Los Angeles Diaries: A Memoir

by James Brown

Overview

A wrenching chronicle of loss and
reaffirmation from novelist James Brown

Plagued by the suicides of both his siblings, heir to alcohol and drug abuse, divorce and economic ruin, James Brown lived a life clouded by addiction, broken promises and despair. In The Los Angeles Diaries he reveals his struggle for survival, mining his past to present the inspiring story of his redemption. Beautifully written and limned with dark humor, these twelve deeply confessional, interconnected chapters address personal failure, heartbreak, the trials of writing for Hollywood and the life-shattering events that finally convinced Brown that he must "change or die."

In "Snapshot," Brown is five years old and recalls the night his mother "sets fire to an apartment building down the street," an act that splinters the family, later leading to their destruction. In "The Facts," he is a young writer and professor "afraid to step out of the darkness" and confront his double life as an addict. In "Daisy," Brown purchases a Vietnamese potbellied pig for his wife to atone for his sins, only to find himself engaged in a furious battle of man versus beast — with the pig's bulk growing in direct proportion to the tensions in his marriage.

Harrowing, brutally honest, The Los Angeles Diaries is the chronicle of a man on a collision course with life, who ultimately finds the strength and courage to conquer his demons and believe in life once more.

About the Author

James Brown is the author of several novels including Lucky Town and Final Performance. He has received the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, a NationalEndowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction writing and a Chesterfield Film Writing Fellowship from Universal/Amblin Entertainment. His writing has been featured in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Denver Quarterly and New England Review. He lives with his family in Lake Arrowhead, California.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060521516
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	08/28/2003
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.06(w) x 8.52(h) x 0.87(d)

About the Author

James Brown is the author of several novels including Lucky Town and Final Performance. He has received the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction writing and a Chesterfield Film Writing Fellowship from Universal/Amblin Entertainment. His writing has been featured in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Denver Quarterly and New England Review. He lives with his family in Lake Arrowhead, California.

Read an Excerpt

The Los Angeles Diaries
A Memoir

Winter 1994

Fire

Winter is the season of the arsonist in Southern California. The manzanita and chaparral are dry and brittle and the Santa Ana winds have begun to blow. They move at gale force. They cross the arid Mojave and whip through the canyons of the San Bernardino Mountains, through the live oak and the pines, the ponderosa, the sugar and coulter, white fir and incense cedar. I know these names because I live in these mountains, eighty miles east of the sprawl of Los Angeles, and I worry when the winds come. I worry about the possibility of fire. I know he's out there, the arsonist. I know he's waiting, like me, for a day of opportunity very much like this.

I've seen the Santa Anas uproot trees. I've seen them strip roofing from houses and shatter windows. I've seen them topple big rigs, and once, along the same freeway I'm traveling now, I saw a stop sign flying through the sky. I keep a firm hold on the wheel. The winds hit in sharp gusts and can blow you clean over the line. You have to be ready. You have to hang on tight and keep your eyes on the road.

Traffic moves slowly, carefully. No one's taking any chances, making abrupt lane changes, cutting you off or tail-gating. I would like to believe that it's courtesy that dictates our caution, our good manners, except this is Southern California, I grew up here and I know better. Danger or its potential sometimes brings out the best in us, and I wonder, as I reach to turn on the radio, if maybe it would be a good thing if the Santa Anas blew every day all year-round.

From time to time I find myself having to drive into Los Angeles on business, and just the thought of it always fills me with a sense of dread and anxiety. The city has changed and grown immensely since I knew it as a child, and sometimes even the most familiar streets, streets I grew up on, seem barely recognizable. Gated communities have replaced the bungalows and tract homes and the signs in the windows of the shops and stores are in Vietnamese, Korean, Spanish, occasionally Arabic. Where corner markets once stood you'll now find minimalls, and Hollywood landmarks, places like Schwab's and Pandora's Box and the old Brown Derby restaurant, have gone the way of the bulldozer. There are more freeways, too, bigger and wider ones, but the traffic has never been worse.

But it isn't the unfamiliar that makes me anxious. It isn't the traffic or the crowds or the evolving landscape of architecture and ethnicity. I am a fiction writer who doesn't make enough money at it not to have to do something else for a living. So I teach. So I am a professor. And what Hollywood offers me is the chance to escape the classroom and tell stories full-time. Trouble is, I'm not very good at telling stories that pay better and that's what this is about. It's what it has always been about: my driving into Hollywood to talk to producers and executives who like my work but want me to write something more commercial. In this case that less commercial work is my last novel and the screenplay I wrote based on it, a screenplay commissioned by Universal and Amblin, both of whom passed on it when I was done. "I don't know why you ever bothered to write this," an executive tells me, after she finishes reading my script. "It's no movie. It's too real." Now the rights are mine and my agent, who feels differently than the executive, is sending it to other executives and producers in Hollywood. As a sample, he calls it. The idea is not so much to sell the script as it is to sell myself as a scriptwriter. Already I'm looking forward to the end of the day.

The Santa Anas die down as I approach Los Angeles and I ease up on the wheel. I take a deep breath. But I know it's only temporary, this calm. I know better than to let myself relax. That thing called the L.A. River borders the last stretch of the freeway into Burbank, and I look out on it, the dirty water, moving sluggishly through the narrow concrete channel that contains it. Over the rush of the cars I try to imagine it as I was told it used to be, a real river, filled with trout and salmon and lined with sycamores and willows instead of chain-link and barbed wire. But I'm not successful. I think about my brother. I think about my sister. We are children down by that river on a day very much like this with the wind blowing lightly and the smell of fire in the air. I'm nine years old, the youngest, and we're passing a bottle around, a bottle I've stolen from a grocery store nearby. My sister points to the sky.

"Look. Look," she says. "Snow."

Only they're ashes. Ashes are falling. Ashes are everywhere, and in the sunlight they appear white, almost translucent. My head is spinning and I laugh. My brother laughs. I can hear us all laughing as we look to the sky, opening our mouths, catching ashes, like snowflakes, until our tongues turn black.

In the rearview mirror I check to see if my eyes are clear. They are, and they should be. I've gone without a drink or a drug for four days, four long miserable days of white-knuckling it, all because I want to look my best, and I like to think I do ...

The Los Angeles Diaries
A Memoir. Copyright © by James Brown. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Table of Contents

Fire 1

Snapshot 19

Daily Rushes 41

My Papa's Waltz 55

The Facts 61

Touch 77

Daisy 97

Personal Effects 117

On Selling a Novel to Hollywood 137

A Fine Place 147

Midair 163

South Dakota 195

Acknowledgments 201

Reading Group Guide

Introduction

Shocking, bleak, and ultimately elegiac, The Los Angeles Diaries chronicles a legacy of addiction, life-shattering tragedy, and the arc of the author's own difficult career as a writer, in an elegant series of twelve interconnected chapters. Written with neither anger nor self-pity, Brown's memoir ranks as one of the most harrowing to emerge in this genre.

As a five year old, Brown waits in the car while his mother sets fire to a building, setting off a chain of events that permanently unravels his comfortable, stable family. Brown watches all the certainties of childhood disappear with her subsequent imprisonment. Thereafter, tragedy follows him like a brushfire spread on the Santa Ana winds. Nimbly emulating his elder sister and brother, Brown escapes into heavy alcohol and drug use. Brown gently and elliptically describes his brilliant brother, a man of rare intelligence and a promising acting career, who shot himself at the age of twenty-seven. Brown's sensitive, shy sister hangs on until her forties, when finally, after a lifetime of disappointment and cocaine fueled benders, she leaps off a highway overpass onto the concrete below.

The only sober and sure thing in his life that keeps Brown going is his writing, between his own days and weeks of drinking and drugging. He writes with the knowledge that every idea, every script meeting, every chance at a screenplay bought or novel sold, might be his last.

Brown draws this brutally honest picture with delicate strokes, revealing his story in fragile, fragmented episodes tinted with dark humor, compassion and an almost miraculous forgiveness. In "Midair," he addresses his sister directly in an open letter, a confession, as he imagines her last moments. In "Daisy," Brown's peace-offering gift to his wife, a pot-bellied pig, chews through five novels-in-progress, and this "manuscript massacre" unleashes a hilarious battle of wills between man and pig. In "The Facts," Professor Brown faces his Monday morning undergraduate English class, desperately trying to conceal the tremors and sweats that arrive on the heels of yet another weekend spent holed up in a seedy motel, drinking and snorting drugs.

Los Angeles figures prominently in these vignettes, a character in its own right, a mirage of hope and folly, as the Brown family helplessly stumbles toward ruin. The sole survivor of his family, James Brown finally finds redemption under the open skies of South Dakota, where he realizes that he must "change or die."

Questions for Discussion

1. "In "My Papa's Waltz," Brown recollects dancing with his father as child, and says, "I find myself confusing what actually happened with how I imagine it ... 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." What is he telling the reader about writers' motives, techniques, and the distinction between reality and fiction? How does he demonstrate the way a writer mines his memories in this chapter? Is it significant that a memoir may not hew strictly to events as they occurred?


2. The snapshot in question, in the story "Snapshot," is an idyllic image of a smiling family by the seaside. But his mother's boyishly cropped hair is actually still growing out after being shorn in prison. An older Jim says of the photograph, "Sometimes, when I look at it, I imagine them as strangers." What does this story say about pictures and the false reality they present? Why do you think Brown returns again and again to this photograph?


3. How does Brown use images on TV to reflect the emotional climate in "Snapshot" and "Touch?"


4. How does the repetitive use of phrases "We'll have to make some changes," "We need a fresh eye," and "They're lightweights anyway" effect "On Selling a Novel to Hollywood?" Do you find the repetitions humorous? What does he mean by, "The drafts are endless, but it's the writer, not the story, who undergoes the most important revisions?"


5. In "A Fine Place," a fourteen-year-old Brown begins stealing and shooting heroin, and realizing that he needs "a stronger sense of belonging, of home," decides to live with his father in San Jose. What does his father teach him? Why does Brown like the hard labor and strict discipline of his father's household? How does his father also influence his choice of career?


6. As an adult, he realizes 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." Compare Brown's mother and father as parents. How significant are parents to a child's upbringing in the context of this memoir?


7. In "Daisy," why does the pig's rapidly increasing girth irritate Brown so much? When he says, "the alcoholic, however, like the pig, is created with certain defense mechanisms and mine are denial and rage," what has he projected onto the pig? How does the pig symbolize his disintegrating marriage? Could the devouring, never satisfied nature of the pig also represent Brown's own addictions?


8. What are the problems Barry wanted to escape in "Personal Effects?" Do you think his early success as an actor exacerbated the problem? Do you think his suicide was inevitable?


9. In "Midair," how did Marilyn's dreams fade? How does Barry's early success affect her? Do you think the siblings' natures play a role in how their lives turn out?


10. Why were the Brown children attracted to careers that required, for the most part, living in one's imagination, careers fraught with rejection and slim chances for success? What role does their troubled family, coupled with the allure of Hollywood fame, play in their choices?


11. In "The Facts," Brown thinks someone is watching him. Why is this figure always outside, watching him through windows? What does this figure represent? What do you think Brown means by "I am instead that man I see and don't see and he is watching me, as I am watching him, both of us afraid to step out from the darkness?"


12. Does the Brown family attain what they want or need in Hollywood? How is Los Angeles portrayed in The Los Angeles Diaries?


13. What insights does this memoir provide into the nature of addiction?


14. The twelve linked chapters of The Los Angeles Diaries each contain fragments of a broader narrative arc. Does the structure of this memoir differ from most autobiographical works?


15. How does the author sustain narrative tension throughout the memoir as whole? Why do you think James Brown chose to reveal his family history in this manner, as opposed to a more straightforward narrative?

About the author

James Brown is the author of four previous novels. He lives in Lake Arrowhead, CA.

Editorial Reviews

It's the balance of agony and grace, of course, that makes life so ferociously interesting. Brown has perfectly captured that balance in this unpretentious, very profound book. — Carolyn See

The Washington Post

As tragic as Brown's life has been, the memoir displays neither pathos nor self-pity but elegiac wisdom...How moving is Brown's The Los Angeles Diaries? While double-checking the quotes and facts, I simply gave in and reread it again, struck even more by its pain, its beauty and its craft.—Deirdre Donahue

USA Today

Novelist Brown (Lucky Town; Hot Wire; etc.) mines the explosive territory of his own harsh and complicated life in this gut-wrenching memoir. The youngest child of a mentally ill mother and an absent father, Brown (b. 1957) grew up in the shadow of Hollywood with two older siblings: a brother, a moderately successful actor until his suicide at 27, and a sister who also dreamed of acting but took her life at 44. Brown's tales are harrowing: at five, he and his mother traveled from their San Jose home to San Francisco, where she set an apartment building ablaze. Arson couldn't be proven, but she was imprisoned for tax evasion. At nine, he shared his first drink and high with his siblings; when he was 12, a neighbor attempted to molest him; by 30 he was an alcohol- and cocaine-addicted writer-in-residence. During his marriage's early years, Brown often left his wife to feed his addictions, repeatedly promising her he'd reform. Desperate to fuel his writing career, he attempted screenwriting, but everything he pitched seemed too dark. Brown's genius compels readers to sympathize with him in every instance. Juxtaposed with the shimmery unreality of Hollywood, these essays bitterly explore real life, an existence careening between great promise and utter devastation. Brown's revelations have no smugness or self-congratulation; they reek of remorse and desire, passion and futility. Brown flays open his own tortured skin looking for what blood beats beneath and why. The result is a grimly exquisite memoir that reads like a noir novel but grips unrelentingly like the hand of a homeless drunk begging for help. Agent, Lisa Bankoff. (Oct.) Forecast: With blurbs from Michael Chabon, Janet Fitch and Tim O'Brien; author appearances in the West and Pacific Northwest; a 50-city radio satellite tour; and national print ads, Brown's book could attract a fairly wide audience. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

A latter-day Thomas De Quincey who began "eating" when he was nine writes powerfully if repetitively about how drugs and alcohol destroyed his family and severely damaged him. Novelist Brown (Lucky Town, 1994, etc.) here arranges in a broken chronology some previously published pieces and a few fresh ones, all of which are confessional and self-flagellant. The author drinks too much, snorts too much coke, smokes too much crack, fails to honor too many commitments; he steals and lies to his friends, to his wife, to his family, to—don’t be alarmed—himself! Hung over, Brown tries to teach Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to undergraduates, who see right through him. He torments a pet pig he bought after a binge to dulcify his bitter wife; he’s annoyed because the porker acts, well, like a pig. He tries AA but is put off by too-patent piety. Brown’s brother and sister are both addicts and both commit suicide (he shoots himself, she leaps from a bridge); the writer crafts for each of them a very strong essay, imagining the moment of suicide in some of his loveliest, most wrenching prose. Brown’s mother was also an addict, and he recalls the time when, carrying along five-year-old James for a night out with Mommy, she torched an apartment building. An old woman died in the fire, but the cops had insufficient evidence to convict, so Mommy went away for tax evasion instead. (She had been surreptitiously selling family property to support her habits.) The Browns are no Cleavers, but their sorrows are delineated in captivating language. Brown knows the puissance of the present tense, effectively uses the second person (in the essay on his sister), crafts some heart-breaking sentences, andgenerally makes you want simultaneously to slap and embrace him. Well-written and unspeakably sad, though often predictable. Agent: Lisa Bankoff/ICM

Kirkus Reviews

Praise for The Los Angeles Diaries

"The best addiction memoirs reflect on the running and gunning with just the right amount of thoughtful remove, which is exactly what makes James Brown’s The Los Angeles Diaries so important. The title is deceptive in that there’s nothing diary-like about it: No diary could be this elegantly crafted and tightly woven. Structured as a series of standalone vignettes, the book has more than enough material to justify a woe-is-me stance—an arsonist mother and suicidal siblings, to start with—but a clear-headed voice that mines the subject matter of regret while refusing to ever wallow keeps the narrator out of self-pity. Underread and underrated, Brown’s vibrant imagery and nimble storytelling elevates The Los Angeles Diaries into a league all its own." —The Fix, selected as one of the Ten Best Addiction Memoirs

“ The Los Angeles Diaries is one of those rare memoirs that cuts deeply, chillingly into the reader’s own dreams. It is a dramatic, vivid, heartbreaking, very personal story of human responsibility and guilt, of alcoholism, of suicide, of marital struggle, of the uncertainties and ambiguities of a writer’s life in modern America. The book is cleanly and beautifully written, and it’s also incredibly moving.” —Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried and winner of the National Book Award

“ The Los Angeles Diaries is terrific. It’s one of the toughest memoirs I’ve ever read, at once spare and startlingly, admirably unsparing. It glows with a dark luminescence. James Brown is a fine, fine writer.” —Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay , winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“This gemlike collection . . . materializes in such delicate strokes that the emerging theme becomes one of almost miraculous forgiveness, any pain and rage all but hidden between the lines.” — San Francisco Chronicle (Best Books of the Year)

“Profound . . . unsparing and clear-eyed, a heartbreaking story, and yet oddly inspirational, the tale of the last man standing.” —Janet Fitch

“Life-affirming . . . An extraordinarily gripping, honest, and somehow uplifting tale. It seamlessly moves from bleak to beautiful . . . A darkly bright, hugely compassionate, and oddly redemptive story of loss and failure, guilt and addiction.” — The Independent

“As tragic as Brown’s life has been, the memoir displays neither pathos nor self-pity but elegiac wisdom . . . How moving is Brown’s The Los Angeles Diaries ? While double-checking the quotes and facts, I simply gave in and reread it again, struck even more by its pain, its beauty and its craft.” —Deirdre Donahue, USA Today

“It’s the balance of agony and grace, of course, that makes life so ferociously interesting. Brown has perfectly captured that balance in this unpretentious, very profound book.” —Carolyn See, The Washington Post

“Novelist Brown ( Lucky Town ; Hot Wire ; etc.) mines the explosive territory of his own harsh and complicated life in this gut-wrenching memoir . . . Brown’s genius compels readers to sympathize with him in every instance. Juxtaposed with the shimmery unreality of Hollywood, these essays bitterly explore real life, an existence careening between great promise and utter devastation. Brown’s revelations have no smugness or self-congratulation; they reek of remorse and desire, passion and futility. Brown flays open his own tortured skin looking for what blood beats beneath and why. The result is a grimly exquisite memoir that reads like a noir novel but grips unrelentingly like the hand of a homeless drunk begging for help.” — Publishers Weekly (Best Book of the Year)

“Brown’s blackout days make for a darkly alluring read. This is the kind of book that becomes an underground classic for all the wrong reasons.” — Booklist

“A riveting read. A supremely powerful and depressing memoir, then, one that seeks to evoke and express—rather than in any way explain—the misery that engulfed one ambitious American family.” — Kirkus

“The ‘Kennedy curse’ looks like a garden-variety hex compared with the dysfunction passed down among Brown's alcoholic clan. When the acclaimed Lucky Town novelist was 5, his embezzling mom dragged him along to an arson; both his siblings committed suicide in middle age; Brown himself abandoned his wife, kids, and college English students for days to binge on booze and meth. If that’s not bleak enough, consider this memoir’s really depressing scenes . . . Hollywood script meetings. It’s all riveting and self-pitiless, but two passages are priceless: a devastating imagining of the post-recovery shame that led his sister to dive into the bone-dry L.A. River, and his nightmarishly funny battle of wills with a potbellied pig that was supposed to salvage his marriage but instead helped demolish it.” —Chris Willman, Entertainment Weekly

“This is a ghost story, and James Brown should be dead. That he is not is a remarkable tale of perseverance in the face of staggering loss and tragedy.” —Charles Feldman, CNN

“Remarkable . . . Rises above the commonplace to the true art of comprehended pain . . . the hallmark of Brown’s prose is gravitas. His truths are definitive.” —DeWitt Henry, The Boston Globe

“Searing, gut-churning but ultimately luminous . . . The Los Angeles Diaries reads like the best—and darkest—fiction . . . Uncompromisingly bleak yet surprisingly beautiful, a passionate testament not only to how one can survive what should shatter and sunder irreparably, but that one can survive and in surviving, begin anew.” — The Baltimore Sun

“Each chapter shows the tool marks of the well-crafted short story, carefully and even lovingly shaped and polished until it shines . . . The stories amount to a memoir of stunning intimacy and unforgettable impact.” —Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“The book is a classic, deeply moving and expertly crafted.” — Sydney Morning Herald

“Vivid, shocking and funny . . . a darkly bright, hugely compassionate and oddly redemptive story of loss and failure, guilt and addiction.” — London Independent on Sunday (Best Books of the Year)

“A stark, affecting memoir about a writer seeking to comprehend and overcome his demons.” — Sunday London Times

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