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By Root 408 0

maybe, that you could go insane just taking care of them, especially if you never had any money for an occasional babysitter or something. But other than going insane or being suicidal, I thought marriage and kids was probably a good thing. I didn’t want to get married because I was worried anyone in my family might think it was important, which my dad definitely did. I wanted it spontaneously, after the nausea cleared, because I wanted to tell everyone I knew the good news, to celebrate. Mom’s death was about large, complicated emotions, with grim specifics, and no one in the family wanted to do anything public. Which I understood. But, the way I saw it, my last family had just ended so sadly, and if Nick and I were truly happy about this family, which we were, why would I want to be discreet about it?

Trying to love L.A., as Nick and Randy Newman did, wasn’t going as well. At a movie, a man in the aisle in front of me was eating not popcorn I noticed, but a bag of raw spinach. And unlike everyone else, I was just not that impressed with sunshine. It was okay, it was fine, yes, of course it was lovely at the right time. But blazing, nonstop, meaningless sun that washed out everything wasn’t beautiful to me and I couldn’t get away from it. Sometimes I just got so mad at the sun I yelled, which made me look insane. Nick didn’t understand why I was so incensed that it was sunny all the time.

“Well, you must miss your friends but you can’t beat the weather!” a stranger said to me at a coffee shop.

“Yeah, I guess.” And then I said it. “I don’t love it, the weather.”

I got that look, the one that said, Wow, you’re so . . . toxic or negative or angry. Like that was a bad thing.

In my mind, L.A. was not a place to grieve. It was just too sunny. You can’t mourn your mother in eyeball-scorching sunshine. Also, when you’re trying to feel the end of someone, it’s appalling to be sitting next to fifty-year-olds in coffee shops who are wearing pink Vans sneakers and red skinny jeans and T-shirts that say things like “You Can’t Make Me.”

I was so used to people in New York asking, “What do you do?” that when people in Los Angeles would look at my pregnant belly and ask, “When are you due?” I would reflexively answer, “I’m a writer.” I discovered people in L.A. don’t want to be judged by what they do. People here are all human beings, not “human doings.” Turns out I liked human doings better.

I couldn’t grasp that real writers live in Los Angeles. I actually called my old writing teacher and asked, “Do you think I could write a book in L.A.?” And he said, “People have done it, you know.”

Moving across the country, for all my derring-do onstage and in life, was totally against my character. I was a New Yorker, and if you are a real New Yorker, you don’t leave. You want to leave all the time but you don’t. That’s something fake New Yorkers do. The same way that if you’re really part of a family, you don’t leave it. To leave the family physically felt more drastic. Like leaving a self behind. What getting sober felt like. Not that I planned on being a Californian. But I did have to get rid of my tear-jerkingly cheap Park Slope share.

On a quick trip back East to pack up my old apartment I told Nick I needed more time to box things up and that he should go back to L.A. and I’d meet him back there in a day or so. He looked at me and said, “I’m not going back to L.A. without you.” The mixture of devotion and mistrust was touching. He got me. He knew I loved him and our unborn child. He also knew how much I loved the hot-and-sour soup at the corner of Sixth and Union.

I insisted that we spend the last trimester in New York, where we would get married and I would give birth a month later, otherwise who the hell was going to visit me in the hospital afterward? Nick complied and we crowded into the Brooklyn apartment with our subletter. I bought the 1971 embryology sleeper From Conception to Birth: The Drama of Life’s Beginnings at one of my favorite secondhand bookstores, Heights Books on Montague Street. According to the authors, intelligence