I grew up moving, so often that I sometimes lost count: New Jersey, Ohio, London, Maryland, Missouri, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Hong Kong by the time I was eighteen. When I left New York to join my soon-to-be husband, Billy, in Los Angeles, at the beginning of 2005, it occurred to me that I had never lived anywhere longer than seven years.
In L.A., the pattern held—from one neighborhood to another, until I started to think I had an internal atomic clock. Then, in 2019, Billy and I landed with our two children, aged seven and nine, on a breezy bluff between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains.
Technically a neighborhood of Los Angeles, Pacific Palisades stood apart, an extra ten minutes’ drive from civilization, on the last stretch of Sunset Boulevard before it plunges to the sea. In a forgetful, self-erasing city like Los Angeles, the Palisades prized its history and its sense of place.
The town was founded in the nineteen-twenties by a community of utopia-minded Methodists. An old map indicates what the early residents thought of their chosen site, with regions marked as the Land of Milk and Honey and the Garden of the Gods. The threat of fire—the dark side of those mountains and the wind—was seemingly ignored. The community’s pitch for growth was “Bring the children here.”
In the wake of the Methodists came artists: actors, musicians, magicians, and writers. The mind reader Frances Usher and her illusionist husband, Harry, lived there; Will Rogers, a prolific entertainer, liked to ride over from his ranch in the neighboring canyon. During the war, European intellectuals fleeing Nazi persecution turned the Palisades into an “American Weimar.” (Thomas Mann’s wife, Katia, wrote, “In California we saw more German writers than we had in Munich.”) The designers Ray and Charles Eames built their Mondrian-style home studio, Case Study House #8, in the Palisades. Inside, they kept a tumbleweed collected on their journey from Chicago to L.A.
In some ways, the Palisades that I moved to felt trapped in time, an eddy in the urban turbulence. (The Zip Code is more than twice as white as the rest of L.A., and older, with a quarter of its residents over the age of sixty-five.) The first time I went grocery shopping there, I was amazed to see a lady out of Cheever, in a thin quilted vest and narrow Belgian loafers, putting cottage cheese and club soda in her cart. One of the few unhoused people you ever saw was Margaret, a woman with long gray hair, who, rumor had it, slept in a Mercedes station wagon and had attended a prestigious college on the East Coast.
