Lifestyle
L.A. Affairs: Our home survived the Palisades fire. Our love almost did not
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a quote widely attributed to Tennessee Williams: “We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”
When the Palisades fire broke out in January, forcing my teenage daughter and me to evacuate from our quaint canyon home while my husband was at work on the other side of town, I did my best to gather our most essential items before heading for safety. Drenched in a cold and sudden sweat, I grabbed our family’s passports, a baby album, my vintage Levi’s — tossing them all into a large silver suitcase.
As my girl and I crawled out of Santa Monica, inching our way through a clogged artery of cars, I felt as though I were in a dream: Neighbors lined the streets, loading up the trunks of their cars while a massive plume of black smoke hunted us in our rearview mirror. Between chatting nervously with my daughter and navigating the roads, it occurred to me that I’d forgotten my grandmother’s brass heart-shaped locket. I’d forgotten the framed photo of my husband and me from our honeymoon to Maui decades earlier. While my daughter tried to calm our two panting pups in the back seat, I worried: What else had I forgotten to save?
No one knew at the time that what began as a local wildfire would quickly come to decimate our city; a beloved small town within the larger landscape of L.A. And I had no idea that my own life — specifically my marriage and the little family we’d created — was itself about to be scorched.
When you choose to live in Los Angeles, you do so with the understanding that, at some point, you may be required to brace yourself for all manner of natural disasters. Earthquakes are the one that have always scared me the most. As a little girl living with my mother in Ohio as my father resided in L.A., I used to pray at bedtime that he’d make it through the night. When, at 18, I finally made my way out West for good, I began reciting the same prayer for myself.
Fires weren’t so much on my radar, but as it happens, they have the ability to shift the earth beneath one’s feet just as drastically. After days of uncertainty, staring at the Firewatch app as miles of hillside and countless numbers of homes were reduced to ash, we let out a collective sigh as we learned that our house remained standing. And yet with the entire contents of our home ravaged by toxic soot and smoke, we, along with thousands of others, were displaced, forced to find temporary housing.
Five weeks passed in a fever-dream of Airbnbs and air mattresses until, finally, we were able to secure a short-term lease on a place of our own. It was a minor miracle in the current L.A. market of limited availability and price gouging. Standing in the barren living room of an unfurnished Hollywood rental, my husband and I should have collapsed in relief. Instead, we did what any exhausted couple of 20-plus years might do: We fought.
“I need a break,” he said, jaw clenched.
“What do you mean?” I shot back. But after months of couples therapy, I knew exactly what he meant. He needed a break from us, or, rather, from me. Our dogs barked incessantly.
I dropped my head into my hands and squeezed hard — a futile attempt to contain the chaos in my brain. Tears forced their way through closed lids, streaming hot down my cheeks. As a little girl growing up in the ’80s, one of my favorite movies was “Firestarter,” starring an 8-year-old Drew Barrymore. When enraged or overwhelmed, Barrymore’s character would start fires with her mind. I remember fearing back then that I, too, might have this power, so profound was my pain.
Now, despite decades of my own inner work, despite years of actively trying to not be ruled by the wounds of my past, I couldn’t help but to detonate at the threat of my husband leaving me.
But having a child means that even during times of disaster, natural or self-made, we must carry on. As the days passed, I attempted to blend our old life with our new one by scattering our few family photos around the apartment, helping my daughter navigate a new bus route, dealing with insurance adjusters. Yet as my husband grew increasingly more distant, I sank into a state of despair.
Loss suddenly seemed everywhere. Beyond the many dear friends who lost their homes in the Palisades and Altadena fires, beyond the decimation to our once gorgeous coastline between Santa Monica and Malibu, I thought of my daughter who would soon be off to college, of my ailing father, of my marriage. Unable to eat or sleep, I sought out help. I met with my trusted longtime therapist, emailed my spiritual teacher, road-tripped down to Orange County to visit my best friend. I also met with a grief therapist with whom I’d worked a decade earlier.
“You have some very real, very major things happening. But this isn’t just about now. What does this feeling remind you of, Evan?” she asked, her voice soft and supportive as she leaned in toward the screen separating us.
Suddenly I was no longer idling in my parked car, phone propped up on my steering wheel. I was 9 years old again, unaccompanied on an airplane somewhere above the continental U.S., being hurled between two contentiously divorced parents. As I talked through my present-day experience, I began to understand exactly what had happened between my husband and me on the day of our move; why I had lashed out so fiercely.
Famed psychologist Richard Schwartz, founder of Internal Family Systems therapy, posits that our minds are made up of different sub-personalities much like a family system. He labels some of these parts our exiles — the wounded selves that hold our deepest pain. When my husband questioned our marriage, my exiles, my most fragile, fearful parts felt wildly threatened. That is when my firefighters — our most reactive, protective parts (and no, the irony is not lost on me) — stormed in to shield them unfortunately in the only way they knew how: through rage.
They weren’t trying to destroy my marriage; they were just trying to keep me from once again experiencing the anguish of being launched into the world, alone and afraid.
Every day for over a week, I knelt before a makeshift altar in my bedroom, anchored myself to my breath and performed a most Herculean feat: twice daily, hour-long meditations. Rather than resist my sadness, I allowed myself to feel it fully — even when this meant soaking my T-shirt in tears, even when it felt as though the tears would never stop.
“I can handle my life” became my new mantra.
As I began to experience the sort of clarity and calm that only meditation can bring, I had a powerful insight: I recently trained to work as a doula, supporting women through labor, reminding them that the most unfathomable pain — in life as in birth — comes just before the new version of themselves can be born.
I considered how, for days on end, I’d cried in the shower, doubled over in heartache. I can’t survive this, I’d sobbed to my best friend. You will, she insisted.
I pleaded to the universe to spare me of my suffering, to reverse time, to let me be anywhere but here.
Just like birthing mamas do in the throes of labor.
But as I was recently reminded, our agony isn’t the end of the story. It’s the threshold. And when once we emerge on the other side — and we always do no matter how unlikely our survival may seem — we emerge transformed.
After eight interminable days, it struck me: My husband was suffering just as deeply as I was.
Sitting across from him at a tiny, borrowed wooden table, I chose to tell him: “I understand now. I hear you. I’m sorry.” Suddenly, he softened. My ability to empathize enabled him to see a door where once he’d believed none had existed.
In the end, had I saved love? It’s such an amorphous, ever-evolving entity; I’m not really sure. Though I certainly hope so.
But what I do know now is that this fire hadn’t come to destroy me; it came to show me what was indestructible. It came to show me that I could, indeed, handle my life.
The author is a writer, yoga teacher and doula in L.A. She is at work on a memoir. She’s on Instagram: @evanecooper
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
The Ides of January are already upon us. Which means that by now, most of the sweetly misguided pollyannas who made New Year’s resolutions have already given up on that nonsense. Don’t beat yourself up about it! Travel and exercise would only have hogged your precious reading time anyway.
And boy, is there a lot of good stuff to read already. This week alone, a reader with an active imagination may pay visits to Norway and Chile, China and Pakistan. Later this month brings new releases from big names on either side of the Atlantic Ocean.
(By the way, this year the Book Ahead is transitioning from weekly posts to monthly, for a broader lens on the publishing calendar.)
The School of Night, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Martin Aitken (Jan. 13)
Knausgaard is an alchemist. The prolific Norwegian consistently crafts page-turners out of the daily drudgery you’d usually find sedative rather than thrilling. The same inexplicable magic permeates his latest series, which began with The Morning Star and here gets its fourth installment. Only, unlike projects such as his autofictional My Struggle, Knausgaard here weaves his interlinked plots with actual magic – or supernatural horror, at least, as a vaguely apocalyptic event loosens the tenacious grip of his characters’ daily cares. The School of Night features Kristian Hadeland, an eerie figure in previous books, whose faustian bargain promises to illuminate this mystery’s darkest corners.
This Is Where the Serpent Lives, by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Jan. 13)
The setting in Mueenuddin’s debut novel — a modern Pakistan rife with corruption, feudalism and resilience — thrums with such vitality, it can feel like a character in its own right. But the home of this sweeping saga of class, violence and romance can also be seen as a “distorting mirror,” says Mueenuddin, whose short stories have earned him nods for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. “Without a doubt,” he told NPR’s Weekend Edition, “I’ll have failed miserably if readers don’t see in this a great deal of themselves and of their communities.”
Pedro the Vast, by Simón López Trujillo, translated by Robin Myers (Jan. 13)
It won’t take long to finish this hallucinatory vision of ecological disaster. Getting over Trujillo’s disquieting novella, however, is another matter. The eponymous Pedro is a eucalyptus farmer who has worked the dangerous, degrading job all his life, so it’s to be expected when he’s among the workers who pick up a bad cough from a deadly fungus lurking in the grove. Less expected is the fact that, unlike his colleagues, Pedro does not die but wakes up changed, in ways both startling and difficult to comprehend. This is the Chilean author’s first book to be translated into English.
Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China, by Jung Chang (Jan. 13)
Chang began this story more than 34 years ago, with Wild Swans, a memoir that viewed 20th century Chinese history through the prism of three generations of women — and remains banned in China still. Now, Jung picks up the story where she left off, in the late 1970s when Chang’s departure set her family’s story on heartbreakingly separate paths — her own, unfolding in the West, and that of the family she left behind in China. Jung applies a characteristically wide lens, with half an eye on how the past half-century of geopolitical tumult has upturned her own intimate relationships.
Crux, by Gabriel Tallent (Jan. 20)
It’s been the better part of a decade since Tallent published his debut novel, My Absolute Darling, a portrait of a barbed father-daughter relationship that NPR’s reviewer described as “devastating and powerful.“ In his follow-up, Tallent returns to that adolescent minefield we euphemistically call “coming of age,” this time focusing on a complicated bond between a pair of friends living in the rugged Mojave Desert. It’s an unlikely friendship, as sustaining as it is strained by their unforgiving circumstances, as the pair teeter precariously on the cusp of adulthood.
Departure(s), by Julian Barnes (Jan. 20)
The winner of the 2011 Booker Prize (and finalist for several more) returns with a slim book that’s a bit tough to label. You’ll find it on the fiction shelf, sure, but also, it’s narrated by an aging British writer named Julian who is coping with a blood cancer diagnosis. The lines aren’t easy to find or pin down in this hybrid reflection on love, memory and mortality, which is as playful in its form as its themes are weighty.
Half His Age, by Jennette McCurdy (Jan. 20)
“If I could have shown myself where I am now, I would not have believed it when I was little,” McCurdy told WBUR in 2023. The former child star certainly has undergone a dramatic transformation in recent years — from noted Nickelodeon alum to a writer whose best-selling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, made a pretty compelling case why kid actors “should not be allowed to go anywhere near Hollywood.” Now she’s stepping into fiction, with a debut novel that features a provocative, at times puzzling, courtship and the same black humor that shot through her previous work.
Vigil, by George Saunders (Jan. 27)
One of America’s most inventive stylists returns with his first novel since the Booker Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo. It’s hard not to hear some echoes of A Christmas Carol in this one, which also finds a mean old magnate in need of some supernatural bedside attitude therapy. But don’t expect a smooth show from narrator Jill “Doll” Blaine, the comforting spirit assigned to dying oil baron K.J. Boone. For one thing, the unrepentant fossil fuel monger can expect more than just three visitors in this darkly funny portrait of a life ill-lived.
‘Members Only: Palm Beach’
Hilary Musser’s $42M Waterfront Flex Hits the Market!!!
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Updated
Hilary Musser built a waterfront dream mansion … and now she’s ready to flip it for millions … TMZ has learned.
The “Members Only: Palm Beach” star has officially listed a jaw dropping waterfront mansion she custom built herself in West Palm Beach and the asking price is a cool $42 MILLION.
The estate has been featured on the Netflix series, where viewers have watched Hilary renovate and develop the mansion over an extended period of time and now, the project is finally complete and officially ready for its next high-profile homeowner.
The ultra-luxury estate quietly hit the market at the end of December, and it’s already turning heads for all the right (and outrageous) reasons.
The brand new, fully furnished home packs 7 bedrooms, 11 bathrooms, and spans more than 11,200 square feet of interior space, with roughly 13,370 square feet of total luxury living. Every room opens up to sweeping Intracoastal Waterway views, staring straight at Palm Beach Island’s mega mansions.
The place features a second story pool and spa with 180 degree water views, an outdoor cocktail bar, and multiple outdoor kitchens built for nonstop entertaining. Inside, there’s a private movie theater, wine room, full spa, and not one but TWO full kitchens decked out.
Boat people, listen up … the property comes with a 100 foot deep water dock capable of handling large yachts, making it a true waterfront flex.
Location wise, it’s prime real estate … just minutes from Palm Beach Island and Palm Beach International Airport, perfect for anyone bouncing between private jets and boats.
Bottom line here … Hilary didn’t just build a house … she built a statement, and now someone with $42 million can call it home.
Jodie Foster, shown here in 2025, plays an American Freudian psychoanalyst in Paris in Vie Privée (A Private Life).
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Jodie Foster has been acting since she was 3, starting out in commercials, then appearing in TV shows and films. She still has scars from the time a lion mauled her on the set of a Disney film when she was 9.
“He picked me up by the hip and shook me,” she says. “I had no idea what was happening. … I remember thinking, ‘Oh this must be an earthquake.’”
Luckily, the lion responded promptly when a trainer said, “Drop it.” It was a scary moment, Foster says, but “the good news is I’m fine … and I’m not afraid of lions.”
“I think there’s a part of me that has been made resilient by what I’ve done for a living and has been able to control my emotions in order to do that in a role,” she says. “When you’re older, those survival skills get in the way, and you have to learn how to ditch them [when] they’re not serving you anymore.”
In 1976, at age 12, Foster starred opposite Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel in Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver. Foster’s portrayal of a teenage sex worker in the film sparked controversy because of her age, but also led to her first Academy Award nomination. She remains grateful for the experience on the film, which turns 50 this year.
“What luck to have been part of that, our golden age of cinema in the ’70s, some of the greatest movies that America ever made, the greatest filmmakers, auteur films,” she says. “I couldn’t be happier that [my mom] chose these roles for me.”
In the new film Vie Privée (A Private Life), she plays an American Freudian psychoanalyst in Paris. With the exception of a few lines, she speaks French throughout the film.
Interview highlights
On learning to speak French as a child
My mom, when I was about 9 years old, she had never traveled anywhere in her life and right before then, she took a trip to France and fell in love with it and said, “OK, you’re going to learn French. You are going to go to an immersion school, and someday maybe you’ll be a French actor.” And so they dropped me in where [there] was a school, Le Lycée Francais de Los Angeles, that does everything in French, so it was science and math and history, everything in French. And I cried for about six months and then I spoke fluently and got over it.
On being the family breadwinner at a young age
My mom was very aware that that was unusual, and that would put pressure on me. So she kind of sold it differently. She would say, “Well, you do one job, but then your sister does another job. And we all participate, we’re all doing a job, and this is all part of the family.” And I think that was her way of … making my brothers and sisters not feel like somehow they were beholden to me or to my brother who also was an actor. And not having pressure on me, but also helping her ego a bit, because I think that was hard for her to feel that she was being taken care of by a child. …
There’s two things that can happen as a child actor: One is you develop resilience, and you come up with a plan and a way to survive intact, and there are real advantages to that in life. And I really feel grateful for the advantages that that’s given me, the benefits that that has given me. Or the other is you totally fall apart and you can’t take it.
On her early immersion into art and film
My mom saw that I was interested in art and cinema and took me to every foreign film she could find, mostly because she wanted me to hear other languages. But we went to very dark, interesting German films that lasted eight hours long. And we saw all the French New Wave movies, and we had long conversations about movies and what they meant. I think that she respected me.
I did have a skill that was beyond my years and I had a strong sense of self … [and the] ability to understand emotions and character that was beyond my years. [Acting] gave me an outlet that I would not have had if I’d gone on a path to be what I was meant to be, which is really just to be an intellectual. … It was a sink or swim. I had to develop an emotional side. I had to cut off my brain sometimes to play characters in order to be good, and I wanted to be good. If I was gonna do something, I wanted it to be excellent. So in order to do that, I had to learn emotions and I had to learn, not only how to access them, but also how to control them so that I could give them intention.
Jodie Foster attends the Cannes Film Festival in 1976 to promote Taxi Driver.
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On sexual abuse in Hollywood
I’ve really had to examine that, like, how did I get saved? There were microaggressions, of course. Anybody who’s in the workplace has had misogynist microaggressions. That’s just a part of being a woman, right? But what kept me from having those bad experiences, those terrible experiences? And what I came to believe … is that I had a certain amount of power by the time I was, like, 12. So by the time I had my first Oscar nomination, I was part of a different category of people that had power and I was too dangerous to touch. I could’ve ruined people’s careers or I could’ve called “Uncle,” so I wasn’t on the block.
It also might be just my personality, that I am a head-first person and I approach the world in a head-first way. … It’s very difficult to emotionally manipulate me because I don’t operate with my emotions on the surface. Predators use whatever they can in order to manipulate and get people to do what they want them to do. And that’s much easier when the person is younger, when the person is weaker, when a person has no power. That’s precisely what predatory behavior is about: using power in order to diminish people, in order to dominate them.
On her decision to safeguard her personal life
I did not want to participate in celebrity culture. I wanted to make movies that I loved. I wanted to give everything of myself on-screen, and I wanted to survive intact by having a life and not handing that life over to the media and to people that wished me ill. …
What’s important to consider is that I grew up in a different time, where people couldn’t be who they were and we didn’t have the kinds of freedoms that we have now. And I look at my sons’ generation, and bless them, that they have a kind of justice that we just didn’t [have] access to. And I did the best I could and I had a big plan in mind of making films that could make people better. And that’s all I wanted to do was make movies. I didn’t want to be a public figure or a pioneer or any of those things. And I benefited from all of the pioneers that came before me that did that hard work of having tomatoes thrown at them and being unsafe. And they did that work and I have thanked them. I thank them.
We don’t all have to have the same role. And I think my role was making movies that mattered and creating female characters that were human characters and creating a huge body of work and then being able to look back at the pattern of that body of work and go like, “Oh wow, Jodie played a doctor. She played a mother. She played as a scientist. She played an astronaut. She killed all the bad guys. She did all of those things — and had a lesbian wife and had two kids and was a complete person that had a whole other life.” And I think that will be valuable someday down the line, that I was able to keep my life intact and leave a legacy. There’s lots of ways of being valuable.
Lauren Krenzel and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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