"They don’t exist for the dead, they exist for the living"

Today I took a long walk through the outer reaches of my neighborhood. I’d just dropped my car off at a strip mall auto repair place, and the way home took me down a particularly unloved stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard, crowded with shuttered storefronts, crawling traffic, dubious enterprises. Recalling it now a few hours later, I can remember only the used furniture stores (because I have tracked them from my car window, before) and the prostrate bodies of three unhoused neighbors wrapped in blankets, their compromised privacy intersecting with my public movement through space.

The last few years have been some of the most indoor of my life. On weekdays I normally either walk my child to or from school, and if I’m lucky I get to the pool to swim, but otherwise, usually, I am at home, working or taking my leisure. We try to get out on weekends, and on rare, special occasions, I go out alone at night, or we get a babysitter and go together. Most days, there are only so many hours after school before bedtime, and those are for dinner and bath. Mostly, our apartment is my spaceship, a sanctuary whose power I value—and fear—more than ever after my experience evacuating from the wildfires at the beginning of January. Value because it is my home and it is safe. Fear because it can be taken from me, because I’m not sure who or where or what I am without it.

It wasn’t always this way. I didn’t always live here. In the first two and a half years I lived in my neighborhood, my partner and I took long walks all the time, almost every day, with the languorous curiosity of lockdown, but having a small child has cut down on those walks. And we rarely walked in the direction I did today, then.

I passed a man resting resting, or trying to, in front of a sleek, newly constructed black wall, erected to protect a small courtyard with pointy landscaping behind a gate with a keypad. The world felt ugly; I could understand, in a way I often think I don’t, why people think everything is terrible. The pedestrians I passed seemed hassled and sore, like me. The unfriendliness of our built environment to pedestrians was achingly obvious. I missed some imaginary past—probably just a different, more familiar block—where the air was sweet and life easy.

Yet above me were flowering trees, and around me many, many, many people living their lives. The world hurt; the world went on; I was scared; it was a mood; I love my life; I love L.A. My partner met me with our kid and we walked home. On the last block before our building, we met our mail carrier, sitting in her parked truck. She handed my son three oranges, one for each of us, the second time she has given us this gift.

I think about writing a slick essay about the last two months, beginning with our flight from the fires, the six weeks we spent at my mother-in-law’s house in Northern California, the jagged return during which I was so afraid. I have been afraid a lot, and I have also known ease and calm, laughter, beauty that helped me.

Partly I resist writing this essay because it feels canned, as a response. Mainly I am locked in a series of reactions, managing my fear, learning to breathe between its acute moments. I am hoping—I am working towards—those pauses for breath becoming long enough to yield more words, more writing, here and in the project ideas that come to me all the time. Books that might be essays, essays that might be books, two novels. In this way I am connected to my creativity, and here in this newsletter (and elsewhere, in my life), I am connected to community. One of the few things I’ve been able to figure out is that I’ll need to keep these channels open, that doing so is my work, now and in the days ahead.

The last time I sent out a Not Knowing How was a few days before a wonderful event celebrating How We Know Our Time Travelers by Anita Felicelli at Womb House Books, thanks to the incredible generosity of proprietor Jessica Ferri. I was so moved to see everyone who showed up. That evening turned out to be a true cross-section of people from my life, including a few friends I hadn’t seen in a very long time and one I’d never met in person before. It was excellent medicine for the trauma of becoming (however temporarily) a climate refugee.

Thus it feels appropriate that the next edition of this newsletter features an interview with Jessica Ferri herself! Jessica will be in conversation with Sarah Rose Etter about her new book Buried Hollywoodland: The Cemeteries of Los Angeles at friend-of-the-newsletter bookseller Sunny’s Bookshop at 7 PM this Saturday, March 15—get your free tickets here!

Jessica is my old friend, and generously agreed to answer some questions about her ongoing project of documenting historic cemeteries—Buried Hollywoodland is the fourth book Jessica has written on the topic!

Where did the idea for your series of books about graveyards come from? What was the originating inspiration?

I’ve always been interested in cemeteries since I was a child; I think the curiosity came from the feeling of stigma, the idea that I wasn’t allowed or supposed to visit them. It doesn’t hurt that they are spectacularly beautiful. I was also–I still am–a hardcore Wednesday Addams, Thackery Binx what took thee so long, kind of gal. 

As a young adult I made it a habit to visit cemeteries any time I traveled to a new place, and that’s when I started taking photographs and learning more about their individual histories. I was standing on top of the incredible cemetery in Hong Kong when it dawned on me that I needed to write a book about cemeteries. 

What has researching and visiting graveyards taught you?

When it became more than a curiosity and a true obsession, and the project of Silent Cities (my first two cemetery books) presented itself, I was fascinated to learn about the history of the funeral business in America, in particular the history of the memorial park cemetery popularized by Forest Lawn in Los Angeles, and the social implications of burial grounds, most notably in the form of racism, the racial “covenants” that barred people of color from burial, leading to segregated sections or separate cemeteries altogether. 

Writing these books has also taught me, more personally, just how terrified we are of death as a society. Some people can’t tolerate the idea of talking about their mortality at all. The idea of walking through a cemetery for pleasure is something that really scares some people on a visceral level.  

When you visited L.A. as our criticism guest at the Antioch MFA in December 2023, I had the pleasure of exploring Holy Cross Cemetery with you. Holy Cross is right across the street from Antioch; it’s where Sharon Tate is buried. I remember standing next to you as you photographed her grave. What does it feel like to be graveside like that? Do you talk to the departed in any way?

Holy Cross is so beautiful, you’re so lucky to be right across the street at Antioch! 

Sharon Tate’s murder is horrific and tragic, and the Tate-LaBianca murders are terrifyingly known to most Americans. Standing at Sharon Tate’s grave is an overwhelming emotional experience. I know some see this kind of engagement as a tasteless kind of death tourism, but I don’t believe in policing others’ grieving and relationship to death. Mourning for a celebrity is one of the only expressions of grief we tolerate in our society. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with making a pilgrimage to see that person’s grave if that means something to you. I do talk to the deceased, especially if I’m alone, I’ll spend some time, and just say hello, do a little tidying up. 

The last time I was at Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills there were two pre-teen boys who asked me if I knew where Paul Walker was buried, because they wanted to pay their respects! And they left him little hot wheels. 

When you enter a cemetery, what are you looking for? What inspires you to take pictures? What inspires you to write about individual graves?

I usually have to have some kind of game plan, especially if it’s a large cemetery that isn’t walkable. You absolutely have to walk, to see anything. Even the smallest cemeteries are packed to the brim with secrets. I usually look for major memorials or “notable” graves, but often my favorite things that I notice in the cemeteries are just people! I love portraiture and I love flowers. The artwork in cemeteries (the stone work, the mausolea, the marble, the sculpture) is mind-blowing. It’s basically a photographer’s dream because everything is still, and the light is incredible. 

How do you see your cemetery histories in your larger body of work as a bookseller, essayist, book critic, and novelist?

This is a good question. Silent Cities San Francisco, in particular, helped me to learn that I am a photographer. I never thought of myself as a “photographer” but rather a writer who took photos to help with research. After I wrote Silent Cities New York there were many illuminating moments, one in particular at Woodlawn Cemetery, where I realized that my photographs were good. And then when the book was being put together, there were over 150 photographs of mine in it! I went into Silent Cities SF with more confidence as a photographer and I think that shows in those photographs and in the two new books, as they are true photo books. 

I’m dying (pun intended) to take more photographs and I’d love to do more and more work with photography. I’m offering memorial photography services but so far no one has taken me up on this. I have two more cemetery books planned for next year, and I’m very excited about those.

I think the research element for these books has undoubtedly made me a better writer. Writing about history and about real people and their families and lives carries a weighty responsibility. Writing in general, but especially about history (and American history at that) is a revealing experience that has helped me to ask questions about marginalized communities and people, which is certainly part of my work as a writer in any genre, but also as a bookseller, certainly. 

Gosh, don’t say novelist in print — I am determined to finish this novel, but I think obsessiveness about any topic is something that I really love reading in fiction. I should probably figure out a way to funnel my obsession about cemeteries into fiction. 

Has your relationship to death been changed by this project? Has your relationship to life?

I can’t think of anything more humbling and invigorating than the reminder that life is short, and precious, and that people don’t live forever. Cemeteries give us this gift, and they don’t exist for the dead, they exist for the living. The project of loving cemeteries helps me to live in the present, and to see people as human beings who are fallible and mortal. 

Allow me to plug the many projects of my incredibly productive (and gifted, but of course I am biased) partner Jasper Nighthawk. His newsletter Lightplay is back and better than ever, with a new essay about how I was right that a trip to the museum wouldn’t mess up our kid’s nap.

Somehow, despite having two jobs and doing at least 60% of the parenting at any given time so that I might recline and observe my two beloveds from my settee, Jasper has also managed to launch a new podcast, the delicious, ASMR-adjacent vignette series You Know What’s Good? Try it, you’ll like it!

Thanks for reading. I will see you when I see you, and I’m trying to see you more.

Thank you to Jessica Ferri for generously doing this interview on short notice, and thank you for reading!

All photos in this newsletter are by Jessica Ferri, except for the art for You Know What’s Good? which is perhaps obviously by Jasper Nighthawk.

Stay safe, everyone, and rest well.