Lifestyle

My best friend is 30 years my senior. Here's what she's taught me about life

Published

1 year ago

August 21, 2024

Press Room

My best friend is 30 years my senior. Here's what she's taught me about life

She was 63.

I was 33.

We shared cocktails at a rooftop bar overlooking Sunset Boulevard during golden hour. And the connection was palpable.

No, this isn’t the start to an “L.A. Affairs” romance column. But it is about a love affair of sorts. My best girlfriend of the last two decades is 30 years older than me.

I met Loraine in 2001. I was newly married and working as an associate arts editor at L.A. Weekly, where I was writing book reviews and covering the arts. A friend introduced us at a literary salon one evening. It was a brief business exchange. We were sitting on the floor of the now-shuttered French-Vietnamese restaurant Le Colonial, cross-legged on silk pillows awaiting the start of the readings. Loraine leaned over and gave me her card, mentioning she had just published a debut novel.

“It’s about marriage, adultery and regular church attendance,” she whispered, clearly pleased with her pithy elevator pitch. I stuffed the card in my purse.

A few weeks later Loraine convinced me to meet her for apple martinis at a rooftop restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. I had been hesitant to spend a free evening with a relative stranger who was a generation-plus older than I and with whom I assumed I had little in common. My friends at the time were all raucous creative types in their 20s and early 30s. Clichés raced through my head: Would she be stuffy or old-fashioned? Would we have anything to talk about? I’d have to watch my manners.

“I’ll be home within the hour,” I told my husband, determined to keep the meeting quick and cordial, a professional nicety.

But our conversation stretched on and on. I learned Loraine had grown up in a small town just north of New Orleans, one of the only Jewish families there at the time. She’d studied art in Paris during college — and she regaled me with stories of ill-fated romances she’d had there — before breaking into Hollywood as a TV writer in the 1970s. She penned what many consider the single most iconic TV show in pop culture history in 1980, the “Who Shot J.R.?” episode of “Dallas.”

“Then I made a pivotal mistake in my career,” she told me.

“What?!” I was rapt.

“I turned 50. That was it. Hollywood stopped calling,” she said, shrugging matter-of-factly. “So I turned to writing novels instead.”

“The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc” would go on to become a national bestseller.

Loraine Despres Eastlake in 2021.

(Wendi Weger)

It was one of those mysterious, pivotal nights. Seemingly benign at the time, it proved to be life-changing in hindsight. Loraine’s resilience and joie de vivre was inspiring. I didn’t for a minute notice the age gap — and haven’t to this day.

Sure, Loraine has curly, silver hair and oversized glasses and, at 86, now walks a tad more gingerly than she used to. But I don’t see an older woman when I look at her; I see the essence of a person, timeless and ageless, housed in a corporeal shell (one that’s in pretty darn good shape, I should add). I see a teenage girl, still ever-curious about the world around her. I see a 20-something women, still evolving through new creative pursuits, most recently poetry writing. I see an accomplished power player in midlife at the peak of a highly successful TV writing career, self-satisfied and oozing with agency. I see a woman, late in life, struggling to unearth new pathways toward creative and intellectual relevance — and succeeding.

Suffice to say: My editor ended up passing on the book review, but Loraine got me instead.

As our friendship blossomed I learned that Loraine was all kinds of fabulous. She was part New York intellectual, part West Coast hippie, part Hollywood elite. Her closet was stuffed with expensive designer clothes, which she often passed over for unassuming yogawear. She drank Prosecco and swam naked in her cobalt-tiled pool. She once convinced me to spend the entire afternoon lying on our backs, in the dirt, beneath an old and glorious oak tree in Franklin Canyon Park, the sun glimmering through the leaves.

Two women wearing sunglasses and lying on their backs on the ground

She knew so much about art, an interest we bonded over and which would become a throughline of our friendship. When I began covering art for The Times, she became one of my go-to plus-ones for museum and gallery openings. We’ve taken that interest abroad too, touring art studios in Cuba, visiting museums in Vienna and, most recently, journeying to Japan’s art island, Naoshima.

I suppose this is where I relay how the three-decade age gap has provided illuminating pearls of wisdom during divorce, career changes and aging woes. But honestly? That’s not been the case. Loraine is there for me in an emergency, but she isn’t the motherly, advice-dispensing type.

Rather, Loraine teaches by example. She’s living proof that fabulousness is about attitude, not age. And that vitality has less to do with hip mobility than it does a sustaining lust for life and unrelenting curiosity about the world. I wonder: Had I not met Loraine, would I be aging, now, with as much ease and universality? Would I be more susceptible to the rigid and relentless stereotypes with which society brands women of a certain age? Loraine is, above all else, a writer. And the narrative she’s crafted for herself — a feminist art scholar turned advertising copywriter and single mother turned happily remarried TV writer turned novelist turned poet — bucks society’s expectations. I hope to continue writing it.

“Oh, it’s so nice you have a surrogate mother in L.A.,” my own mother would often say of Loraine when she visited from the East Coast. Loraine is older than my mom and the fact that I had a “kind of aunt-like person” living nearby brought her comfort.

Loraine would bite her lip whenever my mom said that; but afterward, we’d marvel at the mischaracterization of our friendship. Our conversations are devoid of motherly energy; instead they range from our romantic lives to clothes to books and contemporary art. Our recent Japan trip included several nights at a yurt camp by the sea (which we abandoned due to mold).

Last July Fourth we climbed atop an Echo Park hillside, took edibles and watched the fireworks melting across the sky.

“Really, where do you think we go when we die?” I asked in a haze.

“Beats me,” she said, chuckling. “Pass the nuts, will you?”

Then we burst out laughing.

The beginning of the 2020 pandemic was the first time I ever felt our age gap. Our experiences sheltering in place were very different. I was batch-cooking soup and binge-watching FX’s “Better Things,” relishing what felt like a rare solitude. Loraine became low-level depressed and, as the months of the pandemic turned to years, tinged with bitterness. It was a rare mood for the typically happy-go-lucky Loraine.

“It’s like being robbed of the last years you have left,” she’d say on the phone. “I’m withering here at home.”

Recently, Loraine’s taken to repeating herself, as is the case with almost anyone her age.

“So what are you up to this weekend?” she’ll ask me on the phone, minutes after I answered the question already.

I just politely repeat myself, resigned to a sort of linguistic meditation, learning to enjoy the same conversation threads over and over again.

When we broached the issue recently, she told me, sighing: “I suffer from CRS.”

I braced myself for what that meant.

“Can’t Remember Shit,” she said, laughing — one of her long, loose chuckles that trails off with a cheery whine, as if she were a flapper wielding a cigarette holder in the air, head tossed back in the wind. “It is what it is.”

I’ve found myself using that phrase a lot lately: It is what it is. Loraine may not overtly mentor me in life, but her open embrace of whatever life offers reminds me to be present, to live in the moment.

A woman stands with her arm around the shoulder of an older woman

Thinking about our friendship, I see a supercut of us: the time Loraine and I danced on a cafe rooftop in Cuba to live music; when we sailed through the air on trampolines on my 45th birthday with ’80s music playing over the loudspeaker; the New Year’s Eve we posed for selfies in wigs at a friend’s house; Loraine chasing a flying cockroach around our Miami hotel room as I squealed from atop the bed; her pure, unabashed joy when we rounded a corner in a Naoshima museum recently and she found a Cy Twombly work on display.

We were, in all those moments, 16 and 35 and 86. We meet somewhere in the middle, in the universal mind meld that is true friendship. And I’m grateful for every year of it.

Lifestyle

Doctors says ‘The Pitt’ reflects the gritty realities of medicine today

Published

45 minutes ago

January 9, 2026

Press Room

Doctors says ‘The Pitt’ reflects the gritty realities of medicine today

From left: Noah Wyle plays Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, the senior attending physician, and Fiona Dourif plays Dr. Cassie McKay, a third-year resident, in a fictional Pittsburgh emergency department in the HBO Max series The Pitt.

Warrick Page/HBO Max

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The first five minutes of the new season of The Pitt instantly capture the state of medicine in the mid-2020s: a hectic emergency department waiting room; a sign warning that aggressive behavior will not be tolerated; a memorial plaque for victims of a mass shooting; and a patient with large Ziploc bags filled to the brink with various supplements and homeopathic remedies.

Scenes from the new installment feel almost too recognizable to many doctors.

The return of the critically acclaimed medical drama streaming on HBO Max offers viewers a surprisingly realistic view of how doctors practice medicine in an age of political division, institutional mistrust and the corporatization of health care.

Each season covers one day in the kinetic, understaffed emergency department of a fictional Pittsburgh hospital, with each episode spanning a single hour of a 15-hour shift. That means there’s no time for romantic plots or far-fetched storylines that typically dominate medical dramas.

Instead, the fast-paced show takes viewers into the real world of the ER, complete with a firehose of medical jargon and the day-to-day struggles of those on the frontlines of the American health care system. It’s a microcosm of medicine — and of a fragmented United States.

Noah Wyle plays Dr. Michael "Robby" Rabinovitch in The Pitt.

Many doctors and health professionals praised season one of the series, and ER docs even invited the show’s star Noah Wyle to their annual conference in September.

So what do doctors think of the new season? As a medical student myself, I appreciated the dig at the “July effect” — the long-held belief that the quality of care decreases in July when newbie doctors start residency — rebranded “first week in July syndrome” by one of the characters.

That insider wink sets the tone for a season that Dr. Alok Patel, a pediatrician at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health, says is on point. Patel, who co-hosts the show’s companion podcast, watched the first nine episodes of the new installment and spoke to NPR about his first impressions.

To me, as a medical student, the first few scenes of the new season are pretty striking, and they resemble what modern-day emergency medicine looks and sounds like. From your point of view, how accurate is it?

I’ll say off the bat, when it comes to capturing the full essence of practicing health care — the highs, the lows and the frustrations — The Pitt is by far the most medically accurate show that I think has ever been created. And I’m not the only one to share that opinion. I hear that a lot from my colleagues.

OK, but is every shift really that chaotic?

I mean, obviously, it’s television. And I know a lot of ER doctors who watch the show and are like, “Hey, it’s really good, but not every shift is that crazy.” I’m like, “Come on, relax. It’s TV. You’ve got to take a little bit of liberties.”

As in its last season, The Pitt sheds light on the real — sometimes boring — bureaucratic burdens doctors deal with that often get in the way of good medicine. How does that resonate with real doctors?

There are so many topics that affect patient care that are not glorified. And so The Pitt did this really artful job of inserting these topics with the right characters and the right relatable scenarios. I don’t want to give anything away, but there’s a pretty relatable issue in season two with medical bills.

Right. Insurance seems to take center stage at times this season — almost as a character itself — which seems apt for this moment when many Americans are facing a sharp rise in costs. But these mundane — yet heartbreaking — moments don’t usually make their way into medical dramas, right?

I guarantee when people see this, they’re going to nod their head because they know someone who has been affected by a huge hospital bill.

If you’re going to tell a story about an emergency department that is being led by these compassionate health care workers doing everything they can for patients, you’ve got to make sure you insert all of health care into it.

As the characters juggle multiple patients each hour, a familiar motif returns: medical providers grappling with some heavy burdens outside of work.

Yeah, the reality is that if you’re working a busy shift and you have things happening in your personal life, the line between personal life and professional life gets blurred and people have moments.

The Pitt highlights that and it shows that doctors are real people. Nurses are actual human beings. And sometimes things happen, and it spills out into the workplace. It’s time we take a step back and not only recognize it, but also appreciate what people are dealing with.

2025 was another tough year for doctors. Many had to continue to battle misinformation while simultaneously practicing medicine. How does medical misinformation fit into season two?

I wouldn’t say it’s just mistrust of medicine. I mean that theme definitely shows up in The Pitt, but people are also just confused. They don’t know where to get their information from. They don’t know who to trust. They don’t know what the right decision is.

There’s one specific scene in season two that, again, no spoilers here, but involves somebody getting their information from social media. And that again is a very real theme.

In recent years, physical and verbal abuse of healthcare workers has risen, fueling mental health struggles among providers. The Pitt was praised for diving into this reality. Does it return this season?

The new season of The Pitt still has some of that tension between patients and health care professionals — and sometimes it’s completely projected or misdirected. People are frustrated, they get pissed off when they can’t see a doctor in time and they may act out.

The characters who get physically attacked in The Pitt just brush it off. That whole concept of having to suppress this aggression and then the frustration that there’s not enough protection for health care workers, that’s a very real issue.

A new attending physician, Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi, joins the cast this season. Sepideh Moafi plays her, and she works closely with the veteran attending physician, Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, played by Noah Wyle. What are your — and Robby’s — first impressions of her?

Right off the bat in the first episode, people get to meet this brilliant firecracker. Dr. Al-Hashimi, versus Dr. Robby, almost represents two generations of attending physicians. They’re almost on two sides of this coin, and there’s a little bit of clashing.

Sepideh Moafi, fourth from left, as Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi, the new attending physician, huddles with her team around a patient in a fictional Pittsburgh teaching hospital in the HBO Max series The Pitt.

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Part of that clash is her clear-eyed take on artificial intelligence and its role in medicine. And she thinks AI can help doctors document what’s happening with patients — also called charting — right?

Yep, Dr. Al-Hashimi is an advocate for AI tools in the ER because, I swear to God, they make health care workers’ lives more efficient. They make things such as charting faster, which is a theme that shows up in season two.

But then Dr. Robby gives a very interesting rebuttal to the widespread use of AI. The worry is that if we put AI tools everywhere, then all of a sudden, the financial arm of health care would say, “Cool, now you can double how many patients you see. We will not give you any more resources, but with these AI tools, you can generate more money for the system.”

The new installment also continues to touch on the growing corporatization of medicine. In season one we saw how Dr. Robby and his staff were being pushed to see more patients.

Yes, it really helps the audience understand the kind of stressors that people are dealing with while they’re just trying to take care of patients.

In the first season, when Dr. Robby kind of had that back and forth with the hospital administrator, doctors were immediately won over because that is such a big point of frustration — such a massive barrier.

There are so many more themes explored this season. What else should viewers look forward to?

I’m really excited for viewers to dive into the character development. It’s so reflective of how it really goes in residency. So much happens between your first year and second year of residency — not only in terms of your medical skill, but also in terms of your development as a person.

I think what’s also really fascinating is that The Pitt has life lessons buried in every episode. Sometimes you catch it immediately, sometimes it’s at the end, sometimes you catch it when you watch it again.

But it represents so much of humanity because humanity doesn’t get put on hold when you get sick — you just go to the hospital with your full self. And so every episode — every patient scenario — there is a lesson to learn.

Michal Ruprecht is a Stanford Global Health Media Fellow and a fourth-year medical student.

Lifestyle

In Beauty, Private Equity Is Hot Again

Published

2 hours ago

January 9, 2026

Press Room

As strategic firms slow down their shopping sprees and venture capital dollars dry up, PE firms’ reputation for asset stripping is a thing of the past. Founders are now often hoping for private equity buyouts, but want to be sure there can be a true partnership.

Lifestyle

10 books we’re looking forward to in early 2026

Published

13 hours ago

January 8, 2026

Press Room

10 books we’re looking forward to in early 2026

Two fiction books about good friends coming from different circumstances. Two biographies of people whose influence on American culture is, arguably, still underrated. One Liza Minnelli memoir. These are just a handful of books coming out in the first few months of 2026 that we’ve got our eye on.

Fiction

Autobiography of Cotton, by Cristina Rivera Garza, Feb. 3

Garza, who won a Pulitzer in 2024 for memoir/autobiography, actually first published Autobiography of Cotton back in 2020, but it’s only now getting an English translation. The book blends fiction with the author’s own familial history to tell the story of cotton cultivation along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Crux, by Gabriel Tallent, Jan. 20

Tallent’s last novel, My Absolute Darling, was a harrowing coming of age story about a teenage girl surviving her abusive survivalist father. But it did find pockets of beauty in the outdoors. Tallent’s follow up looks to be similarly awestruck by nature. It’s about two young friends, separated by class and opportunity, but bound together by a love of rock climbing.

Half His Age, by Jennette McCurdy, Jan. 20

The former iCarly actress’ bracing and brutally honest memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, was a huge hit. It spent weeks on bestseller’s lists, and is being adapted into a series for Apple TV+. Now McCurdy’s set to come out with her fiction debut, about a teenage girl who falls for her high school creative writing teacher.

Kin, by Tayari Jones, Feb. 24

Similarly to Crux, Kin also follows two friends across the years as options and opportunities pull them apart. The friends at the center of this book are two women who grew up without moms. Jones’ last novel, 2018’s An American Marriage, was a huge hit with critics.

Seasons of Glass & Iron, by Amal El-Mohtar

Seasons of Glass & Iron: Stories, by Amal El-Mohtar, March 24

El-Mohtar is an acclaimed science-fiction writer, and this book is a collection of previously published short stories and poetry. Many of the works here have been honored by the big science-fiction/fantasy awards, including the titular story, which is a feminist re-telling of two fairy tales.

Nonfiction

A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides, by Gisèle Pelicot, Feb. 17

Pelicot’s story of rape and sexual assault – and her decision to wave anonymity in the trial – turned her into a galvanizing figure for women across the world. Her writing her own story of everything that happened is also a call to action for others to do the same.

Cosmic Music: The Life, Art, and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane, by Andy Beta, March 3

For decades, the life and work of Alice Coltrane has lived in the shadow of her husband, John Coltrane. This deeply researched biography hopes to properly contextualize her as one of the most visionary and influential musicians of her time.

Football, by Chuck Klosterman, Jan. 20

One of our great essaysists and (over?) thinkers turns his sights onto one of the last bits of monoculture we’ve got. But in one of the pieces in this collection, Klosterman wonders, how long until football is no longer the summation of American culture? But until that time comes, there’s plenty to dig into from gambling to debates over the true goat.

Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! by Liza Minnelli, with Michael Feinstein, March 20

Minnelli told People that previous attempts at telling her story “didn’t get it right,” so she’s doing it herself. This new memoir promises to get into her childhood, her marriages, and her struggles with substance abuse.

Tom Paine’s War: The Words that Rallied a Nation and the Founder of Our Time, by Jack Kelly, Jan. 6

If you haven’t heard, it’s a big birthday year for America. And it’s a birthday that might not have happened if not for the words of Thomas Paine. This new book from historian Jack Kelly makes the argument that Paine’s words are just as important and relevant to us today.