The Beauty and Decay of Kate Braverman's Los Angeles

For Lit Hub, Liska Jacobs remembers the late Kate Braverman's beloved Los Angeles. "Braverman’s Los Angeles is grittier than Eve Babitz’s, lusher than Joan Didion’s," writes Jacobs. "[I]t’s the city from my early childhood, the city my parents grew up in, and their parents before them. I recognize her Los Angeles as my own." More:

...All concrete and bougainvillea and stucco sliding into the sea. It’s pre-gentrified, before Silicon Beach and Bird scooters, back when Ocean Boulevard still resembled the main drag of a sleepy beach town and not some simulacrum of Miami Beach.

If you’re unfamiliar with Braverman, imagine Jean Rhys, toes in the sand near Santa Monica Pier, trying to make sense of this little port town turned future city. How can it at once repel us and capture our imagination? “Here, where it is always some form of summer, she continues, everything grows swollen, enormous, oblivious to proportion. Early roses bloom in front yards on Carroll Canal. Honeysuckle spills over the wire fence of the house next door. Walls of red hibiscus hide windows. Lemon trees are opening up, stiff yellow.” That mix of beauty and decay, as if Braverman were a scientist examining a specimen, or an astronomer a star—it’s something only a daughter of Los Angeles can appreciate.

Those who grow up here have a complex about doing so. Insecure and self-conscious, we’re aware of the stereotypes. We’ve heard it before. This is a city with no center, a pretend town—a greenscreen, a backdrop for more illustrious cities back East. Devoid of culture, devoid of art, a cement jungle with congested freeways and a polluted sea. Blah, blah, blah. It’s a tired formula from the last century, but one Braverman wrestled with...

Read the full piece at Lit Hub.