I Did It: My Book Is Out!

A poetry collection about dating badly, getting older, trying to stay sane, grieving people who are still alive, and occasionally finding beauty in the middle of an utterly ordinary day

The book is out. In the world. On Amazon, which apparently counts as the world.

It is one of the best things I have done, and also one of the more unnerving. There is something slightly surreal about releasing something so personal and vulnerable.

I don’t call myself a poet. I never studied poetry formally. I studied journalism and comparative literature, which feels relevant and irrelevant at the same time. What I do know is that I’ve finally stopped trying to write like someone else.

That took a while.

When I was younger, I was writing through other writers. Bukowski, Nin, Miller, Hemingway, Kundera, Murakami, Millay.

Later Babitz, Didion, Sexton, Lispector, Sedaris. At different points, I copied their voice. Not intentionally. It just sort of rubbed off on me.

Even my speech does this. With some people, my accent shifts slightly. It switches from French to Southern. Not on purpose. Not in a performative way. It just happens. I’ve stopped trying to figure it out it. It’s a form of extreme mirroring.

But I have found my own voice, and that’s why it felt OK to publish it. Unapologetic and not giving two fucks. It’s actually always been there. I was just afraid to use it.

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My book was originally called Ode to LA. That felt true at the time. Then I realized there isn’t a single ode in it. I don’t even know how to write an ode! So I changed it to Take Fountain, which is both of a direction and a declaration.

“Take Fountain” is an old piece of Los Angeles advice—an instruction for getting across the city in …

A. the most efficient way
B. without losing your mind.

I like that. It also feels like the closest thing I have to a thesis: moving through a place while often feeling a tad unmoored in it.

So what is Take Fountain?

It is about Los Angeles, yes. But also about dating, and time, and the small, ordinary rituals of getting through a day. Peeling fruit. Sitting in traffic. Talking to neighbors. Making meaning out of things which on the surface aren’t terribly meaningful.

Some of it is true. As in: it really happened. Some of it is twisted and tweaked for effect. Reshaped. A few people became composites along the way. One person’s record collection or car make merged with another’s ticks and icks.

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If you’ve ever felt slightly out of place in a city you lived in for a long time, or if you’ve ever been surprised by how much can happen in an otherwise ordinary afternoon, I think you’ll understand the tone of it.

And if not, that’s okay too.

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If you’d like to read it, it’s here: