Sonya Walger lost everything when the Palisades fire swept through Malibu and razed her family’s home, high on a promontory in the Big Rock neighborhood. “It was a way of life, of country living,” says Walger, who is temporarily sheltering with her husband and two children at a friend’s Santa Monica home.
A voracious reader, Walger lost, among other treasured items, her vast book collection, which contained everything from contemporary fiction and Romantic poetry to treasured childhood books with her annotations scrawled in the margins. Those lost journals were the raw material for Walger’s first novel, “Lion,” a book of reclaimed memory being published at a time of incalculable loss for Walger and her family,
A fine-grained and beautifully observed piece, “Lion” — out Tuesday — is the story of the fraught and often-harrowing dynamic between a loving, whip-smart daughter and her unstable, charming, self-obsessed father, and how the push and pull of their relationship leads over time to a slow and irretrievable rupture. Narrated by the daughter (no one in the novel is given a formal name), “Lion” is laid out like a mosaic; disparate scenes from the long arc of the two characters’ lives rub up against each other in a seamless narrative that darts back and forth across time. The story functions like memory itself; the narrator’s past informs the present.
“Lion’s” rakish narcissist Dad is based on Walger’s father, who divorced her mother when Walger was young and thereafter kept his life at arm’s length even as his daughter longed to bridge the gap. “I have always struggled with this idea of how to capture oneself on the page, to sort of replicate experience and trap it in the amber of words,” says Walger, an actor who has had recurring roles in the shows “Lost” and “For All Mankind.” “And it seems to me, when I was rereading my journals, that they are also fictions of a sort. This is not my life. It is a story I have told about my life.”
“Lion” is on some level an act of reclamation, a chance for Walger to introduce her children to the grandfather they never knew. “They were so young when he died,” she says. “And it hurt me to think that they didn’t know his stories, because they are such extraordinary stories.”
The novel begins at the end, in the aftermath of a skydiving accident that gravely injures the father. From there, Walger conjures up a man of action, a jet-setting adventurer who twirls through Peru and Argentina in a grand act of improvisation, a boom-and-bust cycle of riches and penury, sexual conquest and prison time. For Walger’s narrator, the father becomes a mythical figure of sorts who runs on gut instinct and drug-induced adrenaline. Suffice it to say, he doesn’t have the time or the patience for child-rearing.
Many of the book’s anecdotes come from Walger’s journals. “My memory is horrible,” she says. “So I went to the journals and sifted through the memories and started assembling the moments. Then, like a little piece of cold clay, I just worked them and worked them, until they warmed up.” It was only when she had set down a critical mass of these stories that the notion of creating analogues between her father and Walger’s life as a child and a parent began to coalesce in her mind. “I wanted to make this parallel between how I parent and how I was parented, and how this is how we become who we are and how we take stock of who we are.”
Walger’s life path was radically divergent from her father’s. She earned honors in English at Oxford University while taking roles in local theater productions, and came to L.A. in 2000, when she landed her first significant part on the HBO series “The Mind of the Married Man.” She credits her mother with keeping her on the steady path. “I can’t overstate what it has been like to live in the care of my mother,” she says. “I don’t think I would be who I am without her.”
Fiction writing has been an abiding interest, even after Walger’s acting career gained traction. “I read everything. Books have been my North my entire life,” she says. “But it’s allowed me to be deeply intimidated by the idea of writing and of publishing a book. I hold the bar so high for myself.” Walger struggled with “Lion” at first, until she landed upon the idea of using the continuous present tense as the “thread of beads” that holds together its nonlinear narrative. “Then it came really fast,” she says. “I had found the door I needed to walk through.”
The door is still open. Walger has completed another novel, which will be published early next year, and is working on her third book, which she managed to rescue from the fires — among the few items she retrieved are three notebooks that contain the first draft of the book. “I only allow myself to read good books,” she says. “If a book is bad, I throw it across the room! I knew ‘Lion’ had to be something I would want to read.” She is hoping that others feel the same.
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