L.A. Women
It’s 1975, and Lane Warren is an L.A. fixture, a legendary writer and journalist and now a mother of twins. But it’s clear all is not quite as it seems in Lane’s life, or in the life of her sometime friend, Gala, who appears to have gone missing. Lane is writing a book, loosely based on her missing friend, and as the novel switches back and forth between 1975 and ten years earlier when the two women first meet, a tantalizing portrait of a friendship and a writing rivalry gradually emerges.
Los Angeles almost feels like a character in this book, one that is vividly and affectionately portrayed, warts and all. Berman’s characters have their ‘warts’ too. The central figure, Lane, is a complex character – ambitious, driven, self-important, and emotionally trapped by the demons of a difficult childhood. Gala, on the other hand, suffers in her own way from the happiness of her childhood, finding her parents’ perfect marriage is a hard standard to live up to. Much less inhibited than Lane, Gala’s openness to drugs and experimentation have harsh consequences, while Lane, struggling with her career, secretly sticks the knife in Gala’s budding writing career.
While I avidly turned the pages, keen to find the answers to Gala’s disappearance, the relationship between the women, on which so much of the story hangs, didn’t always ring true for me. They’re drawn to each other despite their dissimilarities and are able to understand each other at a deep level with apparent ease, while spending very little time in each other’s company. Like R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface, L.A. Women tackles competition and betrayal in the writing world, and for a woman in the 1970s there’s no doubt success was hard to attain and retain. Lane is a hard character to warm to, however.
