Sunday Edition: How Much Time Do You Spend Remembering?

My week in Los Angeles.

The Sunday Edition is Tuesday’s little sister—off-the-cuff updates I’d bring up over a coffee catch-up with a friend.

How much time do you spend remembering? Pausing for long enough to think about all of the people you’ve been?

I finished writing Tuesday’s post while parked in my aunt’s driveway in Los Angeles. Her home is one of the few places I can return to that remains completely unchanged from my childhood—there’s the same photo of my grandmother and me on her refrigerator held by the same apple magnet, vintage Roseville pottery lining the shelves, and teetering stacks of books; evidence of a family of readers. Her yard, I’m sure, still holds plastic Easter eggs from the massive hunts she put on for us, three decades ago.

Issue #245: When You Get the Message, Hang Up the Phone

Each time I return to L.A., the city I spent my childhood and most of my twenties in, I’m overwhelmed by memories—a sensation that felt particularly poignant in the shadow of this week’s post, where I wrote, “It always feels better to fill fresh pages than to reread the old ones.” The three days I spent in L.A. this week were all about rereading old pages, as I mined memories to research the novel I’m working on, a portion of which takes place in L.A. during the summer of 2013, a summer I spent interning for the then-brand new L.A. Review of Books. I wanted to remember how it feels to run along the bluffs in Santa Monica, to sit in traffic on the way to dinner at a friend’s, and wake up to the cacophony of morning doves, crows, and either traffic or leaf blowers, depending on the fanciness of the neighborhood. The visit unearthed countless memories I hadn’t thought of in years.

On the phone with my boyfriend a few days later, I watched the sun set over the Sierras from my campsite two hours outside of the city as he remarked, “I imagine people used to spend a lot more time remembering. It’s so counter to the Capitalism that urges us to ‘live in the moment,’ but the moment is always about locating yourself in the broad context of your life.” I thought of the first time I camped on my own—a brief, 24-hour escape from L.A. to a goat farm in the hills about Altadena, where I spent the entire time so anxious to sit with my thoughts that I distracted myself with an unending stream of Radiolab episodes. As I write this, my only visitor in days a deer that’s lazily grazing the sagebrush around my van, I’m struck by how many people I’ve been since I lived in L.A. How different I am now, how much braver and sure of myself. How good it feels to take time to reflect and remember and recognize how far I’ve come.

And with that, here are a few highlights and recommendations from my week, including:

• The workout class I attend every time I’m in L.A.

• My best bites in L.A., plus an incredibly simple and satisfying vegan dinner

• The book I devoured before I watch the show

• How I reset my nervous system after the city and a spot-on Tarot pull…