Our Town
"Tribes of Palos Verdes" Author Joy Nicholson Hears a Different Drummer
By Judith B. Herman
"A chaos of stars is spattered across the skies of Palos Verdes. Everything else is regulated…All roofs must be made of red tile, and the walls…must be whitewashed every three years," says Medina, the teenage narrator of Joy Nicholson's 1997 novel "The Tribes of Palos Verdes." Medina and her brother rebel against their rigid, conformist community and elude the disapproving eyes of their parents and classmates, escaping into the renegade culture of surfing.
In 1984 Nicholson dropped out of Palos Verdes High School and fled from a place where she felt she didn't belong. Now high school and college students analyze her writing. "Most students can relate to the feeling of being an outsider and the difficulty of getting along with parents — the 'Catcher in the Rye' quality," says Peninsula High English teacher Mike Hoeger who offers "Tribes" as outside reading every year.
In 1998 Nicholson invited about 30 of Hoeger's students to lunch. They spent the day eating, jumping on a trampoline and discussing the writing process. Everyone had a great time, including Nicholson, who was gratified that Palos Verdes students were more ethnically diverse than in her day.
Nicholson tried college, but says she learns better by doing and reading. Twice a week she scoops up an armload of books from the library. Joan Didion, Paul Bowles and Robert Stone have influenced her literary style. Science and geopolitics fascinate her, particularly the politics of oil.
Seeing the world from the perspective of other cultures was part of her growth. At 19 she hit the road. Traveling until the money ran out, working at odd jobs long enough to afford another trip, then repeating the cycle, she saw Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. But she wasn't sure where she was going.
"For lot of years I went into free fall," she says. "I couldn’t trust anything. I was learning how to be self-reliant, letting go of the belief in others saving me. From age 25 to 27 I was suicidal. Writing saved me."
As a child Nicholson never dreamed of being a writer, but writing to people she then admired, like Barry Manilow and Richard Nixon, eased her isolation. "I actually told Nixon I was sorry he was being framed — my father's influence," she laughs. Although the celebrities were too busy to respond, they understood and cared about her, she felt.
After her family broke up, she was not allowed to communicate with her troubled brother, Jay, whom she adored. "Everybody loved him. He was golden. As he sank into depression he began to lose some of that goldeness and it was frightening." No one wanted to listen to her, so she began writing about him. She didn't think of herself as a writer until literary agent Betsy Amster discovered her short story based on Jay in an underground magazine. Amster tracked her down and encouraged her to expand it into a novel.
"She responded to my writing because of my cold eye. It's a product of my upbringing where I have to draw way back and distance myself to look at things without feeling them." Writing "Tribes" was especially difficult because before she finished Jay died. She wrote with her emotions reined in, then went back, felt the emotions and rewrote. "I learned from my childhood to just go do what needs to be done. I’m great in a crisis. The emotion doesn’t come until later."
The cold eye serves her well in her avocation, rescuing "unadoptable" dogs from the pound. She cradles Farrah, a part-Chihuahua foster dog, as she strides up to a busy sidewalk café near her Silver Lake apartment for an interview. With her slim figure, bobbed hair, cupid's-bow lips and giddy laugh she resembles a flapper who has traded her gin and cigarettes for tofu and tabbouleh. But she is intense and dead earnest. Over the roar of traffic, the blare of amplified music and the syncopated rhythm of dogs yapping from under every table, Nicholson speaks about One Dog at a Time, a project she founded with Elise Duran. There are more dogs than they can save, but Nicholson does what she can, turning off her emotions to pick one. Nicholson says she pours "pretty much my entire income" into caring for each dog until it is adopted. "I understand dogs; I have good sense of what they need. I don't really understand people," she says with a breathy giggle.
Nicholson met her husband, Jeff Leemon, a news sound- and cameraman, at this very café ten years ago. They each had a couple of dogs in tow. They were also both involved with other people, but they felt so connected to each other they soon realized they had to be together. She asked him if he would drop everything and move to Mexico with her. Without hesitation he said yes.
Nicholson's second novel, "The Road to Esmeralda," the story of an American couple who blunders into a jungle of political and criminal intrigue in the Yucatan, came out this year to critical acclaim. Jonathan Kirsch in the Los Angeles Times called Nicholson, "nothing less than a postmodern Graham Greene -- a storyteller capable of spinning a yarn that is at once a romance, a thriller and a morality tale." Jennifer Baker in Booklist praised her "keen eye for human motivation." So much for the author's claim that she doesn't understand people.
Like the couple in the novel, Nicholson and her husband hopped in their car and headed south, hoping to find in Mexico something they lacked in Los Angeles. Many of the events in Esmeralda actually happened, she says, but the novel emphasizes the dark side. They stayed in the Yucatan for a year "because it awesome, so much fun."
They returned to Mexico another time, remaining five years in the state of Guanajuato where she worked in a dog shelter. "You have to be able to immerse yourself in the society. There's a lot of ways to be an expatriate. You can move only with other expatriates, or you can become part of the culture, the poor culture, not just the rich, blond Mexicans, and that always includes physical discomfort.
"I get enraged by what I don’t understand. If I begin to understand my rage lessens. I can go almost anywhere and fit in with almost anything," says the former PV outsider.
Leeman's work has taken the couple all over the world, but when it seemed that for the sake of his news career he would have to go to Iraq, Nicholson put her foot down.
He switched to the entertainment industry, which is not only safer but has unexpected perks. Not many people with three dogs would dare to decorate their apartments with white shag carpeting. Leeman scavenged his from the set of "The Apprentice," where the crew was set to fling it into the Dumpster when filming wrapped. But the film industry, with its emphasis on youth and beauty, rubs Nicholson the wrong way. For her next novel, "My Cruel Summer," she's spent months "undercover" as a blond yoga devotee, hanging out in trendy industry cafes to feel what it's like to be 38, still trying to conform to Hollywood's perverse standards.
Another thing that chafes about the film industry is its fickleness. A movie version of "Tribes" has been "just about to be made" for the past five years.
L.A.'s shallow concern with looks and status reminds Nicholson of what disturbed her about Palos Verdes. She is itching to relocate, but she doesn't know where. Anti-Americanism is growing in Mexico, but "the condition of the world is not an American problem; it’s a human problem," she says.
Because "novels drain every last ounce out of you," she will tackle two nonfiction books before the next novel. She and a man who communicates with dogs through body language, are co-writing "Mad Dogs and Their Humans." Next, in "Shoutout to the Apocalypse" she will look at apocalyptic thinkers, including respected writers such as Laurie Garrett, author of "The Coming Plague," as well as conspiracy theorists.
"Reading conspiracy websites" she says, "is my guilty pleasure. I like seeing where the human mind goes. Very intelligent people formulate elegant theories that are completely wrong. I'm a little in love with people who are trying to figure things out rather than people who are apathetic."
Returning to the topic of her first book, she has a message for young people in Palos Verdes. "I don’t know if it’s changed, but when I was growing up in PV there was a tremendous emphasis on appearance and being number one, shiny glossiness, going to the right college. If there are kids out there who are on the verge of suicide because they know that's not them, they have to know that there are other ways. You just have to rely on yourself and your intuition and less on other people, but you can do it."
"Tribes of Palos Verdes" Author Joy Nicholson Hears a Different Drummer
By Judith B. Herman
"A chaos of stars is spattered across the skies of Palos Verdes. Everything else is regulated…All roofs must be made of red tile, and the walls…must be whitewashed every three years," says Medina, the teenage narrator of Joy Nicholson's 1997 novel "The Tribes of Palos Verdes." Medina and her brother rebel against their rigid, conformist community and elude the disapproving eyes of their parents and classmates, escaping into the renegade culture of surfing.
In 1984 Nicholson dropped out of Palos Verdes High School and fled from a place where she felt she didn't belong. Now high school and college students analyze her writing. "Most students can relate to the feeling of being an outsider and the difficulty of getting along with parents — the 'Catcher in the Rye' quality," says Peninsula High English teacher Mike Hoeger who offers "Tribes" as outside reading every year.
In 1998 Nicholson invited about 30 of Hoeger's students to lunch. They spent the day eating, jumping on a trampoline and discussing the writing process. Everyone had a great time, including Nicholson, who was gratified that Palos Verdes students were more ethnically diverse than in her day.
Nicholson tried college, but says she learns better by doing and reading. Twice a week she scoops up an armload of books from the library. Joan Didion, Paul Bowles and Robert Stone have influenced her literary style. Science and geopolitics fascinate her, particularly the politics of oil.
Seeing the world from the perspective of other cultures was part of her growth. At 19 she hit the road. Traveling until the money ran out, working at odd jobs long enough to afford another trip, then repeating the cycle, she saw Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. But she wasn't sure where she was going.
"For lot of years I went into free fall," she says. "I couldn’t trust anything. I was learning how to be self-reliant, letting go of the belief in others saving me. From age 25 to 27 I was suicidal. Writing saved me."
As a child Nicholson never dreamed of being a writer, but writing to people she then admired, like Barry Manilow and Richard Nixon, eased her isolation. "I actually told Nixon I was sorry he was being framed — my father's influence," she laughs. Although the celebrities were too busy to respond, they understood and cared about her, she felt.
After her family broke up, she was not allowed to communicate with her troubled brother, Jay, whom she adored. "Everybody loved him. He was golden. As he sank into depression he began to lose some of that goldeness and it was frightening." No one wanted to listen to her, so she began writing about him. She didn't think of herself as a writer until literary agent Betsy Amster discovered her short story based on Jay in an underground magazine. Amster tracked her down and encouraged her to expand it into a novel.
"She responded to my writing because of my cold eye. It's a product of my upbringing where I have to draw way back and distance myself to look at things without feeling them." Writing "Tribes" was especially difficult because before she finished Jay died. She wrote with her emotions reined in, then went back, felt the emotions and rewrote. "I learned from my childhood to just go do what needs to be done. I’m great in a crisis. The emotion doesn’t come until later."
The cold eye serves her well in her avocation, rescuing "unadoptable" dogs from the pound. She cradles Farrah, a part-Chihuahua foster dog, as she strides up to a busy sidewalk café near her Silver Lake apartment for an interview. With her slim figure, bobbed hair, cupid's-bow lips and giddy laugh she resembles a flapper who has traded her gin and cigarettes for tofu and tabbouleh. But she is intense and dead earnest. Over the roar of traffic, the blare of amplified music and the syncopated rhythm of dogs yapping from under every table, Nicholson speaks about One Dog at a Time, a project she founded with Elise Duran. There are more dogs than they can save, but Nicholson does what she can, turning off her emotions to pick one. Nicholson says she pours "pretty much my entire income" into caring for each dog until it is adopted. "I understand dogs; I have good sense of what they need. I don't really understand people," she says with a breathy giggle.
Nicholson met her husband, Jeff Leemon, a news sound- and cameraman, at this very café ten years ago. They each had a couple of dogs in tow. They were also both involved with other people, but they felt so connected to each other they soon realized they had to be together. She asked him if he would drop everything and move to Mexico with her. Without hesitation he said yes.
Nicholson's second novel, "The Road to Esmeralda," the story of an American couple who blunders into a jungle of political and criminal intrigue in the Yucatan, came out this year to critical acclaim. Jonathan Kirsch in the Los Angeles Times called Nicholson, "nothing less than a postmodern Graham Greene -- a storyteller capable of spinning a yarn that is at once a romance, a thriller and a morality tale." Jennifer Baker in Booklist praised her "keen eye for human motivation." So much for the author's claim that she doesn't understand people.
Like the couple in the novel, Nicholson and her husband hopped in their car and headed south, hoping to find in Mexico something they lacked in Los Angeles. Many of the events in Esmeralda actually happened, she says, but the novel emphasizes the dark side. They stayed in the Yucatan for a year "because it awesome, so much fun."
They returned to Mexico another time, remaining five years in the state of Guanajuato where she worked in a dog shelter. "You have to be able to immerse yourself in the society. There's a lot of ways to be an expatriate. You can move only with other expatriates, or you can become part of the culture, the poor culture, not just the rich, blond Mexicans, and that always includes physical discomfort.
"I get enraged by what I don’t understand. If I begin to understand my rage lessens. I can go almost anywhere and fit in with almost anything," says the former PV outsider.
Leeman's work has taken the couple all over the world, but when it seemed that for the sake of his news career he would have to go to Iraq, Nicholson put her foot down.
He switched to the entertainment industry, which is not only safer but has unexpected perks. Not many people with three dogs would dare to decorate their apartments with white shag carpeting. Leeman scavenged his from the set of "The Apprentice," where the crew was set to fling it into the Dumpster when filming wrapped. But the film industry, with its emphasis on youth and beauty, rubs Nicholson the wrong way. For her next novel, "My Cruel Summer," she's spent months "undercover" as a blond yoga devotee, hanging out in trendy industry cafes to feel what it's like to be 38, still trying to conform to Hollywood's perverse standards.
Another thing that chafes about the film industry is its fickleness. A movie version of "Tribes" has been "just about to be made" for the past five years.
L.A.'s shallow concern with looks and status reminds Nicholson of what disturbed her about Palos Verdes. She is itching to relocate, but she doesn't know where. Anti-Americanism is growing in Mexico, but "the condition of the world is not an American problem; it’s a human problem," she says.
Because "novels drain every last ounce out of you," she will tackle two nonfiction books before the next novel. She and a man who communicates with dogs through body language, are co-writing "Mad Dogs and Their Humans." Next, in "Shoutout to the Apocalypse" she will look at apocalyptic thinkers, including respected writers such as Laurie Garrett, author of "The Coming Plague," as well as conspiracy theorists.
"Reading conspiracy websites" she says, "is my guilty pleasure. I like seeing where the human mind goes. Very intelligent people formulate elegant theories that are completely wrong. I'm a little in love with people who are trying to figure things out rather than people who are apathetic."
Returning to the topic of her first book, she has a message for young people in Palos Verdes. "I don’t know if it’s changed, but when I was growing up in PV there was a tremendous emphasis on appearance and being number one, shiny glossiness, going to the right college. If there are kids out there who are on the verge of suicide because they know that's not them, they have to know that there are other ways. You just have to rely on yourself and your intuition and less on other people, but you can do it."
