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Not That Nice

I’m still driving around L.A. thinking: Oh, I wish I could put that in my book. Or: Why didn’t I put that in my book? One of the problems with writing a memoir while you’re living inside your material is the constant feeling that everything is your work: a pothole, a missed garbage pick-up, a carpool lane, a Sigalert, the mayor’s bottom teeth, a dinner party where the hostess takes you on a piece-by-piece, swatch-by-swatch tour of her fabulous renovation, the inane blather of a yoga “professional.” My book took me all over the place, and into all sorts of off-limits bastions: Hollywood soirees with comedians and movie stars, fundraisers during the Schwarzenegger campaign for governor, dinners with nattering producers, the secretive headquarters of the State Water Project. In the course of writing it I entered into contracts with film location scouts, I did discovery in a hit-and-run accident in the Hollywood hills, I entered into some tacit negotiations with a stray pit bull puppy who decided to call my house home, I got naked in the sulfuric pools at Esalen up on the Big Sur coast, and I twisted myself into the fish position next to Nicole Kidman. Of course like everyone else, I had to deal at the same time with the daily grind of family and scheduling: the grocery store, the bills, dinner, the pediatrician.

So I had to weed out a lot of that normal stuff: stuff that is just the day-to-day repetitive material of living, although I also trimmed a section on my first visit to a psychic: She just didn’t have that much to say (maybe I am psychically inscrutable). And I cut a section on movie-star knitting and celebrity hobbies — how it’s fun and rewarding for a movie star or it-girl to work away herself on a hobby, but to pick up the kid from school or go to the DMV or call the dry cleaner, she needs a personal assistant. Also I trimmed a bit about my visit to a restaurant where you eat in the dark — the utter dark (the waiters were blind; I am not kidding). I went to eat in the dark with a friend, and all we could talk about — as we knocked over our glasses and scattered our fusilli and frisee — was what if there’s an earthquake? But still, I felt that these little sections, although amusing, were just not to the point.

And the point was that, incredibly, after all these years and all the visuals coming at the rest of the world on TV and in the movies, California is still exotic territory to those of us who live here but are not from here. Now, I’m used to exotic because the two places I wrote about before I came to California were Haiti and Jerusalem. So I can handle — in L.A. — the plants that look like giant genitalia and those city blocks where world architecture of three centuries is represented in a series of single-family homes on small lots.

For me, a more exotic attribute of California than the architecture or the flora, or even than coyotes and mountain lions in the hills, is the state’s insistence on niceness — a cliché, but true. A defining characteristic of Haiti and Jerusalem is certainly not courtesy. Though Jerusalemites are sometimes hospitable and Haitians are usually well brought up, random acts of kindness are not what those two nations are known for. Whereas, every day in Los Angeles, I still reel from positive and encouraging responses, from earnest rejoinders.

Of course, L.A. is also a city where cops shoot 18-month-old babies, where celebrities occasionally knock off their spouses, where whole neighborhoods downtown are filled with homeless men, women and children, and where teenaged girls walking home from school are killed by drive-by gangs — amazing that a place like this is so determined to retain its veneer of friendly kindliness. Maybe the violence is just a backdrop that helps highlight the niceness. Or vice versa … Yesterday evening, I was astonished to watch a group of people being nice to each other — even apologizing preemptively for their opinions — while discussing the latest crisis in the Middle East: You would not find such a conversation in Jerusalem or in Gaza City, or even in New York.

All this niceness has been good for me. I’m learning to say “Wow,” or “absolutely” or “you got it” instead of “yes.” And I find that doing so lowers my stress slightly. My normal stress level is known to be high because not only am I from New York, but I’m really originally from New Jersey, highest-stress state in the union. I still can’t believe it when I signal on the Hollywood freeway and the person whose lane I’m coming into slows down to let me in. The first time that happened, I said to my son, “What does that idiot think he’s doing?” And then I realized the nice fellow was just being polite. You got it.

In New Jersey, he’d try to run you off the road.

But of course niceness isn’t the be all and end all in California. California includes not only the aging hippies at Esalen (nice), and the barista-obsessed yuppies of Marin County (also pretty nice), and serious off-the-gridders in every corner of the state (more often than not, reasonably nice too) — but also Hollywood. Oh, David Geffen: he’s so nice. Hmmmm … That doesn’t spill too trippingly off the tongue. Even the ones who are known to be nice, like Ron Howard or Steven Spielberg, are maybe not quite so nice. Spielberg, for example, employs a crisis management firm, which is not something nice people generally need. But then again, Hollywood, like the Vatican, is its own country.

I’m feeling a little depressed now that I’ve finished my book — elated too (it’s over!), but sad. One problem for every writer is that a book is never, ever finished, yet there the book goes, out into the world, openly declaring itself to be done. I can look at almost any page of any book by me (or by anyone else, for that matter) and see a possible improvement. A book is like a painting in that way: In your imagination, it dazzles with its perfection. Before you write a book, it is a clear, brilliant, faceted gem, a whole elaborated, organized, and beautifully structured unique entity. Then you put it down in ink and the wretchedness sets in.

And then, after you’ve finished being wretched for a few years in front of your computer, publication begins to happen and you realize, My God! People are going to read this. (Anyway, a couple of people…) Along with the publication of any book comes an unpleasant feeling of exposure, especially with a first-person non-fiction book, and especially a book about a nice place by a person who’s not always that nice. I mean, I’m pretty friendly and bien-elevee, as the Haitians would say. But I’m just not always that nice, especially in writing.

So I try to console myself with this truth: writing is not about being polite. A writer of any value cannot afford to be too nice. (Just as any writer who says “I love to write” is not too good a writer.) You can’t, on paper, hold on to your good-girl persona, your Mr. Nice Guy, and expect to produce anything worthwhile. A writer may be a good person or a bad one, a righteously indignant person, or a true believer, or a cynic, or a baseball fan, or your best friend, but the one thing you can be sure of is that he or she will not in the end be terribly, awfully “nice.” A writer has an obligation to write as honestly as possible about the world as it is experienced. To tell the truth. Absolutely.

As a friend of mine who works in Hollywood said after reading my book: “Oh, now I know what she was thinking all that time.”