Girl of the Burning West
Notes from a life in ashes.
Hi, my name is Erika Schickel and my house burned down in the 2025 Altadena fire.
On the morning of January 8, 2025, the Eaton fire chewed through my Altadena neighborhood, destroying everything in its wind-driven path, including the 1937 home I shared with my partner David and our two cats, Earl and Chippy. While we all mercifully got out alive, we lost just about every single tangible object we either treasured or needed in this life.
Not only did we lose our home, we lost our whole damn zip code. We were in the ill-fated “west of Lake” neighborhood that was the hardest hit. We never got a single warning to evacuate from any authority. We never heard a fire truck or got a “get ready” alert from the county or Watch Duty. We only got the “Leave-now-or-die” alert at 3:25 a.m. We fled our home in a blizzard of smoke and embers. We were lucky to make it out alive. Two of our close neighbors were not as lucky, and they perished in the fire.
I will tell this story in greater detail in a future post. Though we are so grateful to have escaped with our physical lives, we lost the beautiful life we had built in beautiful Altadena.
The scale of the tragedy to us personally and to our beloved community at large is utterly fucking incomprehensible. Even now, three months later, I cannot wrap my head around it. The grief I feel for what was lost on every scale feels… well…I cannot possibly contain it. This is why…
I have to write about it.
I am a writer who has been been living in and reporting on life in Los Angeles for close to thirty years. In the days following the fire, as we negotiated our grief and disbelief at what had happened, I found that the fire hadn’t just reshaped my life, it had reshaped my brain. Like the cast iron pans I salvaged from our burn pit, my thoughts were warped, black and heavy.
I had forgotten to put my Adderall in my go-bag when I fled my home, and in the smoky days that followed, my unmedicated ADHD brain ran wild, drawing a spiderweb of fiberoptic connections across Los Angeles, tethering Altadena to the Pacific Palisades and the Palisades to a story about my mother that has been haunting me for years.
Basically, I was experiencing Trauma Brain, and it made me feel completely porous to the experiences I was having. Insight cascades abounded, and luckily, my Writer’s Brain came to the rescue, ready to safely compartmentalize my experience into narrative. So, I took notes. This Substack is the amalgamation and exploration of those notes and further thinking as I move through and try to make sense of this tragedy.
Nobody seemed to have heard of Altadena before the fire, which was one of the reasons why we loved it. It was this shaggy, unincorporated, bohemian enclave nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriels, pioneered by free-spirited farmers and entrepreneurs. It became a bohemian artistic enclave in the 1930’s, and in the 1970’s and ‘80’s, a place the black community, redlined out of Pasadena and surrounding cities, could safely call home.
I want to tell the story of the Altadena we lost: the people and places that made it so special. I hope I will be able to report on the journey of rebuilding in Altadena as well.
(If you want to know more about my work, I invite you to visit my incredibly stale website, which has lots of old information about me that might be new to you. As soon as I figure out whether to rebuild or flee the country, I will get around to updating my website, I promise.)
Okay, but “Girl of the Burning West”? That sounds like an old LA Weekly headline.
Twyla Tharpe wrote her in book The Creative Habit “You don’t have an idea until you have two ideas.” This is where the web expands to include my mother’s novel.
In 1973 my mother, Julia (“Jill”) Whedon, also a writer, published her first novel; Girl of the Golden West (Charterhouse Books). I was nine years old.
Girl of the Golden West tells the story of a writer (“Kate Attwood”) whose first novel gets optioned by a Hollywood producer. Kate has to fly back home to Los Angeles (from NYC, of course) for confabs. While there, she reconnects with her parents, and the real-life version of her novel’s love interest; the charming “Nick Ballard,” a famous composer and family friend that she crushed on as a child. Reunited in adulthood, Kate and the still much-older Nick consummate their long, mutual sexual obsession with a tumultuous affair.
Stick with me through some exposition here...
My mother and I both had inappropriate affairs with married teachers, which I wrote about in my last book, The Big Hurt. I was seduced by a music teacher in my senior year of high school, and my mother was seduced by a visiting psychology professor during her freshman year at Sarah Lawrence. My affair ended with expulsion, heartbreak and lifelong shame. My mother’s affair was either never discovered or swept under the rug by timid administrators. Like me, her early adulthood was capsized by a traumatic and inappropriate love-affair.
My mother managed her trauma by turning her experience of sexual abuse and domination into a love story. She never budged from her assertion that her relationsip with the reptilian professor was one of mutual respect and affection. She died in 2016 with her Stockholm Syndrome fully intact.
And she left me with so many questions.
What the hell happened to her? How does a smart, vivacious girl fall so readily into the thrall of a much older, married man? Only one answer made sense to me: she had already been groomed by someone else.
But by whom? I knew that I had been groomed by a series of predatory men who had been given a hall pass by the sexual revolution to pursue underage girls with impunity. “Sex positivity” shrouded the harm being done to us GenX girls, who had been raised in neglect and sought love and affirmation in the hairy arms of older men.
But my mother grew up in the constrained 1940’s and ‘50’s. I knew someone else had gotten to her before the Professor, someone who had reset her boundaries and made her think that this was love.
I was thinking about this in the last months of 2024, wanting answers, thinking about writing a book. I had inherited all of my Jill'’s papers, and I had just begun the work of reading and scanning it all onto a hard drive for future generations, when the fire hit. Though I crammed a few file boxes into my car, much of her personal writing, as well as her unpublished manuscripts were incinerated.
I had had also just reread the Girl of the Golden West, for the first time in decades, and I was gobsmacked by how thin the fiction was. Kate, the heroine, was my mother in every meaningful sense. Her physical features, her backstory, her anecdotes and her gimlet take on the preening, prattling people of 1970’s West LA, was pure Mom. This distant, dreamy character had been helixed into me. I would know her anywhere.
Girl of the Golden West is not just a roman à clef, it is a roman à clef, inside another roman à clef, wrapped in yet a third roman à clef, if you can believe it. I will take apart this matryoshka of a story in future posts.
The novel also clearly answers, at least for me, the question of who groomed my mother. I believe to the core of my being it was none other than the famous American lyricist and songwriter, Johnny Mercer. I will parse that fuckery in full here, soon.
But for now, know that this novel takes place almost entirely in the Pacific Palisades, a locale that my mother’s side of the family, the Whedon side, pioneered.
My grandfather, John Whedon, was an early radio and television writer, and my mom’s family is one of the first bi-coastal families in America. Grandaddy had a big run of shows in the 1950’s and ‘60’s, and bought a parcel on Tellem Drive where he built a swinging, travertine-and-glass, (mid-mod), pad for his ex-model, second wife Dorothy. This was the house I knew growing up. My mother recreates this house in its every detail—from the chatter pit to the lava brazier by the kidney-shaped pool—exactly as I rmember it.
Indeed, if there is real tenderness to be found in in her novel, it is in Kate’s love for the California landscape itself, from the smell of the chaparral in the hills at sunset, to the healing, hypnotic Pacific ocean, my mother loved this place deeply and devotedly. Though she spent the last third of her life in Manhattan, when Jill was diagnosed cancer in October 2016, I brought her out here to spend her final days in the sun.
My sister and I scattered her ashes of the Palisades bluffs. The only place in the world she would want to spend eternity.
A tale of two towns.
The lifelong yearning my mother had for the California of her youth is akin to the longing I feel now for the Altadena I once knew and lost. I will never see that place the way it was again, and it makes me want to recreate it in words.
Two towns, 41 geographical miles apart, bracketing the same city and forever connectd by conflagration. These places will forever haunt and obsess me. It is my hope that with Girl of the Burning West I will be able to sort it all into short pieces (much shorter than this!) that will illustrate, elucidate and entertain.
I hope you’ll come along.
Nuts and Bolts.
I know this is a long post, and I have probably lost a bunch of readers already. If you have stuck with me, know that I will be briefer in the future. My goal is to post once or twice a week, but I’m very busy and very ADHD, so keep your expectations low.
This Substack is free for now. I am more interested in growing a readership than I am in making money. So please, if you’re up for a journey through a modern-day hellscape paired with a nostalgic journey through a lost land shaped by ego, predation, pop culture,and patriarchy, then this Substack is for you!
I hope you’ll subscribe below and tell your friends.
I’m hooked! This will be a great book, in my humble.
Subscribed and ofc along for the ride ✨