D.J. Waldie is one of the most resonant and enduring voices of Los Angeles. To wit, Waldie’s first book, “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir,” his account of growing up within and alongside the City of Lakewood, is still in print, 30 years after it was first published. But this isn’t to say that his perspective has remained in what he calls “one nondescript, very ordinary corner of southeast L.A. County,” even if he himself has — he’s lived there for his entire life, 77 years as of last month. In Waldie’s subsequent three books, including his newest, “Elements of Los Angeles” (published in September from Angel City Press), he’s expanded his point of view to cover all of Los Angeles, both the place itself and the idea of it.
Waldie’s lens has shifted somewhat too, from a personal history in the city, to the history of the city. The stories Waldie shares about L.A., however, are nothing resembling a dry accounting. Rather, they read like a memoir of the place, told through long-forgotten tales and evocative anecdotes, like the life of the sacred Kizh-Gabrieleño El Aliso tree in Union Station, to the history of L.A.’s streetlamps. Reading Waldie’s essays about Los Angeles is not unlike listening to someone tell you the stories of their life.
I recently joined Waldie at Willmore Wine Bar in Long Beach, one of the quiet institutions that lends itself to the lesser-known sides of the county he captures in his writing. Over a glass of wine, we spoke of how one must know Los Angeles’ past in order to shape its future, and how that knowing is an act of love. In many ways, our conversation was a master class in loving Los Angeles. But lest you worry that Waldie’s love has blinded him to the complexities and indignities of this place, let me offer this caveat from the author himself: “I make no claims about utopias or perfect places. This is a very imperfect place observed by a very imperfect man.”
Claire Salinda: Over the 30 years that you’ve been writing and publishing books, you’ve rightly been called the bard of Los Angeles. What do you make of that?
D.J. Waldie: I try to tell the city’s story, but it’s also from a particular perspective, because I have a point to make to readers in my material. I’m pretty serious about why learning more about the past in Los Angeles is important.
CS: There’s a question that runs through your third book, “Becoming Los Angeles”: “Can awareness of the city’s past be of any worth to us except as nostalgia or irony?” You then offer an answer of sorts, suggesting that we can no longer depend on fabricated images of L.A., and that an “attunement” to the past, to our history, “makes it possible to reinhabit places abandoned by indifference and to dwell there.”
DW: That’s the best statement of the broad purpose I have in writing, which is to engage readers in the acquisition of a sense of place that contains all the things you’ve just read.
I think a lot of very bad decisions have been made in the political sphere, about housing, about employment, about unsheltered people, about the political process itself. A lot of very bad decisions over the last 40 years have been made in part because Angelenos don’t know very much about their own history. They’re unaware of how much the past impacts them, how much of the past is present in the today. So I’ve tried to blend historical insight and contemporary perspectives — to suggest to my readers that an awareness of the burdens of the past, and awareness of the impact of the past, and awareness that there is a past is important to them.
CS: How do you come to decide on those histories you share with your readers?
DW: The stories come to me because they’re just really interesting and a little off-center from the conventional narrative of Los Angeles. So that’s pretty easy, actually, because the conventional narrative of Los Angeles is terribly clichéd. If you step a little way away from the clichés, you find all kinds of interesting things.
I like stories that reveal this big thing called Los Angeles in a different light — that suggest that maybe we’ve been getting it wrong for a while. And if we looked at some of these stories, we would be getting it more right. I don’t think I have the right answers to all the questions. But I do have the capacity to ask a different question about Los Angeles than the one you typically ask about Los Angeles.
CS: Your relationship to history is especially compelling given that you are a renowned memoirist via your first book, “Holy Land.” And now you’re writing as a historian, making you an expert in both the history of yourself and of your city.
Something I experienced while reading your new book, “Elements of Los Angeles,” was the juxtaposition of history and now, and a braiding of them that made the experience of reading feel like I was living Los Angeles’ past, present and future, all in the same moment. It felt, in many ways, like I was reading a memoir of a place.
DW: I practice a form of history writing that emphasizes something that the sociologist Kathleen Stewart has emphasized, and which other academics have pointed out in my work, which is the notion of something called “affective history”: history that feels like something. So I write history in hopes that you, the reader, or any reader, will read it and feel something. Not simply acquire a bit of information or some facts, but will actually feel something. And that’s why the memoir part comes into a book that maybe is mostly about history.
I go from my personal experience, my inner life, to my life in the public sphere. I go from the personal to the political. And I’m hoping that my readers will go from their personal experience to, if you will, a political understanding. Not a particular kind of politics, but their ability to engage in their community as a political entity. To make good decisions about what their community should be like, and how we should evolve.
CS: In “Elements of Los Angeles,” you write: “Something always wants to deconstruct this city.” It’s easy to think of the National Guard deployment and ICE’s unrelenting terrorism as two current examples of that “something.” How do we remedy that attempt at destruction? How does Los Angeles come back together?
DW: That perplexes me greatly. You’ve repeated back to me some things that sound like I’m trying to struggle toward a philosophy of how a place can become a place to people who live there. And I will keep on repeating this, because it is kind of the constant theme: If you don’t fall in love with a place, it doesn’t become real to you, and if it’s not real to you, then you can ignore it. You can disregard it. You can be indifferent to the shocks that are pulling it apart, and you can be unaware of the political forces that are working on that place, that perhaps are not the best things that are happening there. Perhaps there have to be other forces brought into play. So my highly romantic formulation of what we’ve been talking about so far is to fall in love with the place where you are.
Many times, people talk about Los Angeles, and they talk about things like cultural or ethnic or racial diversity. They talk about the richness of the natural environment. They talk about the cultural aspects of Los Angeles that are real and deep. Some even talk about history. And all of that’s very important, critically important. But you don’t make Los Angeles work properly until a sufficient quantity of people have fallen in love with it.
CS: Something I’ve noticed throughout your writing is that your love of Los Angeles is not plainly stated, and nor is it romantic. It’s a true love, and not in a singular sense but in the way that true love demands honesty, a truth. It’s a less accessible kind of love than a romantic one, both in how it is earned and how it is expressed.
DW: Yes, I’ve spent my writing life turning away from the booster mythologies, the dreamscape mythologies, the Hollywood mythologies, like Tinseltown mythologies. I realize all those mythologies are real. They’re part of our present reality. I can’t unfeel them, unthink them. But I turn away from those things, maybe with a certain degree of stoicism, to focus on other stuff about Los Angeles. Los Angeles was one of America’s most seductive and successful lifestyle products sold to America from the end of the 19th century onward. And now here we are in 2025 and all of that hyperactive selling seems a little tinny, a little shallow, a little false … maybe more than a little.
And so what’s left? We have to find something else to replace that. It’s about turning away from the mythologies — recognizing that they’re part of our reality — but turning away from them to find other reasons to be engaged in everyday life in the place where you are.
CS: You’ve brought up 2025 and the disabuse of the notion that Los Angeles is a frivolous place because this year, we’ve found ourselves in the spotlight, and not for the usual Tinseltown reasons.
DW: One of the reasons why, it seems to me, Los Angeles has been a target recently of the Trump regime is because he sees Los Angeles as somehow destabilizing his authoritarian framework. I think Trump and the Trump regime have bought into the idea that Los Angeles is too magically different, too magically dangerous to be allowed to be Los Angeles.
How do we now talk about Los Angeles, when it’s not that city of glamour or whatever the mythology you might have brought to it? It’s not the days of the dons and this fantasy Spanish past. If it’s not any of the things that have been said about Los Angeles, even internalized by Los Angeles, how do we now talk about it?
Now we have to have a chance — for the first time in a long time — to make Los Angeles. If the big thing called Los Angeles has been misunderstood, mischaracterized, mythologized, tarted up as a lifestyle product for so many decades, if all that’s true, and I think it is, then when we recognize all of that and turn away from it — not disavowing it, but turning away from it — then we do get a chance to make the city anew. And that’s kind of what my books are about, how I, as an observer of the history and the present of Los Angeles, tried to make it anew.
CS: Returning to love, what do you love most about L.A.?
DW: The air, the light.
There are so many things about Los Angeles that transcend the isolated copings of the communities of this place that connect A to B through the gray area that no one pays attention to. The light of Los Angeles is one of those tissues. It is a tissue that connects all of us. The air of Los Angeles connects all of us.
The sounds of Los Angeles too. Because as a pedestrian, I’m on the street all the time. My aural ecology is different from a driver’s. I’m listening to footsteps. I’m listening to the creek of older bicycles and the whiz of electric bicycles. I’m listening to birdsong. The aural environment is filled with birds singing throughout most seasons of the year. I don’t know much about birds, and I’m not a bird watcher, but those sounds are very meaningful to me.
They fill what might be understood as a blank space in everyday life with something. So I walk through the blank spaces of Los Angeles, and it’s filled with sensation, filled with things I can taste and smell and hear and see.
CS: And what do you find most confounding about Los Angeles?
DW: Public indifference. Coldness in this warm environment we live in.
Disdain, disdain. You can be dissatisfied with Los Angeles. You can not care for its qualities that I’ve just described. But if you disdain them, I think you’re being intellectually and emotionally unjust. You are not paying attention. Part of what my writing is, particularly when it moves into its memoir mode, is about paying attention. Los Angeles is so distracting, and it’s so easy to be distracted. It’s effort to pay attention to the everyday, to the ordinary here.
CS: If you had lived anywhere else —
DW: I could not possibly imagine living anywhere else. You know, lots of people are footloose. They move around a good deal. They like to travel. I’m a barnacle.
CS: A barnacle!
DW: They speak to resilience. They endure the rise and fall of tides and the slap of the waves. I’m a good barnacle.
Claire Salinda is a writer, surfer and tarot reader from Los Angeles and New York. Her work has previously appeared in Image, as well as the Surfer’s Journal, the Missouri Review and Off-Assignment, among others.
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