Weekend reads: Meghan Daum on the Los Angeles fires

Remembrance of things past: In search of lost stuff

Meghan Daum

The political developments in both Canada and the U.S. have been so fast and furious that I have not yet had a chance to touch on the devastating fires in Los Angeles that saw so many people lose their homes. My friend and colleague, the American essayist and podcaster Meghan Daum, is one of them.

A month ago, her house in Altadena, California went up in flames, incinerating pretty much everything she owned. In the wake of that blaze, Meghan has published some very moving podcast episodes — you can listen here and here — and has penned a poignant essay for The New York Times about how the crisis made her rethink a lifetime of staunch self-sufficiency. “I will undoubtedly learn countless lessons from this disaster, many of them bitter and unwanted,” she writes in the Times. “But the greatest so far has been the realization that help plays by the same rules as love. In order to give it, you must be willing to accept it.”

Meghan, it must be said, is someone who does much to help others, giving them a place to talk through the madness of modern life on her Unspeakable Podcast, and hosting heterodox gatherings that have made so many people feel less alone. (Including yours truly.) If you have any help to spare, you can subscribe to Meghan’s wonderful Substack or leave a tip in the virtual tip jar on that same site. You can also pre-order her forthcoming book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays, here.

Today I bring you an on-the-ground essay from Meghan — originally published at her Substack — offering a window into what so many in L.A. are going through.

— TH

Two days from now will mark exactly one month since the Eaton fire destroyed the house I was renting in Altadena, California. As I watch my neighbors navigate massive and often maddening insurance claims while also trying to get their minds around the prospect of rebuilding, I know how lucky I was to be a renter. (This is more than a little ironic since home ownership has been my chief preoccupation for the last several years, but I’ll save that discussion for another time.)

As a renter, my loss is not structural. It’s purely material. I lost stuff. As I talked about in the January 16 audio essay, much of the stuff I lost was cheap, disposable nonsense piled on top of valuable stuff. It was as if my house was lined with a layer of soot made of Amazon purchases. Maybe that’s why, as I was gathering my things for my “purely precautionary” evacuation, I looked around the room and thought that there was nothing in my line of vision that probably couldn’t be ordered on Amazon tomorrow.

Technically speaking, I wasn’t entirely wrong about that. The room I was looking around was my office, the second bedroom of a two-bedroom house. It was the room I spent by far the most time in, probably up to 10 hours a day. It was also by far the ugliest, most cluttered, worst decorated, and most cheaply outfitted room in the house. The shelves were from Ikea. The desk chair was from Office Max. The sleeper sofa, a generic beige thing purchased at Living Spaces, was actually quite expensive (and comfortable), but it’s not like I was going to pick it up and take it with me.