Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles

Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles is the second book by D.J. Waldie, one of the most gifted writers on the American scene. As Los Angeles Times columnist and NPR commentator Patt Morrison notes in her foreword, “The suburb is America’s lifeline and its punchline, and Waldie is its bard.”

Few observers can present the facts of everyday life with the texture and emotion of a symphony, the way Waldie does. A breathtaking progression from his much-celebrated book Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, Where We Are Now is a compilation of Waldie’s most intriguing recent works and an exploration of the meaning of place in Los Angeles, long regarded as the most “placeless” of American cities.

D.J. Waldie is the author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir and Real City: Downtown Los Angeles Inside/Out. His narratives about life in Los Angeles have appeared in Buzz magazine, Kenyon Review, the Massachusetts Review, the Georgetown Review, Salon and Dwell magazine. His book reviews and opinion pieces appear in the Los Angeles Times. He is a contributing writer for Los Angeles magazine. D.J. Waldie lives a not-quite-middle-class life in Lakewood, in the house his parents bought in 1946.

A writer whose books are a "gorgeous distillation of architectural and social history" (New York Times), D.J. Waldie is the author of the acclaimed Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir and other books about the everyday life in Southern California. In his essays and commentary, Waldie has sought to frame his experience of Los Angeles as a search for a sense of place.