There was a time, not too long ago, when you might have heard people say that Los Angeles was, well, anti-literary. Sure, many writers had at one time or another called the place home – Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion leap to mind. But the likes of Susan Sontag beat a path to the east coast as soon as they could. F Scott Fitzgerald felt ruined by Hollywood, and Dorothy Parker rather hated the place too. Maybe Fran Lebowitz said it best when she wrote: “The chief products of Los Angeles are novelizations, salad, gameshow hosts, points, muscle tone, mini-series and rewrites.”
What there is of a literary scene in Los Angeles still resents this lingering bad reputation. Everyone loves it here, or at least they are very performative about loving it here, as they showed this past weekend at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. “I’ve gone to many, many books festivals in many, many cities,” the thriller writer and Bosch creator Michael Connelly said on Sunday, settling in for a chat with his Amazon show’s lead, actor Titus Welliver. “And it’s not just because I’m at home: this is the best books festival.”
The Festival of Books is indeed a well-oiled machine, one which leaves most of the other literary festivals in America, including vaunted Brooklyn’s, in the dust. It works so well because it pairs serious literary panels, some of which can be less than scintillating, with actual entertainers. Things were tamer this weekend than last year, when to punctuate a reading and a conversation about his memoir, Billy Idol picked up a guitar and broke into Rebel Yell.
This year there were no impromptu musical performances, at least that I saw. But one can spend the entire festival within a thousand-foot radius of a marquee name, if that’s what you’re into, on the side of attending panels like Bellow biographer James Atlas. At one point he went into rapture about the footnotes in one of the other panelist’s books. “I mean, look at these, they’re beautiful,” he said, holding up the tome.
Step outside of such events, and there you could find the likes of cookery writer Padma Lakshmi, talking about her memoir, Love, Loss and What We Ate, and citing MFK Fisher as an influence. There she was, too, being unnecessarily generous about her ex-husband Salman Rushdie, considering what he wrote about her. “It was a very long, very passionate, very serious relationship,” she said. The interviewer immediately moved on to her next relationship, perhaps instructed not to press for further detail.
And there was Charlotte Rae. She has faded from view since The Facts of Life went off the air – though she did make a recent cameo at Dancing with the Stars. But she was a featured speaker because she recently released a memoir, unimaginatively entitled The Facts of My Life. It is published by a small ebooks outfit in Los Angeles, is co-written with her son Larry Strauss, and begins somewhat in medias res, with Rae rescuing her younger son Andy from the psych ward at Bellevue hospital in New York.
Taye Diggs appeared on the children’s stage to read a picture book he published called Mixed Me. He wrote it, he said, for his son with Idina Menzel, Walker Nathaniel Diggs. The book is about, he said, “what I would like to call self-esteem, self-love, and self-awareness”. He read for just under four minutes before hustling offstage again to sit at the signing booth. I am not sure he smiled once.
Marcia Clark, fresh off a spate of publicity from FX’s fresh look at The People v OJ Simpson, was the star of a panel on crime fiction. “Marcia, I don’t know just what you were doing before you became a writer,” the moderator joked. Clark, who speaks very quckly and self-assuredly, said she’d always wanted to be a crime writer and that she’d always been obsessed with crime from the time she was four years old.
She said she had been particularly inspired by Meyer Levin’s Compulsion, a novelization of the 1924 Leopold and Loeb murders in Chicago, now long out of print. Clark read it at the age of nine. She wasn’t sure she could have made a living writing (“I do like to live indoors”), so she became a lawyer instead. And although her notoriety might have made it seem like she would have an easy time getting published, she was emphatic that it wasn’t so easy. There were other manuscripts before her first book came to her, she said, but “the other books found their way to the fireplace, where they really served a better purpose”.
Even the writers appearing who had a little more literary street cred seemed to be in a show business mood. At a talk with Joyce Carol Oates, radio host Michael Silverblatt – who hosts a long, serious interview show called Bookworm on KCRW – first dissed every interviewer who does not read the book before an interview, then mysteriously decided to talk about how photogenic Oates is.
“Joyce has had an extraordinary career in photographs. She once had herself photographed as Emily Dickinson, and there are many special photographs,” Silverblatt said. Then he paused, seeming to realize he needed a question: “I wanted to ask you about your relationship to image and beauty.”
Oates, for her part, seemed embarrassed. It was the New York Times magazine’s idea to have the Dickinson photograph done, and she found both the execution and the result ridiculous. “I mean, it sort of looks like me and it sort of looks like Emily Dickinson, and it’s one of the things I don’t even want to think about.”
That said, the question loosened her up quite a bit. Later, when asked about how much she writes, Oates said: “I wish it was more!” She is, as of this writing, the author of 43 novels (with a 44th to be released in the summer) and 38 short story collections. And that’s just counting the ones she wrote under her own name.
As you might suspect, the star talks are always solidly attended, the panels of literary writers often less so. Sometimes this seems deserved; naming no names, there are any number of book writers who aren’t terribly suited for public appearances. Ask them about their books and they’ll mumble, or else recite the speech they have given at any number of book tour appearances.
There are of course exceptions, authors whose wit makes them rival the entertainers. During a panel on historical fiction, Stewart O’Nan talked about the people who would always consider themselves greater experts on the matter at hand than the author. His novel, West of Sunset, chronicles the last days of F Scott Fitzgerald, but still he would encounter people who would insist: “That’s not Scott Fitzgerald. I know Scott Fitzgerald. I served with Scott Fitzgerald.”
And then, too, there were the actors whose wit sometimes failed them. Welliver, an actor I love, had a bit of trouble articulating what he related to in his character. He kept returning to the cliches of his trade: “He’s just very human,” Welliver said, over and over again, trying to articulate what had brought him to Bosch. But he managed a good line early on: “Obviously this is a group of literate people,” he said, “so you know what ‘antihero’ means. It’s not something that you clean a hero with.” Which suggests that Los Angeles certainly understands one thing about books: flattery will get you everywhere with an audience that considers itself literary.
