Talking Location With author Stéphanie Buelens – LOS ANGELES

4th September 2020

#TalkingLocationWith… author Stéphanie Buelens – LOS ANGELES

While writing An Inconvenient Woman, I was working as a free-lance French teacher, going to movie studios and company headquarters or meeting private clients in coffee shops or in their homes.  In that way, I discovered Los Angeles’ web of streets.

As I built the story for my book, the avenues, boulevards and streets began to connect one story with another.  They led from the seediness of Venice Beach, where a mute young girl draws a sinister house on a concrete wall, to the luxurious mansions of Bel Air.

LA is rich with famous locales, everything from the Santa Monica Pier, with its iconic Ferris wheel, to the fabled movie sets at Universal City.

The city also offers a myriad of restaurants.  One of my favorite spots is the charming Little Next Door in West Hollywood.  And for tapas, there is A.O.C on Third Street.

As a French teacher, Claire, one of the two main characters in An Inconvenient Woman, explores the city, her mind continually alert to its ever-shifting scenes.  Through her eyes, the book becomes a travel guide for moving around Los Angeles.  With Claire, readers visit LACMA, the great art museum where she meets the man who will later try to destroy her, Hollywood, with its towering sign, the quiet cemetery of Angelus Rosedale Cemetery, where her daughter lies buried, and the sunlit tables of Bar Verde, as the plot coils into a noose around her neck.

LACMA

Living in LA, I learned that it is a town fueled by big dreams and passionate dreamers.  When Emma Stone sings about that aspect of the city in the movie La La Land, she nails it perfectly.  Los Angeles really is at times “a beautiful mess.”

There are many LA’s and some aren’t messy at all.  There is nothing but order and clear purpose, for example, inside the gleaming, high-tech medical complex that makes up Cedars-Sinai.  The spacious promenades of Santa Monica are perfectly designed for leisurely strolls.  And, of course, the walled villas of the rich and famous in Beverly Hills speak of a world far away from the struggles of daily life that go in Watts and Compton.

Angelus Rosedale Cemetery

This variety is reflected both by the high-end shops at the Grove or along Rodeo Drive and the countless small streets filled with art galleries, vintage shops, and small restaurants in neighborhoods along Melrose Avenue at the border between Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, and Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice.

In short, the LA that Claire sees is a mirror ball of reflections.

The book’s other narrator is Sloane, the female “sin-eater” Claire’s husband hires to stop Claire from being so very “inconvenient.”  For Sloane, LA is the seat of memory, the place that contains the unsolved mysteries of her troubled past.  With her, we tour another, very different LA, the demi-monde of hidden lives that is Sloane’s trechearous milieu.

For both these women, as well as for me, LA is a fascinating location, its people reaching for a dream, the perfect setting for a story that deals with the energy it takes to go on despite difficulty, to seek meaning in a world where it is often hard to find, and at last, to search for truth in a place often associated with artifice and fantasy when, in fact, it is a palpably real city whose core identity remains elusive even to those who live here, but where, without doubt, dreams really do come true.

Stéphanie Buelens

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