisades was just destroyed.

And I got myself to the bathroom, and I just fell apart in there, because I didn’t want Pippa to see just at first how like upset I was.

They’ve seen, but you know, that first time I wanted to cry alone.

It was so just weird and awful having to tell my kids about the destruction and that my parents, their grandparents’ house was probably gone.

And I have made it a policy of not watching too much news around my kids.

They’re young.

They’re gonna get bad news most of their lives.

They don’t need, I don’t like to be immersed in the news.

Like I’ll check it a little bit in the morning and a little bit at night, but I’m not one of those people who like is checking the news constantly all day, because it just, it wears me down and it makes me anxious.

And there’s so much negativity on the news that, you know, if it bleeds, it bleeds.

And so I just, I do not watch a lot of news.

And, but I felt the need to watch the news.

And the kids were there and they felt like they needed to watch.

And there was a lot of watching the fires and seeing more fires starting throughout LA County and how the Palisades fire just seemed like wrath of God.

Like it was never going to stop.

We got videos from my parents’ block.

And people were going into the Palisades like that first day.

And we were able to see that like every house on their block had burned.

But the person who was taking the video, it ended right before they got to my parents’ house.

They had the last house on the block.

And my mom really wanted to see, we were trying to make decisions about, can we find you Airbnb or a house rental?

And my mom’s like, I don’t want to commit to something until I actually know my house is gone.

She was having a lot of trouble processing what had happened, understandably.

And she really needed that actual proof that the house was gone.

And exasperating all this was one of her next door neighbors was in like really severe denial.

And she’s like, no, no, no, I saw in that video that the hedge between our houses didn’t burn.

And if the hedge didn’t burn, the houses must not have burned.

And my mom had like really false hope about like, we’re going to be the lucky house.

We’re going to be the ones that were spared.

But then someone who was there that we, that they knew got an actual video.

And I mean, it is gone.

Just the bricks were left.

Like you see a brick chimney and a brick patio, a couple of garden things that had been made out of stone, managed to survive.

But it is completely 100% gone.

And my sister’s car, there it is.

Like you could see, like this was the garage, and there’s the car, and it is like melted.

I mean, that bad boy was beyond repair.

Never thought the fire would reach that far.

And it was a hasty evacuation, with the winds whipping it up so fast, like the mandatory evacuation order, there wasn’t a lot of time.

So, you know, my parents, they only took the one car, and that had three adults and two dogs in it.

So they didn’t take a lot.

They didn’t, you know, my childhood photos are gone.

This little red chair that my great-grandfather made when my mom was a baby, and that my mom used, like there’s a picture of my mom sitting on it on her first birthday, wearing this blue dress, and she had the chair and the dress, and she took photos of me and my sister on our first birthdays, and then of Pippa and my two nieces, and the chair and the dress are gone.

This gargoyle teapot I made in high school is gone.

It’s all gone.

For me, the photos are sad, but what are you going to do?

We decided to stay a second night in the hotel because we had the room booked, and it felt like it was getting okay to go home, but also we were still suggested evacuation in two blocks from the mandatory evacuation, and it just felt better to stay at the hotel.

And then I knew that I was there to just be an emotional support for my parents and sister.

My sister had learned, gotten confirmation earlier that her whole building basically burned and then pancaked.

I don’t know if it was four stories high, just completely obliterated.

So, I was walking the dogs around the hotel for that next night.

And one thing that was very touching was how Pippa and Julian made friends with other children who were evacuees.

And the kids were just running around.

There’s this huge lawn, and there’s this little like pretend miniature golf course like Putt-Putt.

But instead of playing with it, the kids took flags and they had like some massive game invented, and they were just outside having fun.

So it was very heartwarming to see that children could be children.

And the next day, we went home.

It didn’t feel like we were out of the woods, though.

It was still like windy and dry without rain, and the fires were still raging.

So I went to the basement, and I got a proper suitcase and packed it with clothes for me and the kids, and Nathan had a bag packed.

And then I got a bunch of the kids’ art, so much.

And I put all that in the trunk of my car.

And so I was ready to go for a long time.

Like, I think I kept the suitcase for the next week on our coffee table near the front door.

Then I went to the basement and I hunted around through, like, old folders and bins, and I found old photos that my mom had given me, and I put those in my car because we’d lost so much already.

I was like, I want to keep safe what we have.

The next three weeks were a blur.

January felt like it was a decade long, and I would say that to the kids.

They would say, this is the longest January ever, and I’m like, yeah, this is the longest decade of my life, and they loved that.

Yes, it’s the longest decade of our life.

They didn’t have school for three weeks.

We did eventually, I let them go to a day camp that was set up where they went to camp last summer.

It was indoors all day, but it just gave them something to get out of the house and play, and they were somewhere with a ping pong table and other games and lots of kids.

So just at the beginning of it, I thought, oh, I’ll take them on some outings and field trips.

And we did one trip to the aquarium, which was great.

But there was so much to do and so many ways to help my parents get, there’s just a lot to navigate.

And then there were a lot of feelings and grief.

My brain just felt like mush.

I couldn’t, I was doing what I had to do, but I didn’t have any creative energy.

Like I couldn’t have recorded this podcast episode.

And the grief would kind of come and go in waves and you’d feel like, oh, I got through it.

And then they come back.

And that’s, and I was in like a crisis mode.

And I was able to see like, oh, like, I’m okay.

Like the essence of me, I’m okay.

But I could see that my brain and my nervous system were just completely zapped and fried.

And so as the kids went back to school, I just needed to, I had to slow down for a while and get some massages and a pedicure.

And there was a lot of candy crush played in January.

I spent hours a day just sitting, playing, you know, like swiping candies left and right.

And that was about all I could handle.

And it really helped me just like slow down and rest and get out of crisis mode.

And I got, I reconnected with my therapist pretty quickly and have been in and we, you know, have talked about like getting myself out of crisis mode and how to like, just slow down and take care of my body and nervous system.

And she taught me like some vagus nerve exercises where you start with like kind of like massaging your earlobes and then holding your face and also putting your hands in front of your face and breathing.

And these like activate the nerves that can help like your nervous system reset.

And then I would put my hands in my heart and breathe really slowly.

And then I put both my hands on my stomach and breathe really slowly.

And just doing that even once a day, it would help my body like it felt like it was like slowing down and because it was like on just such panic mode from there’s just so many layers of like having to evacuate and having my parents and sister lose their homes.

And there’s been so much grief.

I mean, so many people we know.

Julian’s best friend lost his house.

And so for a while, they were staying with family farther away.

So at first, his friend and him are FaceTiming, and his friend’s like, I don’t think I’m coming back to school.

And then like right before school was going back, he’s like, I am coming back.

So they found an apartment.

So for them, that was exciting.

But other kids, their parents have just decided for whatever reason, like they couldn’t find housing here or they…

Julian’s school, house is burned across the street from it.

I see burnt houses pretty much every day when I pick them up from school.

I drop them off somewhere that I take them to…

I’ve changed the way I drop them off at school, because the street that we used to…

He goes to school.

He starts school about a half hour after Pippa.

But so what I do is I leave the house with both kids, and we drop off Pippa, and then I drive to Julian’s school.

And we sit in the car every morning with whatever book we’re reading.

We’re reading Book 5 of Percy Jackson right now.

And we read for about 20 minutes together.

And it’s, you know, it’s like a special time now for us.

And we would park by this entrance to the school that, where you would have to drive down a block with half the houses burned down, and you would be parked right next to burnt down houses.

So we had to change that.

It’s like we cannot park and just look at the remains.

It’s like looking at like, like the death of a loved one, like all these houses that are just gone.

So we park on the other side of the school and do drop off there, because we don’t have to see the houses burned down.

But when I pick them up from school, he does this after school program.

He doesn’t stay long, but I have to do it because I can’t be in two places at once and I have another child to pick up first.

So but where I pick them up from that, we have to drive down the street and we always see one or two burnt houses.

So that is just part of our life.

Seeing the burnt houses, we go down a street to go home.

The golf course burnt, like a couple of some trees and hedges burnt.

You can see how it came so close to my neighborhood.

If the winds had shifted just a little, you know, we are so lucky.

And I would say during all this, like I wish that our house had burnt down and not my parents, because my parents, you know, they’re 70 and 71.

This is not what they’re, what they wanted to be doing in their 70s, like dealing with a burnt down house.

That’s a whole, that’s future episodes.

I’ll do updates, I think, every few months, and you know, you’ll hear bits and pieces as we go along.

So I’m doing a lot better now.

I took care of myself.

I slowed down.

I got myself out of crisis mode.

I’ve been decluttering.

This week, I have been slowly getting back into, I’ve been doing, I did read a few books for my Read Around the World project in January, and the past couple of weeks, I’ve been doing my Brazilian side quest, but I’ve started writing blog posts this week.

I do a blog post for each book I read.

And I’ve been able to do that this week.

I’m like easing back into like creative work, and I’ll probably try to consciously stay slow for as long as I need to, you know?

Get, like I don’t get massages regularly.

I think I need a massage every couple of weeks.

There’s fortunately, there’s a cheap Chinese place, not far, that I love.

And I think I have to do that little extra pampering and extra self care, you know, in addition to my regular self care, just to like help myself process all this.

It’s a lot to process.

I mean, just like at the beginning of this episode, remembering that my parents lived in Pacific Palisades past tense, that so much of the Pacific Palisades is currently a past tense, that this whole world that I knew and that I frequented, and I went to like pretty much every week with my kids and where my nieces and brother and sister-in-law came, and we have so many family memories, like so much of it is gone.

Not all of it.

There are little bits that survived, but so much of it is gone.

And so much of this, you know, parts of Pasadena burned from the Eaton fire, but it’s mainly the city of Altadena, and a lot of that is gone.

And I just keep meeting people who were affected, and it’s just, you know, there’s a lot of good people.

People were so nice, like when we were at that hotel for two nights, everyone there is very like, you know, just down to earth, and everyone’s just like nice, just as seems like too trivial word, like good, like human.

Not like, like, let me try to get into this elevator before you, but everyone’s talking, how are you?

People ask you how you are first before they want to tell, you know, everyone’s like commiserating about their, you know, everyone’s a bit shell shocked too.

And it’s still, it’s a big thing to process.

And I think there’s a, I can already tell that when I get further away from this episode, in the rear view mirror, this is going to be one of those experiences that helps me become a better version of myself.

It’s like, like when I lived through postpartum depression, it was hell.

It was a nightmare.

But in the rear view mirror, looking back at postpartum depression, I could say that made me a better person.

And I’m glad it happened in hindsight because it helped me have an overall happier life.

And I could already see how it is helping me in so many ways, which I’ll talk about in future episodes.

But right now, the focus has been on just getting out of that crisis mode.

And I’m glad though, that I actually had the bandwidth to make this episode and had the quiet of the neighborhood.

This neighborhood has been so noisy because first we have, you know, we evacuate and then we’re home.

But like, you know, my parents and sister are in and out, like, you know, because they’re dealing with losing their homes.

I’ll talk about what they’re doing in, like, future episodes.

And their dogs are here a lot.

So I had the kids home from school for three weeks.

So that’s just all, you know, all next level noise.

And then as soon as I get the kids back in school, I’m like, maybe I could record an episode.

And our neighbors next door to the north get a new roof installed, which took forever and was so noisy.

And then now my neighbor to the south is having her house painted.

And it has been noisy at times because they’re using like these spray guns.

But I said, I’m going to record an episode now.

And I sat down and, oh my gosh, they have been quiet this entire time.

So I’m not going to push my luck any further.

And I’m going to wrap this episode here.

And hopefully, I can record another episode in the next week or two.

And I will not have any more natural disasters to report on.

I at least, I feel pretty good.

I think Los Angeles did its natural disaster for the year.

Oh, our hamster died this past week, and Julian’s hamster.

So that’s been another trauma that we’ve been dealing with.

I should do an episode about helping children navigate the grief of a pet.

But he’s like, he keeps saying the past couple of days, like 2025 is not off to a good start.

I’m like, no, but you know, there’s a lot of ways it could get better.

So he’s fixated on the idea of Disneyland.

I’m like, yeah, I think we’ll have to have a Disneyland trip this year.

I think we’ve earned that.

The obvious pick for Dominica, a tiny island in the Caribbean, is Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel by Jean Rhys, but I already read that book in 2018. It wasn’t my jam then, and I wasn’t interested in rereading it now, so instead, I read Island Man: A Novel by Joanne Skerrett.

Island Man begins in 2017 as Hurricane Maria makes landfall on Dominica. Hector and his estranged father Winston have recently arrived to spread his mother’s ashes, and their histories unfold against the the backdrop of Hurricane Maria’s wrath. The story shifts between the perspectives of Hector and Winston while toggling back and forth between the present and the past. This narrative structure could have been an absolute disaster, but for me, it worked 110%. (As a writer, I’m completely jealous!)

This book really had it all: complicated characters; a setting that came to life; and a skillful examination of messy issues like racism, poverty, and the immigrant experience. I’m running waaaaaay behind on my reviews, so it has been several months since I read Island Man, but as I sit here in February 2025, I can still feel the way it expanded my heart’s architecture in October 2024.

However, I’d like to get one thing off my chest: I hate the book’s cover.

I know, I know: don’t judge a book by its cover. But there are only so many hours for reading over the course of a lifetime, and I try my best to choose books I’ll love. Covers definitely affect my reading choices, and this cover screamed “intense masculine energy!” and “Tony Soprano! Minus the psychiatrist!” In other words, even though it was my pick for Dominica, I assumed I’d hate it.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. I loved this book! Yet months later, I still feel a shudder of cognitive dissonance when I look at the cover because its energy does not match my experience with the story. Skerrett has also written several romance novels, so I think the publisher wanted the cover to tell the readers, This is different! Very different! but I very nearly missed out on an excellent book because I hated the cover.

Going forward, will I completely ignore a book cover’s when choosing my next read? HELL NO. Covers are a major cue about a book’s genre and vibe, and I’m not about to discount one of the most reliable factors for choosing a book. Instead, as an author myself, I will never underestimate the power a book’s cover has over potential readers. The old adage “don’t judge a book by its cover” has plenty of wisdom — just not when it comes to books.