California Calling: A Self-Interrogation

by Natalie Singer

Overview

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, The Chronology of Water

California Calling 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. Ultimately, California Calling is a search for a state of belonging.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780998825724
Publisher:	Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts, Incorporated
Publication date:	03/13/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Natalie Singer is the author of the memoir CaliforniaCalling: A Self-Interrogation (Hawthorne Books, March 2018). Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in journals, magazines, and newspapers including Proximity, Lit Hub, Hypertext, Literary Mama, The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, ParentMap, Alligator Juniper, Brain, Child, Largehearted Boy, The Nervous Breakdown, The Cut, Full Grown People and the 2015 anthology Love and Profanity. Natalie has been the recipient of several awards, including the Pacific Northwest Writers Association nonfiction prize and the Alligator Juniper nonfiction prize. California Calling 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)
Natalie Singer has been published in a number of journals, magazines and newspapers, including Literary Mama, the Washington Post, the Seattle Times, ParentMap, Alligator Juniper, and Full Grown People. Her work is included in the anthology Love&Profanity: A Collection of True, Tortured, Wild, Hilarious, Concise, and Intense Tales of Teenage Life published by Switch Press. She won the 2013 Pacific Northwest Writers Association nonfiction award, and was a finalist for the 2016 Red Hen Press and Autumn House Press nonfiction awards. She has taught writing at a state psychiatric facility for youth and at a juvenile detention center, and she has worked as a newspaper reporter and magazine editor. As a writer-in-residence at On the Boards, a contemporary performing arts collective in Seattle, her responses to performances have created a bridge of dialogue between artists and the community. Natalie earned her MFA in creative writing and poetics from the University of Washington. She was born in Montreal, lives in Seattle, and dreams of California.

Table of Contents

Prologue 15

1 Formation 17

2 Preparation 33

3 Interaction 61

4 XXX 131

5 Allegory of a Caretaking 171

6 Ex Parte Examination of the Elements 193

7 In Which New Breaks Away from Old 237

8 Completion 273

What People are Saying About This

Writing Is My Drink - THEO PAULINE NESTOR

In California Calling: A Self-Interogation, Natalie Singer brings the universal themes of longing and displacement to life in a singular, inimitable voice. California Calling is a story of yearning for a home that no longer exists, a story of place—both real and iconic. But most of all this is a book about disruption and an interrogation in which form mirrors content; the questions leveled at the narrator become, in the end, Singer’s questions for the reader, who is left to revisit their own notions of identity, home, and belonging. Natalie Singer is an important writer we’ll be sure to be hearing from for years to come.

Linda Bond

Memoirs can be approached from numerous angles: a bit of chronological history, for instance; a slice out of the middle of a life, or just the memory of a particular set of experiences that recur like some kind of life theme. But California Calling is unlike any memoir you’ve ever read. It’s unlike any memoir I’ve read either. It has to do with immigration, with families that break up, with moving to a new country and a new life. It’s written as though the author is being interrogated. It’s written as though her whole heart is in it. It’s written for her and it’s written for you, and for me and for anyone who is willing to open their heart to the reality of what it means to be an immigrant in our country. Absolutely heart-wrenching and heart-healing. I loved it!

The Chronology of Water - LIDIA YUKNAVITCH

If epic longing for an identity could be cured by entering a story, California Calling: A Self Interrogation is the roadmap. Natalie Singer gives us the beating heart of an immigrant entering that mythic place we call the west. By and through the body of a girl becoming a woman we are reminded just how tricky forging a self is against the fractures and earthquakes and soul fires of life. I could hear and identify with an Eastern European heartsong yearning to find the rhythm called home in the west. I know both of those songs. This book split my heart open and reminded me how much immigrants matter, how much we all carry the traces of of other worlds.

Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning - CLAIRE DEDERER

I couldn’t stop reading California Calling—I consumed it in one gorgeous gulp. Natalie Singer writes beautifully of an ordinary, extraordinary coming of age. In prose that’s lean and elegant and fiercely honest, she captures the big pain and the small, real joys of growing up. This book shimmers like a California dream.

The Gifts of the Body - REBECCA BROWN

Natalie Singer’s wonderful debut is about the myths we tell ourselves about ourselves as nations and individuals, and what we do when we learn about the truth beneath those myths. Singer situates California Calling within the geographic, literary and pop culture of the American West but the story she tells will ring true to anyone who is or knows a daughter, a woman, an immigrant.

Interviews

http://xray.fm/broadcasts/22523

Editorial Reviews

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

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

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

2018-01-08
Singer's first book is a memoir of two obsessions: with California and with finding a place for herself.The story begins with the dissolution of the author's family and her move, at 16, with younger siblings, mother, and stepfather, from Montreal to California, a place with which she has been absorbed for years. "My affair with California begins many years before we meet," writes the author, recalling an early library encounter with a book about the Golden State. "A state?" she wondered. "Like New York, where we drive once a year across the border to do our school shopping, hiding new clothes and shoes deep in our Jeep's trunk on the way back, away from the customs officials so we don't have to pay extra taxes?" Singer's glee at being in California was complicated by a custody battle involving one of her brothers. "Are you sexually active?" That was the question the opposing counsel asked her just before she took the stand on her mother's behalf. It was a treacherous moment, but while Singer draws her structure from it—the book is built, more or less, as a series of interrogations and responses—she is interested in treachery of a more personal sort. The author is at her best when she uses narrative to examine disconnection, as with the Taylors, a family for whom she worked yet never quite belonged. "Two of my own families," she writes, "have already exploded. Nuclear family has not proved successful, but still I am drawn to it." This search for place took Singer north, where she researched a serial killer in Yosemite, though she was really looking for herself. As the book progresses, it becomes less fragmentary. On one hand, that's inevitable given the difficulty of stitching together a book of fragments. On the other, it's disappointing given the strength of her fractured approach.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