Frantic Transmissions to and From Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir

By Kate Braverman Graywolf Press (February), $15"To actually claim Los Angeles as your city of birth is a brazen admission. It puts you on the defensive, immediately and permanently," claims Kate Braverman in her new memoir. Good God, that is too true. Inaccurately dismissing Southern California as a cultural wasteland or a sprawl of stupidity is a trick used by the pretentious and dim walking among us. You've heard this socially acceptable prejudice before: It's used as an icebreaker at dinner parties -- an attempt to appear wise. L.A.-raised and San Francisco-based Braverman challenges this conceit, and mostly succeeds at proving her point. Jumping around from her impoverished childhood in West L.A. (just before the 5 freeway joined the city to San Diego) to her life as a mother to her move from California to a farm house in the Allegheny Mountains (where she experiences what people on the other coast like to call "real winters"), she writes with restrained humor and a surprisingly gorgeous stream-of-consciousness style we rarely see used effectively these days. What's revitalizing about this memoir is that it's not as plot-heavy and relentlessly wacky as so many autobiographies today. Braverman turns such bourgeois tasks as going to the mall and editing one's address book -- chores to which she devotes entire chapters -- into acts of redemption and "personal evolution." Sure, some parts get slightly bogged down: Her clear love of foliage gets repetitive ("seductive star jasmine," "wind-shredded redwood flakes," "bronzed needles," etc.), and she tries a bit too hard with the nods to her '60s-ish feminist roots ("We share the unprecedented freedom to express ourselves outside patriarchal borders," and so on). Otherwise, her appreciation of both the beauty and the crudeness of her hometown are carefully realized, and her wisdom about Los Angeles as a place of rich and important culture is an essential tool if you're ever confronted with a garden variety cocktail party snob.