It started with Hanukkah. When she was three, my first daughter came home from pre-school toting a dreidel and singing a Christmas carol. My Irish Catholic/English husband shrugged and gave the top a whirl. A month and a half later, she came home, plopped a red lantern on the table, and chortled, “Gung Hay Fat Choy!” My husband raised his eyebrows. “What?” I cleared my throat. “She’s wishing us happy…
Pamela from the “resort” (perhaps I should dispel any notions of fancy luxury resort right here. The “resort” was rugged to say the least. Dusty, bare-bones housing and gritty, shared showers with water that didn’t always run hot and threadbare towels and wild creatures, including rats and HUGE armies of ants, roaming through the rooms. Not that I knew any of that at that moment and maybe you’ve lost the…
I’ve never really been scared of things that go bump in the night. Sure, when I was little, I had the occasional paranoid conviction that something was lurking just outside my bedroom window or under my bed or in my closet. But somewhere along the way, life just ripped that fear out of me. It’s actually the scariest things that ever happened to me that have made me primarily convinced…
The other day, I was walking home from a friend’s house on a beautiful day. The cliche about L.A. is true — nobody walks, even when it’s just a few blocks, even though we’re all obsessed with exercise. Point is, this was an unusual thing to be doing. While I was walking, I looked up in the sky and saw that a plane was writing a message. I became immediately…
I’m writing this at my favorite time of day (dusk) driving through one of my favorite spots in the world – Orange County. I grew up here and cannot describe how joyous and, at the same time, peaceful I feel about being in California on the eve of my book launch. We,ve had a mini family reunion in the Hollywood Hills, complete with a coyote and a bee the size…
When I began thinking about this topic, I planned to write about Leah, my best friend from kindergarten through about third grade. Fourth? It can be difficult to determine when best friendships morph into regular old friendships, especially while looking back on those pre-pubescent years, but I’m fairly certain that by fifth grade — after Leah had transferred schools — we’d both moved on to other favorites. Then I remembered…
Oh, yikes. Are we really going to go here? I already feel like the delinquent deb — Thank God, is all I can say, for Jennifer‘s at times equally risque adventures — but is it really time to come out and confess the crimes? I’m going to skip through the drinking-related misdeeds, because who really needs to hear about how I got busted for underage drinking when I was 16…
If I hadn’t picked 12 containers of blackberries, I might not have ended up with the Dorothy Hamill-had-she-cut-her-locks-with-gardening-sheers haircut at the age of 13 (aka, the worst age to be when you suddenly find yourself possessing a disastrous haircut). It seemed like a good enough idea at the time. I was staying with my friend Ramsay at her dad’s Napa vineyard for a week and after a few days of…
I love the movies, all kinds of movies. From foreign films where you leave feeling slightly bewildered, to comedies, to action films where it is required by law to have on the screen (at any given time) something blowing up or a woman who has breasts that should be declared a national landmark. Bonus points to action films where there are busty women in the scene where stuff is blowing…
I remember my mom, an avid reader, telling me when I was little that first novels were almost always autobiographical. At that stage, I was reading lots of S.E. Hinton books and had just discovered that S.E. was, in fact, a woman. So there was a lot of time spent plenty trying to figure out where she was in the midst of all those Ponyboy’s and Sodapop’s. It’s not so…
