Lifestyle
Renting used to be a source of shame to this apartment manager’s daughter. Now it’s a knowing comfort
I can barely remember a time when we didn’t live where we worked. Our first property manager job was for a 30-unit apartment building between Beverly Hills and Pico-Robertson. My parents didn’t speak English but got the job anyway because they knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy. There was an elementary school at the end of our magnolia tree-lined street that I couldn’t go to because the Beverly Hills School District allowed only Beverly Hills addresses. I would walk down the block to visit my friend (another apartment manager’s daughter) or to buy a sleeve of blue raspberry sour straws at the Blockbuster around the corner and hear children playing in the well-manicured school yard, but I never once saw an actual child. This was how I learned to perceive wealth in Los Angeles: near, but just out of reach.
Even at the age of 6 or 7 or 8, I knew that this was all temporary. Renting is inherently provisional, especially when you’re not actually paying rent. I made the most of it. While my mother cobbled together a career as a bookkeeper and my father assumed the role of both the maintenance guy and the manager of the building, I stole CDs from the mailroom, Rollerbladed in the slick oil-stained subterranean parking garage and belted Spice Girls lyrics in the emergency stairwell with my cousin until a tenant would open the door and find us there alone in the dark. I still own contraband from that time: someone’s copy of the “City of Angels” soundtrack. Inside our apartment, I shared a room with my parents. Our beds were butted up against each other, as they had always been.
Before this job and this building we lived in a one-bedroom apartment in West Hollywood with brown shag carpet and a cardboard box as my toy chest. The apartment buildings on our block, once favored by up-and-coming movie stars and writer Eve Babitz, now were occupied by Eastern Europeans fleeing the collapse of the Soviet Union. “There comes a moment for the immigrant’s child when you realize that you and your parents are assimilating at the same time,” writes Hua Hsu in his memoir, “Stay True.” While I attended preschool at Plummer Park, my mother went to community college and my father painted houses for $5 an hour. Before the brown shag carpet, we slept on my aunt’s couch in Mid-City for six months. And before the couch, we lived in a brutalist Soviet government-issued apartment in Minsk, Belarus. From the beginning, my life was steeped in the impermanence of renting, which mirrored the impermanence of our immigrant experience.
All immigrants are opportunists. Or, at least all the ones I’ve encountered. They are keenly aware of how, at any moment, everything can change. “Immigration, exile, being uprooted and made a pariah may be the most effective way yet devised to impress on an individual the arbitrary nature of his or her own existence,” writes Serbian poet Charles Simic. With each move, I felt the arbitrary nature of our existence. And every time I translated a 30-day notice or drafted a memo and slipped it under a tenant’s door, I felt the pull of my parents’ ambition. “We came here for you.” They’d say it often. Lovingly piling on the pressure until I could no longer see a future where I didn’t have something to prove.
My father found the second property manager job listing in a local newspaper. A 50-unit building in the affluent neighborhood of Westwood. He brought Mama and me along to the interview, although technically the managers were not supposed to have a child. I was told that if I was on my best behavior, I would go to the sought-after public elementary school down the street and finally get my own room. The front of the building was covered in a flash of fuchsia bougainvillea, and the surrounding brick towers glowed with inviting warm windows and hints of crystal chandeliers. The owners of the building were a wealthy elderly Germanic-Jewish couple who met us outside and assessed my potential with war-weary eyes. I looked up at them dutifully, every butterfly clip I owned fluttering on my head like a migration. “She’s a mini you,” the woman said, noticing the quiet stoicism I’d picked up from my father. She looked at us as if she were looking into her own immigrant past, her harrowing escape from Austria as a teenager during the Holocaust. She smiled. Bent down. And handed me the keys.
Los Angeles has been a haven for transplants and immigrants since the tail end of the Industrial Revolution and the introduction of the railroad. It was once advertised as a wellness paradise, the sanatorium capital of America, a temporary resort for turn-of-the-20th century tuberculosis patients eager to seek treatment in the form of sunshine and “fresh” air. Many of these patients got better and stayed. “Los Angeles, it should be understood, is not a mere city. On the contrary, it is, and has been since 1888, a commodity; something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes, and mouthwash,” writes Mike Davis in “City of Quartz.”
The commodification of Los Angeles and Hollywood, and the rising population, has made the city an expensive place to live. The majority of the population rents: According to a 2021 report, 63% of Los Angeles households are renter-occupied, while 37% are owner-occupied. And rent has more than doubled in the past decade, leading to an astonishing 57% of L.A. County residents being rent-burdened, meaning they spend a third or more of their income on rent. And yet people continue to move to Los Angeles, a place synonymous with liminal space — the space between who we are and who we want to become. Even if who you want to become is out of reach.
“If there is a predominant feeling in the city-state [Los Angeles], it is not loneliness or daze, but an uneasy temporariness, a sense of life’s impermanence: the tension of anticipation while so much quivers on the line,” writes Rosecrans Baldwin in “Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles.”
Los Angeles is a city always on the edge of disaster: gentrification, housing shortages, unlawful evictions, homelessness (second largest homeless population outside of New York), greed, wildfire, earthquakes, floods, landslides, the imminent death of the legendary palm trees, the intangible but plausible possibility of breaking off from the continental United States and slipping into the Pacific Ocean. The city, like its residents, is impermanent, always shape-shifting, always on the verge of becoming something else.
“Our dwellings were designed for transience,” writes Kate Braverman about the midcentury West Los Angeles of her childhood in “Frantic Transmissions to and From Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir.” “Apartments without dining rooms, as if anticipating a future where families disintegrated, compulsively dieted, or ate alone, in front of televisions.”
In Westwood, our living room was our dining room and our office. Leases were signed on the dinner table. At any moment, the phone or doorbell would ring with someone dropping off a rent check or complaining about a broken air conditioner or standing barefoot in a bathrobe locked out of their apartment. I would pretend to not care. I would eat my cheese puffs on the couch and stare attentively at the glowing TV, with the business of the building in my periphery. I would remind myself that this was temporary. Our liminal space. Maybe my parents would invest in an adult day care center like their friend Sasha? Maybe we would one day own a house? As I got older, I grew more ashamed. More aware of my own body and its presence. I would cower in my room or the hallway, shoveling Froot Loops into my mouth until the apartment was no longer an office but our home again. This shape-shifting was its own type of impermanence. One minute the apartment was a place where we lived and the next it was a place where we worked. The line was blurred and so was my idea of home. Of what is yours and what is mine.
Some of the tenants were there before us and some were a rotating cast of characters. But all of them were strangers we shared walls with. Of course, we weren’t the only immigrant family. There were also Persian immigrants who fled Iran during the Islamic Revolution, but they mostly kept to themselves. Due to the nature of the job, we were always on display. My parents’ accents. My growing body. My father’s health. The mezuzah on our door frame. Our apartment, a collection of discarded furniture from vacated units. Early on, I was warned to not make friends with any of the tenants. I was told it was unprofessional. A trap. That they only wanted to be my friend so they could get special treatment. Sometimes, we broke the rules. I babysat the child star while his single mother “networked” (partied in the Hollywood Hills). I played Marco Polo in the pool with the Persian kids. I leafed through headshots with a Russian mail-order bride while my parents drank tea with her mother. They would all eventually move out and so would we.
I used to tell my friends that we owned the building. That I would one day inherit it. This was easier than saying that we lived there because we worked there. I’m not sure if anyone believed me anyway. Many of my friends lived in what I considered to be mansions with nannies and parents with six-figure dual incomes that afforded them trips to faraway destinations I couldn’t place on a map. When my friends were over and the landline would ring, I would rush them to my bedroom before they could hear my father answer the phone with, “Manager.”
The only property my parents own is a shared plot at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. When my father was diagnosed with a chronic disease, my mother was left to manage the Westwood building on her own. Eventually, my parents retired after 21 years and moved out of the building during the first few months of the pandemic. They still rent, and so do I.
What is truly ours?
I’ve spent my life grappling with the concept of ownership. How our identity often gets wrapped up in what we own and what we don’t own. How in the U.S., ownership is the pinnacle of success. How there was no such thing as ownership in the failed Soviet experiment. How you could pick apples off any tree because they were there for everybody to enjoy. How owning a home in Los Angeles may forever be out of reach. How impermanent we are in the arbitrary nature of existence.
After I graduated from college and landed an office job in Los Angeles, I began renting apartments on my own. The eggshell walls painted over and over and over again. The rotating neighbors I still feared to befriend. The flying cockroaches. The broken laundry machines. The unabiding footsteps. The eternal sounds of other people’s lives. The possibility of moving out and starting all over again. It all felt so familiar. The impermanence I witnessed so often as a child was no longer a source of shame but a knowing comfort that at any moment everything could change.
Diana Ruzova is a writer from Los Angeles. She holds an MFA in literature and creative nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her writing has appeared in the Cut, Oprah Daily, Flaunt, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere.
Are psychedelics the next big thing?
Psychedelics include the drugs LSD, magic mushrooms, peyote, and often ketamine and MDMA too, among others. And some of these drugs have a history of spiritual practice spanning millennia. Then many of these drugs became synonymous with hippies and 60s and 70s counterculture. But now, psychedelics have new cheerleaders: tech bros and CEOs. So why the rebrand?
To get into it all, Brittany is joined by Maxim Tvorun-Dunn, PhD candidate at the University of Tokyo, and Emma Goldberg, business reporter at the New York Times, to discuss what it means that these drugs are getting championed – and sometimes financially backed – by the tech elite, and how might that affect our culture’s relationship with psychedelics.
This episode originally aired on March 24, 2025.
Interested in hearing more of Brittany’s series “Losing My Religion?” Check out these episodes:
Goodbye, church… Hello, Wellness Industrial Complex!
Am I a god?! Why “manifesting” your reality is easier than ever
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This episode was produced by Liam McBain. It was edited by Neena Pathak. Our Supervising Producer is Cher Vincent. Our Executive Producer is Barton Girdwood. Our VP of Programming is Yolanda Sangweni.
Twenty-five years ago, Grammy-winning singer Bilal released his debut album, “1st Born Second,” a seminal body of work that fearlessly weaves together the worlds of jazz, hip-hop and neo-soul for a sound that was fresh at the time and still holds up today. With the leading single “Soul Sista,” the album featured vocals from the likes of Common and Yasiin Bey along with production from Dr. Dre, Raphael Saadiq, the Soulquarians and the late J. Dilla.
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Earlier this month, Bilal celebrated the anniversary of the album at the Blue Note in Hollywood with four sold-out shows. I caught up with him backstage before the first show on Night 1.
A couple months ago you popped out during Talib Kweli’s show at the Blue Note Los Angeles, but this is your first solo show here. How are you feeling?
It’s been nostalgic because I’m doing the 25th anniversary show here, so we’re doing music from my very first album. [As I’ve been] putting this show together, I’ve [been] listening back to that music so it just takes me back 25 years ago so it’s a funny feeling, but it’s cool. [Laughs]
You were 21 when you released your debut album, “1st Born Second.” What was going on in your world at that time?
When I released that album I was just a wild young kid who wanted to change music or bring my approach to the music. I had a lot of concepts coming from jazz school. I was like a college rebel kid. I hated everything. I was like a musical snob. I wouldn’t say a musical snob, but yeah, I was. [Laughs]
And that’s OK.
I was just very ambitious back then. I knew what I wanted to do as a musician and I was just very happy to be doing it.
I read that you used to challenge your teachers a lot in high school and college.
Oh yeah, man. I come from Philadelphia and I’ve been in front of people singing since I was 4 years old, so by the time my album came out, I was already like “I want to do this. I know how I want to do that. I want to be a producer. I want to get this done.” I already had music, materials and songs. So coming from a jazz standpoint, I had some strong opinions of who I wanted to be and music school was just my stepping stone — my way out of the house.
When you reflect on the impact of “1st Born Second,” how does it make you feel?
That it was an honest expression and it’s exactly what I wanted to do. I set out to make timeless music. One of my favorite musicians, especially around that time, was Miles Davis. I would read his autobiography all the time and his whole thing was affecting the music, affecting the listener, really approaching it to challenge the listener as well as challenging yourself. To make an affect in the world. So when I can hear it and everybody says, “I’m still checking this s— out now,” I’m just like wow. That’s what I wanted to do, make something that outlived me — really.
In 2024, you released two bodies of work: “Live at Glasshaus” and “Adjust Brightness,” which was your first album of new music in eight years. Why was this the right time and how did they each come together?
Everything came together naturally even from the live album. I was set to do something and when we were putting everything together, I started making phone calls that week. I knew Common would be in town because he was doing Broadway at the time. Then I called Rob [Glasper] and he was in town and we all were like ‘Let’s call Ahmir,’ [Questlove] and I was like [Crosses fingers] ‘cause I knew he was doing a show too over at the Fallon show. So we set up a time where everybody was free and made it happen. It was a natural, magical kind of a vibe.
In February, you were a part of a powerful tribute for late singer D’Angelo at the Grammys. How did it feel to be a part of that moment and to celebrate the legacy of someone you came up with?
It was surreal. I was outside of my body. As a kid I was always able to do that, so in those situations, I just jump out my body.
You seem like the type of artist who is always creating. Are you working on anything right now that we’ll be able to hear soon?
I kind of move naturally. I don’t try to force it, but I have been in a creative space so hopefully the creative gods pour into me sooner. But I don’t beg. Everything has to be natural.
I know you’ve taken up painting recently. Outside of music, what are some things that have been keeping you grounded and excited lately?
I’m a lover of mad stuff. I love books. I like history. I like philosophy and I’ve been getting into a lot of Zen meditations. Concepts about clearing the mind and being present. I also love kung fu. The concepts of everything, you know. I’m a Virgo.
After a long winter, readers look to summer for a respite — an opportunity to sink into stories that are magical, mysterious and memorable. If some downtime is in your plans, we have some reading to suggest.
Our book critics have previewed what’s coming to the library and bookstores this summer. Here’s what they are most looking forward to reading — and seeing you read too.
Water in the Desert: A Pilgrimage by Gary Paul Nabhan
I love books that explore nature through a sociocultural lens. Lebanese American Gary Paul Nabhan’s new book traces the story of his unusual life. Nabhan grew up along Lake Michigan’s southern dunes and was negatively singled out as a student with “disabilities.” He found his path through ecology, poetry, travel, studying Indigenous Mexican communities, becoming an Ecumenical Franciscan brother and exploring his own ancestry — all of which shape his view that Earth is “the original scripture.” An ethnobotanist, Nabhan was awarded a MacArthur “genius grant” for “insights into the relationship between culture and land.” I can’t wait to read this book. (June 2) — Martha Anne Toll
Muñeca by Cynthia Gómez
Natalia Fuentes has a plan. Violeta, the only child of the Miramontes family and the last in a long line descended from Spanish settlers and Mexican rancho owners, is magically trapped in her own body, and Nati is going to break her out. For a fee, of course. With the help of a doll, she finds a way to communicate with her client, and an unexpected romance sparks between them. But she also attracts the attention of the person who cursed Violeta, and they would do anything to stop Nati from interfering. This gothic horror tale touches on colonialism and colorism, queerness and feminism, generational trauma and familial curses. It’s at once romantic and frightening. We may be only just heading into summer, but this one is already in my top 10 for the year. (June 2) — Alex Brown
The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris
Whenever I encounter a belted kingfisher here in coastal Virginia, my spirits rise as I gaze at a bird with a spiky mohawk and an attitude to match. My summer nonfiction reading will kick off with The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss by nature writer Robert Macfarlane and illustrator Jackie Morris, which celebrates the lives of declining or endangered birds from kingfishers to avocets, nightingales and yellowhammers. Though British species remain the book’s focus, the joys of bird-watching span the globe, as does this pair’s invitation to revel in and protect the multispecies worlds of which we humans are one part. (June 9) — Barbara J. King
Earth 7 by Deb Olin Unferth
I discovered Deb Olin Unferth’s work years ago via her flash-fiction piece “Likable,” which became a staple on my syllabi. Years later, and now firmly a fan, I was thrilled to learn about her forthcoming novel, Earth 7. A story about a decimated future Earth and those working to collect DNA samples from its past in order to rebuild it, the novel is also about love — between two people, yes, but also the broader, more universal love their work entails. After all, preservation of what was and hope for what will be are both acts of immense care for the world. (June 9) — Ilana Masad
Twenty Minutes of Silence by Hélène Bessette, translated by Kate Briggs
This riveting translation at once slays and reinvents the mystery genre. Set in an affluent villa in Manche, France, this 1955 “poetic novel” reconstructs the clashing narratives around the 20-minute interval between a patricide and the arrival of the police. The titular concept of silence, purportedly about the accomplices’ erasure of evidence, in fact represents a linguistic and structural red herring. The articulate, seemingly uncounseled testimonies of the deceased’s adulterous wife and abused son, along with biased speculations by the chief inspector, his deputy, the journalists and the bookseller, are replete with operatic revelations. (July 14) — Thúy Đinh
Charity and Sylvia by Tillie Walden
Tillie Walden’s long-anticipated Charity & Sylvia is a graphic biography in five parts, tracking the love story of two women who openly lived together for 44 years in Weybridge, Vt., in the 1800s. Walden builds on an archive of letters, journal entries and various biographical material to offer this moving portrait told in vignettes, most captured as delicately drawn, copper-tinted, nine-panel comics. Family affairs, religious musings and intimate scenes between the two women are set against the backdrop of a young country, and state, moving through constant, and colossal, transformation. The effect is a slow, dense, contemplative read — a rare gem of a book. (June 16) — Tahneer Oksman
Names Have Been Changed by Yu-Mei Balasingamchow
There have been a slew of entertaining novels in the past few years about average people stumbling into criminality — think Kirstin Chen’s Counterfeit and Nina McConigley’s How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, to name just two. But I’m especially looking forward to Names Have Been Changed. Ophir, the Singaporean protagonist, is on the run from the law for her involvement in a money-laundering scheme, and she podcasts about it from an undisclosed location. This picaresque is off to a rocking start, the first-person narration is charmingly self-effacing, and the story promises depth as well, exploring the emotional toll of being a fugitive. (June 23) — Leland Cheuk
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Paul Tremblay
Paul Tremblay has made a career out of reinventing himself as an author with every novel, and in his upcoming Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep, he does it yet again. The book is a creepy and unexpectedly humorous science-fiction romp about a young woman who takes a job using a cellphone/remote control to pilot a man in a vegetative state from California to the East Coast while the man goes through a surreal nightmare. A master storyteller, Tremblay’s b(l)ending of genres here truly is a perfect beach read. (June 30) — Gabino Iglesias
Country People by Daniel Mason
I so loved Daniel Mason’s North Woods, which spans four centuries in the life of a Massachusetts house, that I’m eager to read whatever he writes. Country People is quite different. His first contemporary novel spans just one year — the length of a visiting professorship that brings Kate and her family from California to Vermont. The hope is that her husband will finally finish his long-overdue dissertation on Russian folktales, but instead he gets pulled in by some colorful locals and a bizarre, fantastical legend. It’s apparent from a quick peek that Mason has fun exploring marriage, friendship, parenthood and the beguiling allure of storytelling and fantasy in this upbeat romp. (July 7) — Heller McAlpin
An Infinite Love Story by Chanel Cleeton
An Infinite Love Story is a sweeping romantic drama with a touch of magical realism from the bestselling author of The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes. Chanel Cleeton is one of my auto-buy authors — and I was hooked on this new book immediately. Cleeton’s ability to pull readers in quickly and deeply through her storytelling makes her a go-to author for an immersive reading experience. Set during the Space Race of the 1960s, this story follows the wife of an astronaut who is lost in space, who refuses to believe her husband is gone forever. Vivian and Joe’s love is unforgettable, and so is Cleeton’s writing. She had me from the dedication. (July 7) — Denny S. Bryce
The Great Wherever by Shannon Sanders
After winning the LA Times Book Prize for her story collection Company, expectations were running high for Shannon Sanders’ first novel. A playful and poignant intergenerational saga about a haunted farm in which ancestors watch over and critique the living for posterity and entertainment, The Great Wherever leaps over that bar. The story pays tribute to the lasting legacy of Sanders’ ancestors (land that’s been in the family for a century), while creating something inventive and new. From an undead perspective, haunting is believably bittersweet; it’s “better than the best reality TV,” but “lesser, of course, than the thrill of both seeing and being seen.” I was hooked from the first sentence. (July 7) — Carole V. Bell
Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate by Roopika Risam
Data centers have been making me anxious for a while, largely because of the environmental impacts — the massive draw on the electrical grid, the millions of gallons of clean water they require for cooling, the massive carbon footprint. The harm caused by data center infrastructure is only part of the problem, though. Roopika Risam’s newest book, Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate, explores “how data has always been the seed of power,” tracing its centrality from Mesopotamia to today. A book that promises not to just show how empires have collected and weaponized data over the ages, but also how we can resist, is an easy must-read for me. (July 14) — Ericka Taylor
Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast by Pamela Colloff
I have been a fan of Pamela Colloff’s investigative journalism since 2018, when ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine published a narrative feature on junk forensic science. Her first book builds on her 2019 feature about a con artist who became one of America’s most prolific jailhouse informants. Despite his reputation as a liar and grifter, prosecutors were all too willing to believe the “useful” stories he spun — including about defendants who were ultimately sentenced to death. Unfolding in cinematic detail, Catch the Devil offers a riveting and disturbing account of the potentially fatal consequences of a criminal legal system that is more concerned with securing convictions than determining the truth and delivering justice. (July 14) — Kristen Martin
Yellow Pine by Claire Vaye Watkins
I’ve been an admirer of Claire Vaye Watkins since her debut book, the story collection Battleborn, was published in 2012. As good as that book was, I was blown away by her novels, Gold Fame Citrus and I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness, both of which brought the American West to life with Watkins’ formidable wit and audacity. I can’t wait for her new novel, which follows a single mother living in an intentional community in the Mojave Desert. Watkins is known for taking risks, and she never repeats herself — I’m betting that her latest book will showcase her genius at storytelling and her love for the rugged landscape of the West. (July 21) — Michael Schaub
Dèy by Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat is an author whose work truly captures the Haitian American immigrant experience with prose that is so languid and all-consuming that one never wants to be released from its grasp. In her first novel in over a decade, she offers a beautiful exploration of migration, gentrification and political instability. The title — Dèy, the Haitian Creole word for “mourning” — immediately caught my attention, as many Americans are in this state today, for their own country. The novel introduces us to Magnolia, a successful real estate agent in Miami whose outlook on life changes after she is caught in a mall shooting. A story that allows us to reassess love and grief, Dèy is a novel of now. (Aug. 25) — Keishel Williams
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