Natalie Singer releases memoir: California Calling: A Self-Interrogation

This week alum Natalie Singer (’16, Creative Writing & Poetics) releases her memoir, California Calling: A Self-Interrogation. Singer will discuss her memoir at Elliott Bay Books on March 5, joined in conversation by Sonora Jha, Hugo House Prose Writer-in-Residence and author of Foreign. On March 13 Singer will appear at Lit Fix, Seattle’s bar-friendliest reading and music series, hosted at Chop Suey.

About California Calling:

California Calling is a self-interrogation of obsession, emigration, and identity. Natalie Singer’s story opens in a courtroom on a witness stand, where she’s forced to testify in a family breakup that changes the course of her life. At sixteen Natalie emigrates from Montreal and the secrets it holds to the golden promise of the California Bay Area, just as her Jewish ancestors fled Russia and went west for a new life. Through uneasy rituals of high school pep rallies and college sex in boats and the backs of pickups, to a summer tracing a serial killer through the heart of Gold Country, to an eventual journalism career in San Francisco and the deserts of Palm Springs, Natalie aches to forge an American identity. At once an intimately unflinching memoir and a probing examination of the family and cultural myths that shape us, California Calling calls upon history, reportage, witness interrogation tactics, music and pop culture, and the iconography of the West to explore whether we can cure loneliness through landscape. Ultimately, California Calling is a search for a state of belonging.

California Calling: A Self-Interrogation