Contemporary Authors

• California Calling: A Self-Interrogation ( memoir) Hawthorne Books (Portland, OR), 2018

• Natalie Singer Writes - https://nataliesingerwrites.com/about/

  About
  Nataliebig_histo_edgeI’m Natalie, an author, journalist, editor and content strategist. East-Coast-bred, West-Coast convert. Origin: Canadienne; currently a Seattleite via California. For a decade I built my writing skills as a reporter at newspapers around the West, learning how to tell a stories that deeply impact readers. I wrote about Mexican immigrants dying in the desert, lesbian golf tournaments, and backyard + boardroom politics at The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, Calif.; dodged falling boulders and a serial killer at a tiny newspaper in Gold Country that boasted a single Internet connection; wrote film and art reviews for the gritty San Francisco Independent (RIP); and covered growth issues, murder trials, transportation and social issues at The Seattle Times. From 2012 to 2017 I directed content and editorial strategy, helped developed social and marketing campaigns, and dreamed up creative as Executive Editor of ParentMap. I currently curate and program content on two global Microsoft websites and work as editor for the tech giant’s culture storytelling program, editing and writing content on topics ranging from artificial intelligence to global health to product development that illuminate the fascinating ways people are evolving technology and empowering one another.

  I have a bachelor’s degree in journalism and an MFA in creative writing and poetics from the University of Washington. I am an extroverted introvert and a storyteller at heart. One of my favorite things in the world (besides red velvet cupcakes) is to be in a room with a team of highly engaged, mission-driven people and drive actions for good through creativity. To keep myself under the spell of language, I write creatively on the side and my essays and stories have been published in newspapers, magazines and literary journals around the country. I am an invited guest writer for the 2017/2018 season at On the Boards Seattle, where I respond creatively to contemporary performing art and help create a bridge of dialogue between artists and the community. My memoir, California Calling, will be published in 2018 by Hawthorne Books.

  I live with my husband and daughters in Seattle, the best place in the universe and, oftentimes these days, the center of the resistance.

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  Photograph by Stuart Isett. ©2017 Stuart Isett. All rights reserved.
  I am a content strategist, managing editor, and experienced writer and writing coach. Please connect if you would like to work with me on journalistic projects, corporate and organizational storytelling, or evolving your literary writing. See my resume below (for my creative resume, look under the creative writing menu tab).

  206-390-0355 | nataliebeth@gmail.com | Twitter: @Natalie_Writes

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  Natalie Singer-Velush
  COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER ▪ STORYTELLER ▪ CONTENT STRATEGIST ▪ EDITOR ▪ AUTHOR

  I take content to the next level. I am strategic journalist and compulsive noticer who has created, directed and promoted compelling content and communications programs. When organizations need a head-turning multimedia storytelling project or highly trafficked content brand campaign ― they come to me. I have blasted off successful digital content programs and lit a match under audience engagement. With a strong foundation in journalism, I’m fluent in marketing strategies, metrics, social media, CMS and SEO. I quickly build rapport with stakeholders to successfully tell their stories in credible, exciting ways.

  My mission is to create and drive successful, one-of-a-kind content programs that showcase the inspiring and intelligent work of brands and organizations I believe in, and through this work engage audiences and motivate actions for good.

  Specialties: Chief storyteller, editorial and communications strategy, long-range and daily editorial content planning, managing content and communications teams, social media management, marketing campaigns, blogging, magazine and news publishing (digital & print), copy editing, trend-spotting.

  Topics of expertise: Technology; jobs and careers; global health; literary and performing arts; family health; data/demographics; criminal justice; education.

  EXPERIENCE
  Communications Manager | Managing Editor – Microsoft (Prowess), 2016-present
  As the Managing Editor for Microsoft’s Employer Branding team, I help drive an editorial and content strategy that showcases how employees live the Microsoft culture and future employees and curious outsiders perceive it. On our culture storytelling team, I develop, edit, and write original feature stories for internal and external audiences on topics ranging from artificial intelligence to global health advancements, and career growth to product development, that illuminate the fascinating ways people at Microsoft are evolving technology and improving the world. To ensure a robust, unique, inspiring, and ever-evolving culture story, I plan and maintain a content calendar, project manage editorial and creative workflow, and coach a team of writers, photographers, and graphic designers.

  Executive Editor, ParentMap magazine & parentmap.com, 2012-2016
  SNAPSHOT: Built a digital content program that tripled traffic across all channels in 24 months. Direct all editorial strategy and oversee owned and social media for digital and print products, including magazine, blog, email newsletters, marketing materials and corporate communications. Manage a team of editors, producers and freelance writers to deliver inspiring, trustworthy, highly trafficked content that helps experts share research and news and helps parents better navigate and enjoy their families’ journeys. Build marketing campaigns for live and social media events, lectures and book launches. Manage editorial calendar and all aspects of content discovery, production and publishing, from story assignment and editing to crafting the voice that allows ParentMap to connect with parents in a Puget Sound doctor’s office waiting room and in communities across the world.

  Responsibilities

  Set editorial program for daily website and blog content and 18 print magazine issues a year.
  Act as a key steering-level company manager to shape brand and execute strategic editorial and marketing campaigns.
  Built and manage in-house editorial and digital production team of seven and a freelance roster of 50+ writers.
  Use analytics and social media and email marketing metrics to assess and optimize content success.
  Manage editorial budget driven by KPIs and goals for product ROI.
  Direct a daily menu of digital content that includes articles, video, social and marketing material.
  Oversee search engine optimization across digital channels.
  Guide online content discovery and user experience, and select signature rotating top-level content on website.
  Manage social media channels, including content selection and promotion, partnered projects, brand campaigns and analytics review.
  Conceptualize visual design, select art and images, guide product aesthetic.
  Craft marketing content for live lectures and events, social media engagement, email newsletters, video program, media kit and special products and campaigns.
  Write highly trafficked articles and commentary on health, science and social issues topics.
  Act as a brand representative and community connector at community events, including the ParentMap-hosted Parentelligence lecture series.
  Results

  Increased digital traffic by more than 300 percent 2013-2016 across channels.
  Built a highly functional editorial calendaring process and growth-driven culture.
  Grew brand recognition via audience acquisition, conversion and retention.
  Launched a menu of new content products, including video, social media contests, and special series that have broadened engagement and generated new revenue.
  Lead a complete website redesign and rebranding to improve UI/UX and increase revenue opportunities. Serve as project manager and main liaison between design and dev team and ParentMap creative content, sales and events teams.
  Won more than 35 Parenting Media Association awards 2012-2016, including five Golds for website general excellence.
  Author, Content Strategist, Writer, Editor, Speaker, 2012-present
  I am a content strategist; freelance journalist and content creator; editorial and storytelling consultant, author; blogger; essayist; em-dash admirer.

  I report and write news and narrative profiles for freelance clients including The Seattle Times, The Washington Post, the Harvard Law Bulletin, the ACLU, and University of Washington; I have blogged at ParentMap, Huffington Post, and Mamapedia; I have worked as a content strategist for news magazines and as a legal researcher and commentator for InSession (formerly Court TV), I publish literary nonfiction essay pieces in journals and anthologies; I edit copy and content on a project basis.

  I developed “J School in a Day” workshop, which launched in 2016 with the Society of Professional Journalists Western Washington. Drawing writers, marketers, subject-matter experts, and academics from around the region, the workshop teaches the basics of journalistic storytelling from a panel of experts and helps attendees assemble their own tool kits to help tell better stories in their work.

  I developed and lead the “How to Pitch An Editor, Not Piss Her Off” workshop at media and writing conferences, universities, and organizations to help marketers and others be most effective pitching content and stories for earned media.

  I am the author of “California Calling: A Self-Interrogation,” released March 1, 2018 from Hawthorne Books. The book won First Runner Up in January 2017 for the Red Hen Press national nonfiction book contest, and I was a finalist in Fall 2016 for the Autumn House Press national book contest. I am a contributing author to the 2015 YA anthology “Love and Profanity: A Collection of True, Tortured, Wild, Hilarious, Concise, and Intense Tales of Teenage Life.”

  Jobs and Careers Columnist, The Seattle Times, 2011-2012
  Blogged weekly at The Seattle Times NWJobs Career Center Blog about sticky workplace issues, work/life balance, employee hacks, market trends and self-employment. Helped drive traffic by providing well-written, niche content infused with voice.

  News Reporter, The Seattle Times, 2002-2008
  SNAPSHOT: Nimble and organized storytelling within a fast-past, daily news publishing environment. Expertise in research methods, reporting, writing, sourcing, data analysis, social media cross-promotion and community engagement.

  > Criminal and social issues reporter
  Covered King County Superior Court, the state’s largest criminal court. Tracked and wrote content about major criminal cases and civil trials. Followed precedent-setting cases to the state Supreme Court. Covered mental-health and social issues.

  > Transportation, growth and government reporter
  Covered transportation on the Eastside of the Puget Sound area, one of the most congested regions in the West.

  Demographics and Government/Politics Reporter, The Desert Sun, 2000-2002
  Reported on immigration, the Coachella Valley’s booming Latino population, the gay and lesbian community, aging issues, low-income families and growth. Led Census 2000 coverage. Manipulated and interpreted raw data and analyzed research to find trends.

  Issues Reporter and Editorial Coordinator, San Francisco Independent, 1999-2000
  Covered public health, film, art and theater; compiled and edited arts and events calendar.

  Reporter, Union Democrat, 1999
  Covered government, the forest beat, cops and courts and general assignment at this Northern California daily newspaper.

  SERVICE
  Board member, Society of Professional Journalists Western Washington, 2015-2017

  Teacher/Mentor, Pongo Teen Writing, 2015-2016

  SKILL-BUILDING
  IN NW social media summit 2015-2017
  Doe Bay Writer’s Retreat, 2014, 2015
  Wild Mountain Writers Retreat, 2013
  Mom 2.0 conference for women in media, 2013, 2014
  MediaNEXT, 2012 and 2013
  PNWA Conference 2013-2016
  Parenting Media Association conference, 2012, 2013, 2014
  Social Media One Night Stand, 2013
  National Writers Workshop, multiple years
  Multiple Hugo House classes, Seattle
  Writers on the Sound, 2010
  Northwest Writers Conference, 2008-2010
  Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, Calif., “Law School for Journalists”
  Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism, Los Angeles, Calif.
  National Press Foundation, Washington, D.C., “Our Aging Society”
  Pew Center for Civic Journalism, Pasadena, Calif.
  Poynter Institute, St. Petersburg, Fla.
  EDUCATION
  Masters of Arts, Creative Writing, University of Washington, 2016

  Bachelor of Arts, Journalism, San Francisco State University, 2000

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• Hawthorne Books - http://hawthornebooks.com/authors/natalie-singer

  Natalie Singer is the author of the memoir CaliforniaCalling: A Self-Interrogation (Hawthorne Books, March 2018). Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in journals, magazines, and newspapers including Proximity, Lit Hub, Hypertext, Literary Mama, The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, ParentMap, Alligator Juniper, Brain, Child, Largehearted Boy, The Nervous Breakdown, The Cut, Full Grown People and the 2015 anthology Love and Profanity. Natalie has been the recipient of several awards, including the Pacific Northwest Writers Association nonfiction prize and the Alligator Juniper nonfiction prize. California Calling was first runner up for the Red Hen Press nonfiction prize and a finalist for the Autumn House Press nonfiction prize. Natalie has taught writing inside Washington State’s psychiatric facility for youth and Seattle’s juvenile detention center, and she has worked as a journalist at newspapers around the West. She is a 2017-2018 writer-in-residence at On the Boards, a contemporary performing arts collective in Seattle, where her writing responds to the season’s works and creates a conversation with the community. Natalie earned her MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from the University of Washington. Originally from Montreal, she lives in Seattle. (@Natalie_Writes)

• Parent Map - https://www.parentmap.com/author/natalie-singer-velush

  Natalie Singer-Velush
  Natalie Singer-Velush
  http://twitter.com/Natalie_Writes
  Natalie Singer-Velush used to write for newspapers and once pumped milk in the bathroom of the King County Superior Courthouse while covering a murder trial. Natalie is Canadienne via California and now lives in Seattle with her husband and two daughters. She likes cool sheets, cupcakes, tall men and obedient children. She previously served as ParentMap's executive editor.

• Proximity Magazine - http://true.proximitymagazine.org/2018/03/01/nataliesinger/

  Quoted in SidelightsL “less of a single identity than something that functions as the nucleus of a collection of interrogative energies or identities that I’ve tussled with or been subjected to. Maybe a multiple-personality identity. That said, I want to leave it open for the reader to interpret the identity as she is compelled to.” She added: “The questions I ask in the book came up from my cells, sometimes forcefully. It felt like I had been carrying them for generations. Writing them, and the answers, was instinctual but not proscriptive.”
  an interview with natalie singer
  When I first skimmed a galley of Natalie Singer’s California Calling, I felt–there’s no other word for it—spooked. I glimpsed words and phrases about California as a mythic place, about aching for it before you really know what it is, about how being there and being gone from there and longing for there are all one state of mind. These are thoughts I’ve had, too, as I negotiate and deepen my own love affair with California. It was like dreaming of a word and then having that word appear everywhere the following day. Had I written this book? No, of course not, it’s Singer’s book and Singer’s love affair. But I felt a kinship forming.

  Reading the book overwhelmed me. Its subtitle, “A Self-Interrogation,” is the first indication that it’s constructed as a series of answers to questions, and is sectioned out through the well-established stages of interrogation (as well as some stages of Singer’s own invention). But within these strategies and structures, California Calling presents itself without artifice, without hand-holding. It is unquestionably, unforgettably Singer’s story, as well as an expert chronicle of California’s ineffabilities.

  The opportunity to connect with her, to pick her brain about the story behind the stories she tells so fearlessly in this memoir, was an honor.

  Katharine Coldiron: So, first off, I see the irony of interviewing you about a book that’s structured as an interrogation.

  Natalie Singer: I’ve been thinking about this as I’ve been doing interviews for the book. In one way, it fits nicely to be questioned—I’m in that mode already, and as a rule-follower whose gut instinct is to please (even as I recognize how problematic that instinct has been for me and many girls and women), I do well answering questions. On the other hand, it makes it harder to distinguish between the book itself and the life of the book. And author interviews, while I love them-and feel especially lucky to be talking with you, whose work I so admire-also induce anxiety similar to that sometimes brought on by the interrogative voice in my book: is it friendly, is it suspicious of my viewpoint? Will it believe me? But again, that unease mirrors the book well.

  KC: I don’t think I need to know who the interrogator of California Calling is in a concrete way, but I want to know if s/he/it had a specific identity to you as you were writing.

  NS: It’s less of a single identity than something that functions as the nucleus of a collection of interrogative energies or identities that I’ve tussled with or been subjected to. Maybe a multiple-personality identity. That said, I want to leave it open for the reader to interpret the identity as she is compelled to.

  KC: That’s an instinct I admire. Leaving my work open to interpretation, and embracing those varying interpretations, has risen to paramount importance for me in the past couple of years, but it’s a challenge.

  NS: Thank you. It’s actually a source of tension for me, too. Because I can be an Alpha-no, I need to be more honest; I am an Alpha—so I also like to be in control of things. In an argument or a debate, or any conversation about a complex topic, really, I like to state my case, and get my say so that it’s absolutely clear to me that the other person understands exactly where I am coming from. When we first got together my husband noted that in a fight I “obliterate.” Not in any kind of abusive way or anything, but in a lawyerly way. I tend to like to be thorough. So this instinct, to allow space in my writing for the reader to adopt their own meaning, is both something I feel is important but also can be challenging for me. I have to consciously resist putting everything inside of me on the table. I know my writing can be more nuanced and relevant to readers if I do.

  KC: Where did the specific questions come from? Some of them seem like catechism, but some of them seem like writing prompts. I’m a student of Lidia Yuknavitch, who blurbed you, and I thought I might’ve recognized some of your questions from her instruction.

  NS: I am endlessly inspired by Lidia’s writing, though I’ve never had the luck of taking a class with her or being exposed to her exercises—I hope to one day! Practically, I was inspired in part by Bhanu Kapil’s use of questions in her brilliant work The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers. In terms of where the questions come from, and whether they were structured to surface intentional responses–that’s complicated. Much of the book, including many of the questions, were written corporeally, which I know is a space Lidia invites her students into. The questions I ask in the book came up from my cells, sometimes forcefully. It felt like I had been carrying them for generations. Writing them, and the answers, was instinctual but not proscriptive. Did the questions come as they did because I knew on some level the answers were necessary? I knew there were some stories I wanted to tell. But I never knew consciously what an answer would be, exactly, until I began to write it. So much of the process of writing this book the way I did felt intuitive.

  KC: That’s beautiful, but I must shove it into the realm of the practical: how did you write this? Did you write in fragments and order them later? Write longer versions and trim them down to tiny bites? Did you write in order and mix it up later?

  NS: All of the above. This book started years ago as a more traditional narrative memoir. And while narrative sections still exist and help to drive the story forward, overall the book is what I would classify as a hybrid—a lyric memoir, a fragmented memoir, a found-form work. So how did I get there? As I went deeper into the work, I began to see that beyond the surface coming-of-age story there were broader themes related to the silencing of girlhood, the legacy of interrogation, the impermanence of the California myth and of all of our personal mythologies. To get at these themes, to interrogate them, I felt I had to reduce and distill.

  One writer I was influenced by was Maggie Nelson, specifically her book Bluets. I could see the power of the fragment, and of investigating grief by sometimes looking around and to the side of it, rather than directly at it. I sensed that fragments could help me construct a whole. I was also influenced by Lydia Davis, who tells us that form is a response to doubt. To work deliberately in the form of the fragment, she says, “can be seen as stopping or appearing to stop a work closer, in the process, to what Blanchot would call the origin of writing, the centre rather than the sphere.” If we capture only a little of our subject, Davis says, we have “allowed it to live on at the same time, allowed it to live on in our ellipses, our silences.” Silence is an important theme in my book, and I began to shape the book around the question of whether form can be a response to silence.

  KC: Interesting. I appreciate, but don’t enjoy, Davis because I find her so clinical. Like a taxidermist. Your book is deeply felt and corporeal. Would you say you’re using her technique but not her style?

  NS: I agree with that. For me, some of her ideas functioned as a jumping-off point, an invitation to start thinking more deeply about my own poetics and about the use I could make of fragmentation or omission. I could not strip down as much as Davis.

  KC: Since the book is in fragments, in sideways gestures rather than straight narrative, do you feel as if you’ve told the whole story?

  NS: I feel actually like I’ve told more of the story than I could have with a traditional, complete narrative. It’s hard to crystalize, but one reviewer from Foreword Reviews touched on it when they wrote that as powerful as what I do share in the book are the things I choose to mute or conceal. I was so grateful when I read that, because that was my goal. To palpate the hardest-to-touch things by grazing the edges of grief, or hurt, or ecstasy and to interrogate silence itself to see how it functions.

  KC: How do you answer questions about where you’re from? A childhood spent moving around, locating various definitions of home, leads to awkward answers to this common question.

  NS: One way I attempted to answer this question is by writing the book. I don’t mean to be facetious! I have always had a hard time with this question, because I was transplanted to California at the age of sixteen, right when I was ready to imprint on a place but also already forged by the place I came from. I wanted to explore with the book the moment of assimilation-be it into a place, a person, or ourselves. How does allegiance form? Even now I have a hard time saying where I am from in a soundbite, which I think is an increasingly common experience as so many of us shift across geographies and cultures, melding and re-classifying ourselves. This is the alchemy of identity today.

  KC: One of the threads I found visible in the book again and again is loneliness. Was that something you set out to write about, or merely a theme that kept appearing during this period of your life?

  NS: t’s a theme that emerged, although the girl me would have known-maybe without being able to verbalize it-that loneliness is at the center of everything. Now I recognize it as a driving theme of my life, so much so that my next book is kind of an investigation or shakedown of loneliness.

  KC: Why did you leave California? This book is written about a time in your life that’s long past; what is California to you today?

  NS: Sometimes I think I left because at the time, I couldn’t conceive of how much my identity had become entangled with that place. Factually, I left for a job and then life, with all its attachments, evolved out of that. But I didn’t know that, after leaving, I would miss the panorama of a California freeway or the smell of the ocean ruffling a palm frond like a phantom limb. Ironically, because I left it, California has in a way reverted to a mirage or a myth for me, a place I yearn for but that, once again, I don’t have.

  KC: Los Angeles does not figure into the book at all. Since so many people think only of Hollywood when they think of California, was leaving it out a purposeful choice?

  NS: Primarily no, not intentional at all. I lived in a handful of different places in California, but never in L.A. The closest place to L.A. that I lived was the Colorado Desert, and I decided early on not to set the story in any region I hadn’t spent enough time in to really feel I had come to know it. So part of me wishes that I had experienced more of that mythical L.A. in order to include it in this book, but I also think there is something interesting in its omission.

  An undercurrent in the book is this examination of the California myth and more broadly the commanding myths we are all raised up on and chase after. The promise, or mirage, of Hollywood glamour has in part come to define the California myth-in fact it’s the only thing many people around the country and world know about the land we now call the state of California. But historically the draw of the place, and the roots of our desire around what California has come to symbolize to us, whether we’ve lived there or never been, are anchored not in Hollywood but in other regions, cities and towns. So maybe L.A.’s absence can allow us to see this lore, and lure, in new ways.

  KC: I’m so impressed by your intention to tackle California as a myth, both culturally and personally. That’s a big ambition.

  NS: Well, it almost feels like a transgression. Like how dare we, how dare I, question the promise, the prospect, of the California myth or the American Dream? But I’m oriented toward transgression. You have to be an outsider of some kind, I think, to want to—or feel compelled to—deconstruct a mythical institution. I did feel like an outsider, and the worst kind-the kind who is dying to be in the club, to belong. So I think I felt that if I could unpack some of these myths, maybe I could make a space for myself to slip inside, to integrate.

  KC: It seems as if your evolution as a writer has included a shift from dedicated journalism to dedicated creative work. Is this accurate? How does the shift feel to you?

  NS: Yes. For about 15 years I worked as a newspaper journalist and never-never-wrote the word “I.” As a journalist you are taught that objectivity is at the core of everything, and by keeping yourself out of the story you are able to more fairly tell the stories of others. After I had my second child, I came to a rough place. At work I covered murder and rape cases, the worst things you can think of. I had been working earnestly on making space for others’ voices for so long, and I had gone through some very powerful changes in my own life-becoming a mother and now caring for two daughters under age three; seeing my own parents age and get sick. Questions I had about my own girlhood started to press in on me and I felt the urge to explore my own stories. I took a career break and began to write creatively. It was very hard at first to write about myself: I felt guilty, like I had broken an oath and was doing something only very bad girls do. But I soon found that my journalism background was very useful to my creative work. As a journalist you learn to listen deeply to others and to follow intuition; this helps me be gentle and perceptive with myself. These days I do occasional journalism and I write creatively.

  KC: I noticed that wordplay has a large part in your work. The multiple meanings of “state,” for instance. Every word seems to matter, to have subtext. Can you speak to that?

  NS: It can be freeing or constraining, right? My work has definitely curved more toward the lyric and poetic in recent years, finding a deeper permission in the language itself than it did early on. But I think the roots of this go back to my journalism training, which teaches you to make every single word count, to pare down and “kill your babies,” to not be lazy with language and to recognize the power of it. I often find that when I cannot find the answer to something in my memory, or when my logical, critical, or intellectual thinking falls short, I can turn to language and mine it. For instance, playing with the homonym “state” enabled me to investigate connections between place and voice, between geography and utterance. Language illuminates.

• Brooklyn Rail March 2018 print edition - https://brooklynrail.org/2018/03/books/STATE-YOUR-NAME-FOR-THE-RECORD-NATALIE-SINGER-with-Christine-Sang

  Quoted in Sidelights: “obsessive memory” “Basically, it haunted me,” Singer explained. “I’d ask myself for a long time, ‘what does this memory want me to do with it?’ I was on a courtroom witness stand. I remember it not being fun; it was upsetting. Life seemed kind of different after that. The memory wouldn’t go away. What does this memory want from me? I followed that down the track, and started making broader connections. What does society want from us? When are we allowed to speak and when are we silenced? What if we can’t silence ourselves?”
  BOOKS MARCH 5TH, 2018
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  INCONVERSATION
  State Your Name for the Record: NATALIE SINGER with Christine Sang
  by Christine Sang
  Natalie Singer
  California Calling
  (Hawthorne Books, 2018)

  “Because I could not speak, because I could not say, when interrogated in that courtroom, We are a family—because women have bodies that can lead to the unraveling of everything—we lost my little brother.”

  In Natalie Singer’s memoir, California Calling: A Self-Interrogation, (Hawthorne Books, 2018), the author lays out all manner of forces to evacuate a silenced voice, a self she lost at sixteen years old. California Calling is the remembering of a mosaic of experiences, growing up female in a divided family, within the myths of California—a state that promised becoming and belonging.

  California Calling was first runner-up for the Red Hen Press nonfiction prize and a finalist for the Autumn House Press nonfiction prize. Natalie Singer holds a MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from the University of Washington.

  Our interview was conducted by phone and email, linking Seattle, Savannah, and New York City.

  Christine Sang (Rail): Natalie, your memoir begins with a prologue, the memory of being on a witness stand. You write that the moment called on you not only to speak of adultery, but “to testify about who I am, what I am. Who we have allowed inside of us. I must defend the women in my family, all the way back, and every girl and woman who ever was.”

  Natalie Singer: All of this started with that obsessive memory. It would come back to me in dreams. Basically, it haunted me. I’d ask myself for a long time, “what does this memory want me to do with it?” I was on a courtroom witness stand. I remember it not being fun; it was upsetting. Life seemed kind of different after that. The memory wouldn’t go away. What does this memory want from me? I followed that down the track, and started making broader connections. What does society want from us? When are we allowed to speak and when are we silenced? What if we can’t silence ourselves?

  I did some research into trauma. I came across this idea that you’re not necessarily able to forget trauma until you’ve done testimony about it and born witness to it. It’s not about going public, but you’re looking at it and you’re talking through what happened in the way a witness might do. We can’t process something that’s traumatic that happens to us in the moment. We can only do it later, and there’s an importance to bearing witness to that.

  Rail: In your book, you examine other events that spiral out of this. You write, “I have a relationship with interrogation.” There are eight sections to the memoir. Four of the eight headings are named and patterned after the stages of a cross-examination—Formation, Preparation, Interaction, Completion.

  Singer: The book started out as more a traditional narrative, and I had most of the book written that way. It felt to me at that point that it didn’t feel true to what I thought the story needed to be. I spent a couple of years playing with different structures. In trying to figure out what didn’t feel right to me, eventually I came to the place where I realized the idea of interrogation was really important to the center of my story. I needed to use the form of the book with that idea and that theme. That’s how I ended up reframing a lot of the work with shorter, I guess you could call them chapters, shorter sections or vignettes, each with a title formed as a question. That’s essentially how the book started to became fragmented.

  Rail: The fragmentation reflects your family, and your growing up, also. When you moved from Montreal to California in the early ‘90s, your family, “a hastily and sloppily assembled family, like a project for the school science fair,” consisted of five kids from three different fathers and two different mothers. The idea of interrogation not only includes divorce, but also immigration and belonging.

  You latch onto California. “It is about how we search for things we don’t know are there, bringing myths to life. It is about longing. The taste of it and the shame of it. It is about mapping one’s way out of the silence of girlhood.”

  You weave in snips. “Memory is funny that way. One sniff, one note, and the whole lost world opens up again.” “I will remember the . . . spray of surf; my mother’s Chanel perfume and pink Bubblicious chewing gum and lemony Mr. Clean and her hidden, hungry heart.”

  Singer: As I kept working on it, it felt right to me. I’m working a lot obviously with memoir and memories, and so one of the challenges is that memory is fragmented and my memories were very fragmented. I was going through the process of trying to find those, and translating the story in the way that I remembered it, which was little bits and pieces here and there. My quest or question was in struggling to connect those as an overall story, not just in a book form, but in how all this is connected to my own story or my own life. I came to a point where that structure was right for the book.

  Rail: Even though you incorporate a narrative, you use many forms to voice your Self.

  Singer: It’s a bit of a hybrid work so it is memoir, it is creative non-fiction. There are certain sections of the book that read more like poetry, there are other sections of the book that bring in forms like media news reports, or types of questioning, interrogative questioning.

  Rail: There’s a short scene from a play. News reports of Baby Jessica falling into the abandoned well. Margaret Trudeau “dropping her basket.” It’s like a scrapbook of scattered moments that add up for the reader. A montage evoking a way to see clearly.

  Singer: Some of the sections are one sentence long, and some sections go on for several pages. That speaks to their goal of exploring how fragments can make a whole. It was very important to me from the outset that it felt like a fragmented work. That’s the essential reason that the book looks the way it does.

  Rail: At the top of each page, a question is asked in bold type, such as “Identify the point of departure,” or “What evidence would you present?” Does this play the role of an Interrogator, to which you must respond to?

  Singer: Absolutely. Well, one thing is, I can’t really definitively say for the reader who this Interrogator is. Ultimately, I want the reader to think about who that narrator or who that Interrogator feels like, in their own lives, and what their role is in questioning their own experience. For me, the exercise began as a way to take that power or voice over my own story.

  Rail: You wanted the person to look into their own lives and see who their own interrogator was from their own experience? Yet, quickly, the Interrogator and your responses aren’t consistent. The Interrogator changes roles, switches points of view, makes inquiries, comments, scolds. Your responses often don’t answer the questions the way an interrogation would demand.

  Singer: I’m hesitant to answer this question too deeply, because I think part of the experience of reading the book and thinking about it, is for readers to think of their own coming of age, and their own story. Who controls the narrative of their own story? Who have they had to answer to? It became a goal of mine with this work to take back voice or to disrupt the feeling by taking control of that interrogation. I’m using that voice, but now I’m in control of it. Obviously as I’m the writer, I’m wielding it the way that I need, but some could say I might be making a commentary on the role of our interrogators, and the people who question us, and require us to provide answers or perform answers in our lives, because I’m playing with it. Sometimes it’s tongue-in-cheek, sometimes the Interrogator is actually on the side of the character, the protagonist. Sometimes I feel like the Interrogator has been exposed, for tactics that aren’t there. There are all kinds of different angles to it.

  Rail: The Interrogator/Responder is set up as the form, but just as you lost your voice in court, the destruction of the form, the non-form, becomes the form. Even though one of the Interrogator’s questions is to state the rules of the game, your truth is there are no rules.

  Singer: The form changes. It’s not consistent, and once you begin to expect something with the form, the form changes.

  Rail: There are juxtapositions that occur. A description of California follows a first kiss with a boyfriend. “The air smells like sea salt and nectar and oranges, even here beside the inland freeway that rims the airport. There is nothing staid or weighty or static about this place, I conclude after only my first five minutes. It is giving not taking. I close my eyes, and I feel it—her, the state—touch my skin with the cool palm of an open hand. I part my lips. I’ve been waiting for you, California whispers.”

  This is followed by a sociologist’s definition of interpenetration, “acquiring the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of others . . .”

  There are also four sections in the midst of the interrogation-format, in which you explore your role as a journalist in the Yosemite murders of three women, and of your experience being a nanny within a perfect family. Will you talk about your decision to include these sections?

  Singer: This may be a reflection on the climate that we’re in right now, and conversations that are happening all around us. It might be more of what a feminist work, if one calls it that, something that is, in part, doing the task of making commentary of how girls and women are required to be in the world.

  I was very sensitive to that by the time I was finished with the draft version that went to a copy editor.

  Rail: You’ve included some of his notes as part of the book. I’m guessing the copy-editor was male?

  Singer: Yes, exactly. I have a very close circle of readers as part of this work, most happened to be women, and then there was the copy editor, who was a stranger. Obviously this was very normal. I noticed myself reacting or bristling at the way he phrased some of the questions in his edits. I want to give him credit. He was a great copy editor! He caught a lot of things, including a song that to me shimmered with the time reference, but actually hadn’t come out ‘til later. He definitely did his job, and I’m grateful. Yet, I noticed in myself a reaction to the way he framed some questions, and he became part of the narrative structure. In another case, his questions stirred a memory that hadn’t been in the book before, and yet felt like it belonged. That’s how those got in there.

  Rail: Are you bringing in other people’s stories, to help you excavate your own? You write, “In Gold Country I had quietly moved my body all over a landscape like a chess board, while a killer had quietly moved his body across the very same scene. But I had also interviewed everyday people . . . to facilitate other people telling their stories, to exercise their own voices . . . I will have to forge a new way of being in my mind and in my body without concern for who is watching me, or not watching.”

  Singer: As I got further and further into the work, the protagonist started to answer some of her own questions, having more agency over her story, so the previous structure form became less important to me. It was important to me to say the story in a chronological way, in that my memoir takes place over the course of 7 to 8 years from the moment—the year that I arrive on that plane to California until the year that I leave California. It ends when I leave, but I also felt like there are parts of this story that happened long before then. It also felt important in terms of inquiry to move around, and bring in something from the future to show this perspective or experience. I’m telling this story from the now, so that’s the voice of experience, and what allows me to bring in these other non-chronological snippets, snapshots, vignettes, to deepen or enrich the coming of age chronological story. This character is coming of age; coming of age is something that happens over years, and that’s a very familiar story.

  Rail: Yes, your images of California resonate with a universal idea of its dream.

  “What do you think California will be like?

  It will be like a secret society.
  Like pineapple Jell-O.
  Frangelico cream.
  It will be like a woman in a silver Speedo and an alligator mask.
  Shaving her legs in a public fountain.
  A jar of marmalade.
  A pink tattoo.
  A Barbie doll with hair you can braid.
  It will be like a silk nightgown a baby bear tongue-tied night-
  ingale a wet nurse laurel shrine sugar pine larkspur revolt a quiet scream.
  It will be like a dream.”

  At one point you bring up the Brady Bunch. I lived around the corner from that iconic TV home, and walked past it daily. Your “interrogator” asks why is this story special? What makes your familiar story important, if it was everyone’s story in that time period?

  Singer: I like to think it’s universal. This is a question a lot of memoirists have very close to them, when they’re creating a work, unless they have a story like The Glass Castle in which something very out of the ordinary happens. Very outrageous. Many of us have very regular stories. Yes, my family exploded, maybe somewhat spectacularly, but certainly in a way that many others have as well. So what is special about that, or why should it be written about?

  For me it wasn’t that I needed to tell an unbelievable story in a narrative form. It was always that I needed to understand what happened to me, which happens to everybody. And if I don’t know where I belong or don’t know who I belong to, how is my story connected to that, and is there a way to figure that out? Is there a way to think about my story, my family, and my experience and get to some kind of an answer from examining it. I think so much of the human experience is trying to understand our story. It’s not navel gazing, but it is what drives us. I embrace that. I have to shut down the voice that says, “What’s special here, this happens to everyone,” and just follow the voice that wants me to understand how that changed me. That’s the desire that many of us have had. All of us.

  Rail: That’s what literature allows us, isn’t it. Throughout the vignettes, you include quotes and perspectives of other writers, starting with the Queen of California myth-tress, Joan Didion. Are all these writers associated?

  Singer: Essentially I had a short list of writers that I kept close to me during this project. It felt like I was writing to them, or was in conversation with them, and that we were together writing about similar themes. For Didion, obviously, and in the way she writes with so much dimension, something central to the book is the California myth. Another major drive for me was to dissect that myth, which made California seem so special and necessary to me in the first place. A lot of people think California is where their dreams can come true. Shiny Hollywood, the sun’s always out, land of possibility. There’s a reason for that picture, there’s a history for that. I think what Didion does so masterfully is she interrogates that myth. I wanted to not just interpret the California myth, but the mythology that we built our lives on, our family mythology, like what it means to be a good family, to belong, to be loved. Those mythologies are our foundations. She interrogates that with regards to California and also what that represents. Very important to me, her work in that space.

  With some of the other writers, it was their ability to look critically at how girls move around in the world, and are allowed to develop and come of age. And then, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets which was very close to me for several years while I was working on this. The connection there was, what was grief, and how she chose to look at grief. She looks at grief not head on, she looks at the side. She comes through the back door. It’s something that I choose to do as well.

  Rail: Do you mean in the way the gossip article about Margaret Trudeau is a stand-in for telling the reader your mother had an affair? How your stepbrother slamming your choice on the radio blindsides your memory of your father’s love of music?

  Singer: I feel it’s sometimes more effective to look to the side of something than to shine a light directly on it. For different reasons these writers influenced me and taught me, and opened up possibilities to have me look at my story and tell it.

  Rail: At the end of the memoir, the Interrogator is still at the top of each page. That voice hasn’t been quieted, even after all the Responder has gone through. How do you feel about where you leave yourself?

  Singer: It felt like at a certain point the Interrogator’s voice transitions into my own voice, asking myself questions—and that voice will never be shut up. It never shuts up. It constantly questions about how should I be, is this right? What should happen next? What should I do? Did I do the right thing? What is the right thing? As opposed to outside interrogative voices that often hamper us, this voice to me is essential. It makes me think of a conversation I had over Thanksgiving, when my family and I visited my uncle in Palm Springs. This is the uncle in the book, who comes out during the time we’re in California with my step-family. We are having dinner, and I’m married to someone who’s not Jewish, and he’s married to someone who’s not Jewish, and this conversation starts up about a movie portraying Jewish characters. I was saying I really like this, and here’s why, and my uncle’s husband says, “Okay, don’t take this the wrong way, but aren’t you guys tired that the characterization of Jewish people always seems to be the same? Overcome with angst, and always self-questioning, question! question! question!” My uncle and I looked at each other and burst out laughing—because we were like, you just explained the Jewish experience. This is, to us, completely normal. You’re constantly asking what else should you be doing. We were saying, we don’t find that upsetting. This is comforting to us. We’re constantly having a conversation with ourselves about how to be, and who to be.

  So at the end of the book, I’m trying to gesture towards this idea there will always be questions, and now these are my questions, and I’m free to ask them. Whatever I need to move ahead. I’m answering to my own desire to understand things.

  Rail: From your memoir—“I’m beginning to love her, California. Every direction is a new part of her mapped body, wild grasses like silky hair. Kidney swimming pools; flower-bud breath; warm-arteried highways. From my driver’s seat, I look out at her . . .” Although you write about having a love affair with California and your episodes together in growing sexuality, by the end of the book you’ve met your husband, and are moving into your future life and a family. For me as a reader, it’s as if you broke up with California. How did those feelings change into a relationship with Lucas?

  Singer: Actually, that was something I felt very conflicted about. I wanted to be true to the story, which in a sense ends when I leave the state. When that happened, I had Lucas. He was there. This isn’t a story about a guy who saves her. She only finds herself. It was very tricky territory because again I have to be true—it didn’t feel right to write him out of the story. But the story wasn’t him.

  California always felt like a she to me. Is California sexualized? Yes. Is California a metaphor for my own identity, or sexuality, or coming into myself? Finding out where I belong? Do I belong to myself? There’s definitely a thread there.

  Rail: You now live in Seattle with your family. Did you find the answers you needed in California? Why did you leave? Was it a place left behind?

  Singer: Good question. I’m not sure how to answer that. It feels like I didn’t leave California. Because I didn’t necessarily want to. I feel like I’m always longing for it, and I always feel like my identity is tied to those places. Part of it is, we leave the places that we feel are our places. They’re imprinted upon us or we imprint upon them. I never looked at it so much as closing a door, as more ending a chapter. But I still feel, very much, I belong there. I wish I was there right now. Even though I do love where I am now. I have a family where I am now, and a life here. Maybe it is true that it was left, out of a need to move forward, but I always felt very conflicted about that.

  Rail: Perhaps the truth of it is that you didn’t really close the door. It still pulls you. It’s still part of you.

  Singer: Maybe that’s reflected in the book.

  Rail: The Interrogator questions, “Be careful what you wish for.” Your response ends with, “A story is yours alone until it is spoken. When words are secret, it is you who decides if they exist.”

  Later, the Interrogator asks, “Is form a response to silence?” Is this one of the themes of the book?

  Singer: Absolutely. I was just working on an essay, which is exactly about that. Lydia Davis’s writing around fragments and fragmented work asks the question—is form a response to doubt? She’s an advocate for fragmented writing and how bits can make a whole. I was thinking about that. I asked myself—can form be a response to silence? In fact, the book is an experiment to try to get an answer to that question. Yes, the entire book is an effort to answer that.

Quoted in Sidelights: “Singer’s candor and self-questioning are humbling,” “melodic precision and sunshine-soaked imagery,” “a powerful and memorable memoir.”
Print Marked Items
California Calling: A Self-Interrogation
Courtney Eathorne
Booklist.
114.11 (Feb. 1, 2018): p11.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text: 
California Calling: A Self-Interrogation. By Natalie Singer. Mar. 2018.320p. Hawthorne, paper, $18.95
(97809988257171.818.
In this searing book, Singer recounts her adolescence in the heat of California. After spending much of her
childhood in Montreal, Singer moved with her mother, step-father, and younger brothers to the Golden
State. Throughout this self-described "interrogation," Singer reveals that her mother had an affair while still
married to her biological father. Her youngest brother resulted from the liaison, and bitter custody disputes
defined Singer's younger teenage years. At one point, Singer even had to take the stand in court to defend
her mother's fitness as a parent while having her own sexual history examined. Singer struggled to come
into her own identity after her tumultuous childhood. She is haunted by the humiliation she faced as the
daughter of a known adulteress and a timid student but hungry journalist, spending summers between her
college years as a small-town reporter near Yosemite. Singer's candor and self-questioning are humbling.
She writes with melodic precision and sunshine-soaked imagery, crafting a powerful and memorable
memoir.--Courtney Eathorne
YA: Teens might appreciate Singer's affectionate honesty about how her parents' decisions affected her
adolescence. CE. Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Eathorne, Courtney. "California Calling: A Self-Interrogation." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2018, p. 11. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527771738/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b6262314. Accessed 20 May 2018.

Quoted in Sidelights: “inevitable” and “disappointing” “a mostly compelling book about a complicated question: if identity is made of memory and memory does not cohere, how do we build a self from the shards?”
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527771738
Singer, Natalie: CALIFORNIA
CALLING
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Singer, Natalie CALIFORNIA CALLING Hawthorne Books (Adult Nonfiction) $18.95 3, 1 ISBN: 978-0-
9988257-1-7
Singer's first book is a memoir of two obsessions: with California and with finding a place for herself.
The story begins with the dissolution of the author's family and her move, at 16, with younger siblings,
mother, and stepfather, from Montreal to California, a place with which she has been absorbed for years.
"My affair with California begins many years before we meet," writes the author, recalling an early library
encounter with a book about the Golden State. "A state?" she wondered. "Like New York, where we drive
once a year across the border to do our school shopping, hiding new clothes and shoes deep in our Jeep's
trunk on the way back, away from the customs officials so we don't have to pay extra taxes?" Singer's glee
at being in California was complicated by a custody battle involving one of her brothers. "Are you sexually
active?" That was the question the opposing counsel asked her just before she took the stand on her mother's
behalf. It was a treacherous moment, but while Singer draws her structure from it--the book is built, more or
less, as a series of interrogations and responses--she is interested in treachery of a more personal sort. The
author is at her best when she uses narrative to examine disconnection, as with the Taylors, a family for
whom she worked yet never quite belonged. "Two of my own families," she writes, "have already exploded.
Nuclear family has not proved successful, but still I am drawn to it." This search for place took Singer north,
where she researched a serial killer in Yosemite, though she was really looking for herself. As the book
progresses, it becomes less fragmentary. On one hand, that's inevitable given the difficulty of stitching
together a book of fragments. On the other, it's disappointing given the strength of her fractured approach.
A mostly compelling book about a complicated question: if identity is made of memory and memory does
not cohere, how do we build a self from the shards?
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Singer, Natalie: CALIFORNIA CALLING." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461376/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=62f75faa.
Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461376

• Foreword
  https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/california-calling/
  Word count: 403

  Quoted in Sidelights: “brief and lovely snapshots of moments,” “in language that is visceral and vivacious.” “both raw and incandescent,”
  CALIFORNIA CALLING
  A SELF-INTERROGATION
  Natalie Singer
  Hawthorne Books (Mar 1, 2018)
  Softcover $18.95 (313pp)
  978-0-9988257-1-7

  “California is a fable. A fantasy. A fiction,” Natalie Singer writes of her adopted home. “A metamorphosis.” So it was for the explorers and prospectors who first clambered over the Sierra to find it; so it remains for every wave of subsequent immigrants to fall under its spell. So it was for her.

  In her captivating literary memoir, Singer recalls finding California in waves. She fell in love with the idea of it as a child; she met it face to face in her teen years, when her mother relocated their family to a town just beyond the San Francisco Bay. But as much as her book is a celebration of place, it is also about the insatiability of hunger for home. Buried in her pages, even when she’s most wrapped up in California’s glow, is a searing sense of loss.

  The interrogation referred to in the title is both a memory and a reconstruction. When she was sixteen, a family court demanded that she justify her family in order to keep it. She couldn’t find the words. Not then. Now, in retrospect, she paints a picture of a family that was unconventional, sure, but that from generation to generation grew up from unapologetic and acute desire.

  Singer’s story comes through brief and lovely snapshots of moments, captured in language that is visceral and vivacious:

  I am beginning to love her, California. Every direction is a new part of her mapped body, wild grasses like silky hair. Kidney swimming pools; flower-bud breath; warm-arteried highways.

  As powerful as what she does share are the things that she chooses to mute or conceal. She touches on her shtetl ancestors’ stories only briefly, but with evident pain; an account suited to #MeToo is slipped into a footnote. The result is a work that is both raw and incandescent, but whose most powerful reveals will perhaps reemerge in the reader’s consciousness only after the fact. This is a California that, as promised, truly does belong to all.

  Reviewed by Michelle Anne Schingler
  March/April 2018

• Seattle Review of Books
  http://www.seattlereviewofbooks.com/reviews/land-of-promise/
  Word count: 1085

  Quoted in Sidelights: “The self-interrogation is a gimmick, to be sure, but a good one,” related Paul Constant in the online Seattle Review of Books. “It allows Singer to criticize her own actions without feeling too namby-pamby, and it creates a workable distance between her youthful indiscretions and her modern-day reporting.” He further noted: “In a lot of ways, California Calling is the story of coming to terms with the unknowable aspects of yourself. … This all sounds painfully serious. You should know that California Calling is a fun and funny book, too.”
  “Ultimately, California Calling is a rollicking road trip of a book.”
  The Seattle Review of Books
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  “What we were heading toward,” Seattle writer Natalie Singer writes at the beginning of her new memoir…

  …was bigger than a natural, perfect family. In that plane, over the next six hours, I would cross over into what I hoped would be my own version of freedom. By the time the plane touched down at the San Jose International Airport, I would be unburdened of the pressures of my old high school, the weight of family secrets that burned like a brand, and the loneliness of my existence in the nowhere of the North.

  Something was calling to me.

  California.

  Singer’s book is titled California Calling and it’s subtitled A Self-Interrogation. It follows Singer from her childhood in a nontraditional Canadian family through her adulthood, and the one constant in her life through all that time: her dreams of running away to California.

  “I have an attraction to escape stories, to reinvention narratives, tales of Amish, Orthodox, and polygamist girls, of girls locked in attics, ushering in their own freedom, heisting it,” Singer writes. California is that escape for Singer, precisely because California is a state of mind. It’s too big to completely capture in a word, a sentence, a paragraph. California is mountains and beaches and deserts and lakes. It’s cities and farms and vast, empty expanses. Even if you stand in one spot in California, you experience a number of realities all at once:

  Because of the transitional topography of northern California’s Sierra slope, a full range of seasons can occur at any time, from major blizzards to dry scorchers, warm clear nights to intense, blasting thunderstorms. Winds of great speeds are capable of whipping through the region causing damage during any month of the year. Pristine warm days can be followed by cold stormy nights. You like this idea of a transition zone.
  The book is set up in a series of questions and answers, a ruthless interview of Singer, by Singer. Each volley of call and response is its own tiny chapter, leaving the book with a rat-a-tat rhythm that keeps the reader whipping through pages. The tone is conversational, but also more than a little accusatory.

  One “question,” for instance, is a statement: “You’re not saying anything about your mother.”

  Singer replies, all conciliation and surprise: “Right. Oversight, sorry. Because she is everywhere, everything, rule arbiter and family concierge and friend of my days, every minute of them.”

  The self-interrogation is a gimmick, to be sure, but a good one. It allows Singer to criticize her own actions without feeling too namby-pamby, and it creates a workable distance between her youthful indiscretions and her modern-day reporting.

  Of course, Singer is far from the first person to become obsessed with the idea of California. Pioneers for centuries have gone west in search of reinvention and renewed opportunity. Even after every last inch of its topography had been mapped from orbit, California maintained a certain mystery that Singer found irresistible. She was drawn to California by the same gravity that drew generations before her: the belief that maybe this one time, changing a body’s location in the world will finally be enough to change a mind.

  It’s obvious that what Singer loves about California are the aspects that she sees of herself in the state: the vivid potential, the unknowable air, the contradictory states of being. No one person can claim to know all of California, and Singer similarly defies easy categorization - which explains why she spends hundreds of pages interviewing herself.

  And in a lot of ways, California Calling is the story of coming to terms with the unknowable aspects of yourself. It’s no mistake that a recurring image in the book involves Singer admiring bodies of water that she never gets to immerse herself in. She covets a hot tub that’s been mounted on a tall porch, but she never uses it because she fears a structural collapse. She lusts after a beautiful pool at the house where she gets a nannying job, but she’s too meek to ask if she can go for a swim.

  Chuck Berry famously compared California to the Promised Land:

  And the thing about a Promised Land is that it doesn’t retain its magic unless there’s a Moses in the story to lead people to it and witness it and, ultimately, never set foot into it. Singer does get to California - in fact, she spends long swaths of the book in California — but the yearning doesn’t go away. There’s always somewhere else she could be, some other hot tub to picture herself in.

  This all sounds painfully serious. You should know that California Calling is a fun and funny book, too. It’s filled with references to Twilight and Island of the Blue Dolphins and an extended pager metaphor. Singer’s restless brain never stops finding new and ridiculous ways to express her rich internal life to her readers.

  Ultimately, California Calling is a rollicking road trip of a book with a driver who can’t stop pointing out places of historical interest to all her passengers. Singer’s map is incomplete, and she threatens to take her reader off-road at any moment. But that’s okay; you’ll never completely fall off the map in California. There’s always more west to discover.