Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

Long before Moon Unit Zappa introduced the term to popular culture, I was a Valley girl. On sweltering summer days when the asphalt bubbled and the mercury hit 114, my friends and I practiced cannonballs at Verdugo pool in Burbank and axels at the ice-skating rink in North Hollywood. Come September, I donned a blue plaid skirt to attend Our Lady of Corvallis, a Catholic girls high school in Studio City that the nuns have since sold to a Japanese business college. When classes let out, we’d flounce in saucy clusters down to Ventura Boulevard for ice cream at Sav-on and pastries at Weby’s. That was my universe.

It’s not as if I never left the Valley. My immigrant mother took us to Europe for visits, and we spoke French at home. The house was crammed with dusty books, old 78s and antiques from my Aunt Sanya, a Russian ballerina who had danced with the Kirov. Nonetheless, I was quite provincial. Until I grew older and started going to nightclubs on Sunset and museums in the city and volunteering at a soup kitchen downtown, it never dawned on me that my private universe was part of a larger public place called Los Angeles.

It was intoxicating to discover I was connected by civic and historical bonds to this larger, more dynamic and even dangerous place. For a sheltered 16-year-old, it was liberating to realize my identity wasn’t defined solely by an arid valley of broad, flat boulevards and tract homes. That my horizons weren’t bounded by the Verdugos on the east and the Hollywood Hills to the south. I had only to drive over the hill and meld anonymously with a chaotic slipstream of humanity, leaving the suburban me behind.

Around this same time, my husband-to-be was growing up a world away in El Sereno. But we shared something before we ever met: We were both Angelenos.

I became a journalist. Navigating the corridors of City Hall for the first time, I felt overwhelmed by ghosts, a great clamoring continuum of history--the good, the savage and the ugly. Fifteen years and one career later, that sense of wonder and awe remains.

My husband and I settled in Silver Lake, which combines many of L.A.’ s best elements. Two kids later, we outgrew our hillside home and moved to the foothills of a rim city. My sister already lived here, and we found a house a block away. Family became more important than cool urban aesthetics.

Now, from my perch overlooking the Valley and the L.A. Basin, I watch the secession battle catch fire and I feel a sense of loss. Being part of a great metropolis shaped my identity and my perceptions of the world. It liberated me to become a writer and inspired me to make L.A. a character in my novels.

Despite having grown up in the Valley, it left scant imprint on my psychic landscape. I wonder about that. And I worry about the turning inward, the closing of doors, the denial of our universality that secession would bring.

L.A. is one of the world’s great cities. It exists in our collective unconscious and is embedded into our creative grid just as surely as it is in the Thomas Bros. guides stashed in our cars. Secession would deal a mortal blow to that identity, taking away something precious that has nothing to do with geography.