For Mental Floss, I wrote about a juicy 1930s Hollywood scandal involving Mary Astor’s Purple Diaries.
It’s one of the first Hollywood sex scandals–plus it inspired part of my novel, Right Back Where We Started From, which starts in 1930s Hollywood and has a Scarlet Diary and a controversial starlet in it.
Check out 10 Juicy Facts About Mary Astor’s Purple Diary, Old Hollywood’s Most Infamous Sex Scandal.
Late last year, I went on a quest to see the critically endangered California Condor in the wild. I wrote about the experience for Alta.
I’ve always wanted to see a California condor in the wild. It’s on a list I keep in my head of animals I’d like to glimpse in their natural habitats, which includes, in no particular order, a male moose with full antlers, a whale, a ringtailed cat, a hedgehog, a swarm of monarch butterflies, and any kind of monkey. But the California condor stands out because it came so close to extinction. When I was a kid, there were only nine wild condors left. At that point, in 1987, they were taken into captivity, and their future looked bleak. The idea that we could lose North America’s largest flying bird—a vulture with a wingspan of almost 10 feet—struck me as tragic even then.
But we didn’t lose the condor. Thanks to conservation efforts, it has made a comeback. There are now around 300 condors in the wild, most living in Central and Southern California, with smaller populations in Arizona and Utah. I kept thinking about this throughout 2020, a year filled with environmental disasters, from wildfires to melting permafrost to a worldwide pandemic caused by a mutating virus. Even as climate change bears down and some scientists say we’re entering an era of mass extinction, the preservation of the California condor shows that we can repair some environmental damage. Not that it was easy. Despite extensive time and resources spent, the condor is still critically endangered. Lead poisoning remains a threat, and the bird’s future is far from guaranteed. So I’m not sure whether my interest comes from ecological hope or an urge to see a rare creature while I can.
My neighbors cut down their tree and banished all the birds from our yard. I wrote an essay about it for Entropy.
The morning after the neighbors cut down the tree, my yard was quiet. The crows that for the last 15 years had woken me every morning like an alarm clock were gone. A few days before, when the elm tree still stood in my neighbor’s yard, I sat in the predawn light drinking coffee and watching hundreds of birds fly over my house. Crows tossed about like balls in the sky, a necklace of Canada geese flowed past my vision, and songbirds jangled in the bushes. The cacophony they made was loud and wondrous and I loved it.
Now my house rang with silence, and loneliness crept over me. As I stood by the window, avoiding at the gap in the sky where the tree used to be, I could hear the crows in the redwoods several blocks away–a party that moved houses. They had no reason to come here now.
So happy to have Right Back Where We Started From included in a spring literature round-up in The North Bay Business Journal!
For Alta Magazine, I wrote the essay Searching for Mary Austin: Life for the author of The Land of Little Rain was as hard as the inhospitable region she wrote about. Excerpt:
Right before the coronavirus quarantine, I went to the Owens Valley to learn more about Mary Austin. The Land of Little Rain, Austin’s 1903 book about the California desert, is an environmental classic rivaling the work of naturalists like John Muir. But today the essay collection, and Austin, are largely forgotten, and I found myself wondering why.
Austin was prolific, producing 34 books and more than 200 shorter works. She believed she possessed genius-level talent, but her literary legacy, as biographer Esther Lanigan Stineman puts it, “would have disappointed the writer who finally yearned for an enduring reputation as a social novelist.” Genius or not, Austin was ahead of her time when it came to feminism, racial equality, and environmentalism. The Land of Little Rain was her first and most successful book, important in its recognition of the striking austerity of the Owens Valley and the Mojave Desert. While Austin was writing it, her circumstances were as inhospitable as the environment around her. Trapped in poverty and a loveless marriage, she was geographically and spiritually isolated as she juggled caring for her disabled daughter and working full-time as a writer and teacher. She remembered that period as “long dull months of living interspersed between the few fruitful occasions when I actually came into contact with the land.” So here I was, going in early spring to that same land to see if I could better understand this complicated writer.
Recently I spoke with Carol Edgarian about her novel Vera for Alta Live. You can watch here:
And if you like that, I also spoke with Carol again on What’s The Story? (Scroll down to find her name.)
Here is my keynote for the Southern California Writers’ Conference! I tell the publishing story of my novel, Right Back Where We Started From, and lessons I learned along the way.
This Sunday, Valentine’s Day, I’m giving a keynote speech at the Southern California Writers’ Conference. It’ll be streaming on Zoom, for free. Tune in and listen at 4:30 PM (PST) on February 14th.
I’ll be telling the crazy story of Right Back Where I Started From, and how it was waylaid from publication in 2013 because of hurricanes and a school shooting. It should be fun. I hope you can make it.
LINK TO THE TALK
Meeting ID: 930 4826 0655
Passcode: 449387
This link will be live a little bit before the talk.
In the meantime, here’s more information about Southern California Writers’ Conference.
There are still slots open for all three days, including virtual keynote speeches from thriller-writer Dennis K. Crosby and Isla Morley, whose novel The Last Blue is about the blue-skinned people of Kentucky. Plus lots of craft workshops on everything from writing car chases to infusing micro-tension in your story to writing a memoir. Fun!
The book cover of RIGHT BACK WHERE WE STARTED FROM is here!
Coming May 4, 2021!
PREORDER:
AUDIBLE
PRAISE:
In Right Back Where We Started From Joy Lanzendorfer has crafted a terrific first novel, one brimming with energy, wit, and emotional resonance. Sandra Sanborn is a wonderful character, very much alive on the page. The novel captures, vividly, some of the crazier times in California’s crazy history. Highly recommended!
– Peter Orner, author of Maggie Brown & Others
Joy Lazendorfer’s thrill of a novel, Right Back Where We Started From, tells the story of an engaging young woman, eager to be discovered in 1930s Hollywood. But as she looks to the future, a letter from a man who claims to be her father, pulls her to the unknown past. This is a novel of California dreaming, from the Gold Rush to the Hollywood Hills. Lazendorfer writes with charm, style and great energy.
– Ellen Sussman, New York Times bestselling author of four novels, A Wedding in Provence, The Paradise Guest House, French Lessons and On a Night Like This.
From the California Gold Rush to the to the San Francisco earthquake, through the Great Depression and World War II, Joy Lanzendorfer artfully weaves a beautifully textured saga. Yearnings, secrets, and shame shape the lives of three generations of American women as they dare to question the rigid societal expectations that confine them to proscribed roles and stifle ambition. Gripping prose and complex and memorable characters make this shining debut novel a pleasure to read.
— Liza Nash Taylor, author of Etiquette for Runaways and the forthcoming In All Good Faith.
SUMMARY:
If misfortune hadn’t gotten in the way, Sandra Sanborn would be where she belongs—among the rich and the privileged instead of standing outside a Hollywood studio wearing a sandwich board in hopes of someone discovering her. It’s tough breaking into movies during the Great Depression, but Sandra knows that she’s destined for greatness. After all, her grandmother Vira crossed the country during the Gold Rush and established the Sanborns as one of San Francisco’s prominent families, and her mother Mabel grew up in a lavish mansion and married a wealthy rancher. Success, Sandra feels, is in her blood. All she needs is a chance to prove it.
In between failed auditions, Sandra receives a letter from a man claiming to be her real father, which calls into question everything she believes about her family history—and herself. As she tries to climb the social ladder, family secrets lurk in the background, pulling her back down. Until Sandra confronts the truth about how Vira and Mabel gained and lost their fortunes, she’ll always end up right back where she started from.
Right Back Where We Started From is a sweeping, multigenerational work of fiction that explores the lust for ambition that entered into the American consciousness during the Gold Rush and how it affected our nation’s ideas of success, failure, and the pursuit of happiness. It’s a meticulously layered saga—at once historically rich, romantic, and suspenseful—about three determined and completely unforgettable women.
***
I have a new article on LitHub, On the 19th-Century Food Writer Who Embraced Gluttony As a Virtue.
It’s about how I read The Diary of a Greedy Woman by Elizabeth Robins Pennell, which I loved… until I didn’t.
