Book Report: The Los Angeles Diaries

14. James Brown, The Los Angeles Diaries: A Memoir (2003) (6/11/2020)

I don't know how I stumbled on this book, which is not the sort I usually read—a memoir, and more specifically, an "addiction memoir." But I'm glad I did. It is gorgeous, and honest, and painful, and sometimes funny, and altogether it feels very true.

The book consists of dated essays that jump around in time, starting in 1994, then going back to 1961 when the author was five and waits in the car while his mother goes to . . . set fire to an apartment building—and on like that, back and forth between his childhood and his twenties and thirties when he is a moderately successful author, unsuccessful screenwriter, floundering husband and father, and wholly committed addict to drink and drugs.

What makes the book especially remarkable and moving is the lack of self-pity, the lucidity, the undercurrent of pain tempered by love and, perhaps, hope—and the language, spare and unflinching. Along the way there are suicides, broken marriages, prison terms, drunkenness, but it's all explored in something like wonder, a desire to understand what life is all about. There is a sort of melancholy to the book, but not despair.

Here's a passage by way of example:

A few years back I wrote a novel that uses this memory [of dancing, at six or seven years of age, to Patsy Cline's "Crazy" with his father in the kitchen] as its heart. I've mined the territory before, if not this particular moment then something like it, and I've done it so often that I find myself confusing what actually happened with how I imagine it. In trying to sort between autobiography and fiction, or invention, and then trying to put the pieces together so that they make some kind of sense, I've come to think that the truth as it occurs isn't of much use to me other than, say, as a catalyst for a story. While I'm figuring this out, I lose a couple of years writing a bad novel. I don't get through it and that's a good thing, because if I hadn't given up I would have lost more time. And I worry about time.
 The problem, at least one of them, what that I was being dishonest with myself in the worst, most shameful way. I was writing about people and events and places that I didn't fully understand, and I wasn't good enough at it for it not to show. So I start another book, one that makes me see past what I think actually occurred, to what hasn't but should have according to that thing I imagine called plot. And the writer's obsession, as I also come to understand, suggests something other than limitation or theme, that as storytellers we basically spend our lives telling the same story over and over, only we do it from different angles.
 The trick is disguising it, so it doesn't seem the same.
 The trick is how well you can keep doing it, not once or twice, but hundreds of times, page after page, with one real detail after another. The hardest part is to make it appear seamless and vivid in the end as if it all came naturally.
 Like magic.
 Like you don't have to think. Like it really couldn't have happened any other way.

In a later essay, he writes about going to live with his father for a few short years, when he was fourteen:

We live in a rented house on the east side, the poor side of San Jose, and for the first month after I arrive, until we can afford another bed, I sleep with my father. At night he tells me stories about when he was growing up in the backwoods of Oregon and how he used to hunt for deer and fish for salmon. He tells me about the years he worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad and laid tracks through mountainous terrain that up until then no white man had ever seen. He tells me about the Cherokee, how he admired and respected their love of nature, and he teaches me to count to ten in their language. . . . My father has a talent for detail, and as he describes the Chetco River, the salmon leaping out of the water, the sun glinting off their backs, as he describes the mountains of his youth and the beauty of a grazing deer, I am there with him. It is real to me. It is a fine place, and I live in his stories as I will someday live in my own.
 At seventeen I will leave for college. A few years after I graduate he will die. Looking back, I see myself at fourteen in bed beside him. The room is still and dark. The kid who shoots heroin, robs and steals is getting drowsy, his father's voice slowly fading, and when I fall asleep and wake up thirty years later as a middle-aged man, I realize that this brief time I spent with my father has much to do with why I am still here and my brother and sister are not.

There are two more books in Brown's trilogy of memoirs, This River and Apology to the Young Addict, the latter recently published. I have both of them. I will be reading them. But not right away. I want to keep savoring The L.A. Diaries for a little while longer.

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Today's Covid-19 numbers for Monterey County: confirmed cases, 865, up 51 since yesterday, 74 since I last posted; hospitalizations, 81, up 2; fatalities remain at 11.

Stay safe. Be well.