Hollywood Notebook: Essays

A cartography of Hollywood and transformational wanderings, back in print

A daylight traipse through early-aughts Los Angeles, Hollywood Notebook encapsulates the powerful feelings and hopeful futures of twentysomething Wendy C. Ortiz. In this boundary-defying sister memoir to Bruja, Ortiz navigates internal maps as she traverses external palm-treed streets, moving through her youthful twenties and into the pensiveness of her thirties. Peering at what lies ahead while dipping her toes into the past, Ortiz shows us that there is no place like Hollywood to unearth the joys of success and the blows of mistakes--both realized and denied. An innovative and bold examination of the daytime roaming mind, Hollywood Notebook is a cartography of love, loss, and transformation in the face of a brilliant psyche in a vibrant city.

WENDY C. ORTIZ is a writer of creative nonfiction who works in hybrid forms, essays, and memoir. She is the author of three books, all published by Northwestern University Press. Her writing has appeared in BOMB, Joyland, The New York Times, Pleiades, Fence, and many other journals. Ortiz is a therapist in private practice in Los Angeles.