<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>"The first time Natalie Singer learns about California, she's nine, tucked between library stacks, a Canadian blizzard outside. In a book called All About California, she reads of mythological griffins, rupturing earthquakes, furnace deserts, and Hollywood stars, and an imprinting takes place. Could California be an answer to her dull existence in the nowhere of the North and the family secrets seeping out from behind closed doors? The fantasy of California blooms out of Singer's father's collection of Beach Boys records, her pretty mother's perfect red nails, the boys and men she tries hungrily to connect with, and the haunting memory of being interrogated on a courtroom witness stand. At sixteen, she finally goes west to the place of her obsessions to find out whether you can cure longing with landscape alone. Reckoning with the power that family and cultural myths hold over us, California Calling is a universal coming-of-age story and one woman's lyrical, achingly honest search for a state of belonging."--Provided by publisher.<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><b>This book split my heart open and reminded me how much immigrants matter, how much we all carry the traces of other worlds. LIDIA YUKNAVITCH, <i>The Chronology of Water</i></b> <p/><i>California Calling</i> is a lyrical self-interrogation of obsession, emigration, and identity. Natalie Singer's story opens in a courtroom on a witness stand, where she's forced to testify in a family breakup that changes the course of her life. At sixteen Natalie emigrates from Montreal and the secrets it holds to the golden promise of the California Bay Area, just as her Jewish ancestors fled Russia and went west for a new life. Through uneasy rituals of high school pep rallies and college sex in boats and the backs of pickups, to a summer tracing a serial killer through the heart of Gold Country, to an eventual journalism career in San Francisco and the deserts of Palm Springs, Natalie aches to forge an American identity. At once an intimately unflinching memoir and a probing examination of the family and cultural myths that shape us, California Calling calls upon history, reportage, witness interrogation tactics, music and pop culture, and the iconography of the West to explore whether we can cure loneliness through landscape. <strong>Ultimately, <i>California Calling</i> is a search for a state of belonging.</strong><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br>A mostly compelling book about a complicated question: if identity is made of memory and memory does not cohere, how do we build a self from the shards?-- "Kirkus Reviews"<br><br>In her captivating literary memoir... Singer's story comes through brief and lovely snapshots of moments, captured in language that is visceral and vivacious... a work that is both raw and incandescent, but whose most powerful reveals will perhaps reemerge in the reader's consciousness only after the fact. This is a California that, as promised, truly does belong to all.-- "Foreword Reviews"<br><br>In this searing book... Singer's candor and self-questioning are humbling. She writes with melodic precision and sunshine-soaked imagery, crafting a powerful and memorable memoir.-- "Booklist"<br><br>Love, escape, education, and family... These subjects are intertwined in ways that make for emotionally engrossing reading.-- "Library Journal"<br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br>Natalie Singer is the author of the memoir <cite>CaliforniaCalling: A Self-Interrogation</cite> (Hawthorne Books, March 2018). Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in journals, magazines, and newspapers including <cite>Proximity</cite>, <cite>Lit Hub</cite>, <cite>Hypertext</cite>, <cite>Literary Mama</cite>, <cite>The Washington Post</cite>, <cite>The Seattle Times</cite>, <cite>ParentMap</cite>, <cite>Alligator Juniper</cite>, <cite>Brain</cite>, <cite>Child</cite>, <cite>Largehearted Boy</cite>, <cite>The Nervous Breakdown</cite>, <cite>The Cut</cite>, <cite>Full Grown People</cite> and the 2015 anthology <cite>Love and Profanity</cite>. Natalie has been the recipient of several awards, including the Pacific Northwest Writers Association nonfiction prize and the Alligator Juniper nonfiction prize. <cite>California Calling</cite> was first runner up for the Red Hen Press nonfiction prize and a finalist for the Autumn House Press nonfiction prize. Natalie has taught writing inside Washington State's psychiatric facility for youth and Seattle's juvenile detention center, and she has worked as a journalist at newspapers around the West. She is a 2017-2018 writer-in-residence at On the Boards, a contemporary performing arts collective in Seattle, where her writing responds to the season's works and creates a conversation with the community. Natalie earned her MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from the University of Washington. Originally from Montreal, she lives in Seattle. (@Natalie_Writes)