Blog

Refusing to let history slide into the past.

The 2001 film, BOYCOTT is essential viewing for Black History Month. It portrays the year long Montgomery Bus Boycott, winning many awards, including a coveted Peabody Award for “refusing to allow history to slip into the past.”

“A darkened theatre was our favorite place on earth.”

The Pickford, Bellingham’s arthouse cinema, is now celebrating its twentieth anniversary. Supported by memberships and an all volunteer staff (except for the projectionist) it is indeed a “little music box of a theatre.” The Pickford is my favorite place in town.

Pierino’s Restaurant, La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, California, 1927–1981

Pierino’s, the restaurant frequented by Roxanne Granville in The Great Pretenders, is well known to me. I invented it when characters from my novel American Cookery had lunch there in 1956. Like Roxanne, you too can enjoy Pierino’s in its heyday.

Happy Birthday, Virginia Woolf! 137 Years Young

How do I love thee, O Great Virginia? Let me count the ways. I love thee for A Room of One’s Own and To the Lighthouse. These books changed my life. My multiple copies of each are stained with suntan lotion, with spilled wine, with tea, with tears.

Central Avenue – A Playlist for The Great Pretenders

For each book I have written, I have created soundtracks, music that I play continually early in the writing process. Sometimes this is thematic, allied to a mood or a certain chapter, sometimes evoking an era. For The Great Pretenders, I was introduced to a whole new musical world, West Coast Cool, thanks to a book that was crucial to my novel.

The ARC of the Novel

“Writing a book, seeing it published, why that must be the most wonderful feeling in the whole world. To hold it in your hand, a book that began just as an idea in your imagination!” So says a character in a novel of mine that is still under construction. It’s not an...

Women in Hollywood

Offscreen roles for women have changed over the years. In 1948 women made up some 25% of the writers in Hollywood. By 1974 that number had fallen to 14%.

The Blacklist Era

Despite a longstanding love of film and the darkened theatre, I had never given much thought to the Hollywood blacklist until the 1999 Oscars when the Academy gave a special award to Elia Kazan, the legendary director – and cooperating witness to the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Television

Television is an important part of my novel, The Great Pretenders. Doing the research, I was astonished to find that the first talkie of Cyrano de Bergerac was actually made for British television in 1938.

The Power and Peril of the Past

Crescendo, like Beggars and Choosers, These Latter Days, Caveat and other fictions of mine, explores the power and peril of the past.

What If

The novelist’s central question.

For Love of Paris

Though I am a life-long Francophile, I had never read Les Misérables until after I saw the musical in London in 1986. The book seemed to me a tale of injustice and identity, yes, but more than that, a love poem, a paean to the city of Paris.

Caveat

For years I carried in my wallet a short article from the L.A. Times about a drought in 1916. The city hired a rainmaker, who brought rain, who actually unleashed a monstrously destructive flood. The inspiration behind Caveat.

Beggars and Choosers

Beggars and Choosers is the story of a group of poets, one who stayed true to the dream, and one who traded that dream for academic power.

Neither Fish Nor Fowl

Thus the great pleasure of writing novellas: the tale is just as long as it needs to be, and if in that loose definition, it remains neither quite fish nor fowl, not a mini-novel, nor a overblown story, well tant pis as the French say.

The Music Room

A concert inspired me to create, at least on paper, the noisy lives of children, two abandoned little girls, who live with music lilting through their lives.

The Butler in the Pond

"The novelist is one on whom nothing is lost." ~Henry James By 1980 I had achieved two important life goals: Little, Brown had published my first novel, and I had a beautiful son, Bear. A toddler at the time, Bear instinctively recognized that the clack of the...

These Latter Days

These Latter Days, a vast, brash, unruly novel, took me seven years to write. I was creatively unable to move on to another book till I had wrestled this one to the ground, and seen it into print.

Figs Napoleon with Leaves of Time

American Cookery is a big, broad-canvas novel of the West. A novel of migration and immigration, it reflects the California that I grew up in where everyone was from somewhere else. Some people (like my father) were uprooted by World War II when he joined the navy,...

What Would Ginger Rogers Do?

“I felt less like Ginger Rogers, and more like Tess of the d’Ubervilles: I knew I had been screwed, but I wasn’t sure how it had happened.”

Also By Laura