D.J. Waldie is a cultural historian, memoirist and translator. In books, essays and online commentary, he has sought to frame his suburban experience as a search for a sense of place. He is the author of several books, including “Becoming Los Angeles: Myth, Memory, and a Sense of Place” and “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir.” He is a recipient of the California Book Award, the Whiting Writers Award, and the Dale Prize for Urban and Regional Planning. Follow him @DJWaldie. His essay titled “Who Are We?” appeared in the spring 2019 issue of LMU Magazine. Waldie was interviewed via email by Editor Joseph Wakelee-Lynch.
When you talk or write about the Los Angeles area, you do so with great affection. What’s the source of your love for Los Angeles?
I wanted to fall in love with Los Angeles and I did, by reading its history, walking its neighborhoods, eating at its local joints, and being receptive to the qualities of its light and air. I didn’t want to be an exile here, as so many Angelenos seem to be, so I put myself in the company of its novelists and poets.
Your work is a refutation of the false stereotype of Los Angeles that describes the area as a place where “there is no there there.” Do you think of your work in that way?
Los Angeles only seems insubstantial. It’s not. I labor to drag into view memories that feel like something, that resist forgetfulness. We cannot make our home in Los Angeles and sustain communities there unless, in the words of Michel de Certeau S.J., we “awaken the stories that sleep in the streets.”
What’s your latest L.A. project?
I’ve another book at Angel City Press. It’s the third collection of essays in a trilogy of books about acquiring “a sense of place” in my hometown of Lakewood and in Los Angeles (a place not confined to its official borders). The classical elements — earth, water, air, and fire — give the book its structure.
If you are asked by a recent transplant to L.A., “Which two books must I read to begin to understand Los Angeles?” how would you answer?
Although it was published in 1946, “Southern California: An Island on the Land” by Carey McWilliams is still the book a new Angeleno needs to read first. McWilliams lays out the guilty history behind all the bright myths of Los Angeles. “Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles” by Rosecrans Baldwin brings many of these contradictions up to date. (I’d also slip newcomers a copy of the novel “Mildred Pierce” by James M. Cain to show them the awful yearning that has been so much a part of Los Angeles.)
