How L.A.’s writers spent their two-year pandemic

Two years ago, when the pandemic paused life as we knew it and many Angelenos started tending to stricken loved ones, stuck-at-home children and sourdough starters, L.A. writers started tending careers stymied by shuttered bookstores, delayed publication dates and canceled book tours.

Los Feliz mystery writer Charles Finch put fiction aside to write his 2021 memoir, “What Just Happened: Notes From a Long Year.” Highland Park husband-and-wife journalists Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley published “Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine,” which they’d begun researching years before the subject became global news. In May of that long year, a coalition of writers’ organizations petitioned the L.A. City Council for emergency relief. “These artists … are central to the publishing, entertainment, and new media sectors that are a core component of our economy. Our city cannot afford to leave writers behind.”

Shortly after lockdown began, The Times commissioned writers’ quarantine diaries, yielding entries like novelist Anna Solomon’s: “An eight-city tour was in the works. I know my loss is minuscule in the scheme of losses right now. Still, my novel … took years to write.” The June 2020 piece concluded, “It’s well worth listening to these voices, because whatever future we can imagine ourselves into next might depend on them.”

That imagined future is now upon us as we enter Year Three of the ever-mutating, ever-mind-melting COVID-19 pandemic. We asked seven Los Angeles writers what they’ve done with this crazy time and what it’s done to them.

CHANGE OF PLANS

I had just finished “The Committed,” my sequel to “The Sympathizer.” It was supposed to come out later in 2020. The pub date was pushed back to early 2021 because of the pandemic and the fear that the presidential election would distract everyone, which turned out to be true. Just before the lockdown, I had a meeting at a Santa Monica hotel about the TV adaptation of “The Sympathizer.” I stayed behind after the meeting, and the bartender sent me a lot of free cocktails he was experimenting with. I stopped on the way home to buy some pants, figuring I wouldn’t be shopping for a while. Prophetic. That was my last in-store clothing purchase. Proud to say I still fit into those pants. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

The pandemic really forced me to take stock of my efforts. I realized that I’d spent years — years! — working on TV projects that hadn’t gone anywhere, and I had nothing to show for all my effort. I decided to work on some book projects and return to TV dreams only after I’d published some new titles. I synced up with a new literary agent and pretty quickly sold a memoir, so it felt like the universe was applauding my choice! — Michelle Tea

My novel “Interior Chinatown” had just come out, so I was looking forward to a number of festivals and other literary events throughout the spring and summer. They started getting canceled one by one, and then pretty much everything was canceled. — Charles Yu

I was working a novel. But then I was asked to write a story for a special issue of the New York Times Magazine modeled on “The Decameron,” and so I put my novel on hold and read “The Decameron” and wrote a story inspired by it. I also watched [Pier Paolo] Pasolini’s version of “The Decameron” and took careful note that there is no suffering, disease or death anywhere in sight. Just sex and shenanigans. This seemed important. — Rachel Kushner

I was working on short stories, and the one I wrote in mid-March, “The Thirteenth Day,” addressed the pandemic just as it was breaking out. It is set on one of the cruise ships that were turned away from port after port when the infection crept aboard. My agent felt it was too (comically) disturbing to send out under the uncertain circumstances, so he held it until recently. Esquire has just brought it out online. — T.C. Boyle

LOSSES

Two people in my extended family died of COVID, my aunt and my cousin’s dad, and that was very hard and sad. And a third, my uncle, died indirectly from the pandemic, afraid to go to the ER because he didn’t want to get COVID. Priorities of care, of friends and family — yes, those were altered to a degree, but writing is its own inviolable thing. Fiction is a drive, a way to be and feel and live. Nothing could alter that unless I was running for my life. The unexpected is what keeps me sharp. So you can stay home and watch Criterion Channel and read Balzac novels and think you’re living your best life, etc., but something profound goes missing, which is the rush and thickness of a populated world, the angles at which you meet, or don’t, other people. —Kushner

I stayed home, which didn’t affect my writing. But what did was the rise of Zoom. Instead of peace and quiet and isolation, I was constantly on Zoom, teaching, meeting people, doing events, giving talks. It was surprisingly exhausting, although I never left my seat. I didn’t get COVID until recently. Since my 8-year-old son is also positive, he’s been home for the last 10 days, and that has definitely cut into my writing time. — Nguyen

A lot of my writing life is in community, staging and participating in readings, etc. I had a little tour planned for my podcast, with shows confirmed in San Francisco and Portland, Ore., and those had to be canceled, as well as shows here in Los Angeles. The lack of literary community has really affected me, but I also really appreciate the virtual readings and Instagram Lives that I’ve been a part of. I have not gotten COVID! (Knock wood!) —Tea

If it weren’t for COVID, I would have traveled to Florida, where much of my new novel is set, to check out certain locations. I was not able to do that because of the fear of winding up in the ICU with one tube shoved down my throat and the other up my posterior orifice. I relied on memory and what I could glean online to float me through those scenes. P.S. Of course, I saw all this coming back in 2000 with “A Friend of the Earth” and the following year with “After the Plague.” Not that it helps. — Boyle

CONSOLATIONS

I don’t have children. I know that’s a completely different story. But honestly, the pandemic made it easier to focus on my novel. USC, where I teach, went virtual. Sometimes it felt like that classic episode of “The Twilight Zone,” “Time Enough at Last,” where Burgess Meredith finally gets to read all the books he wants after a disaster. On the other hand, it was often difficult to concentrate because everything felt so fraught and uncertain. — Dana Johnson

I had a collection of essays come out during the pandemic, and I did notice that promoting it was a lot easier than it normally would have been. It was just, like, two weeks of being online and then I was done, and selfishly I preferred this more sterile experience to the disorientation of embodying an “author” persona on a book tour, which isn’t part of writing or art and yet can take up a lot of space. — Kushner

It was a godsend to have a project already underway during those first few nightmarish months of quarantine. The book became my main priority — I literally had nothing else to do — and one of my few connections to “normal life.” It’s no exaggeration to say that it was the thing that kept me sane. — Tom Perrotta

I pursued my obsessive/compulsive occupation as always, with the exception that I still haven’t gotten to go back out into society. I finished the story collection “I Walk Between the Raindrops,” which comes out this year, and began the next novel, “Blue Skies,” which I delivered to my publisher last month. — Boyle

LONG COVID

I cannot wait to go on tour and be back out in the world. During this time I’ve realized that being on tour has given me some of the peak moments of my life. This August we’re bringing back an original version of the 1990s feminist performance tour Sister Spit. Co-founder Sini Anderson and I have gathered a great group of writers, including some who published books during the pandemic and didn’t get the chance to promote them. Really hoping everything will be back to normal enough by then. — Tea

It’s been bewildering and frustrating and depressing to have lived this way for more than two years, and these pandemic years also felt inevitable, a slow-moving disaster that we saw coming from the start of the previous presidency. I suppose my writing is and will be in conversation with all of that. — Johnson

I suspect my writing would not be affected by something everyone on the planet was affected by. I go for niche stuff that only I’m interested in and not the headlines. Maybe I’m in denial and repressing, but the past two years are a blur, with the major exception of the George Floyd Rebellion, which was a significant rupture for everyone to actually leave their house, and that’s what I did too. — Kushner

The pandemic didn’t affect my work all that much. What it affected was my brain. I sorely missed going out in public, not where I live but in the larger world, where my release from the confinement of writing is to go out and perform my work before a live audience. Happily, and if Omicron allows it, I will be doing a whole lot of this in the spring, including an appearance at the best book fair of them all — I think you know the one I’m talking about. — Boyle

The pandemic has only heightened my sense of the preciousness of life and the limited time we have on Earth. Better work while I can … — Perrotta

COVID has made me think about how other writers have been influenced by pandemics. What about the Lost Generation of the 1920s? Their aesthetic is usually attributed to World War I, but maybe the 1918 influenza pandemic was also to blame. The Lost Generation sure had a lot of fun and wrote some great novels, so I’m looking forward to all the partying and writing once COVID is done. — Nguyen

Maran is the author of “The New Old Me” and a dozen other books. She lives in Silver Lake.