"This book split my heart open and reminded me how much immigrants matter, how much we all carry the traces of other worlds."' -Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water
California Calling is a lyrical 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. "In her captivating literary memoir . . . Singer's story comes through brief and lovely snapshots of moments, captured in language that is visceral and vivacious . . . a work that is both raw and incandescent, but whose most powerful reveals will perhaps reemerge in the reader's consciousness only after the fact. This is a California that, as promised, truly does belong to all." -Foreword Reviews
"A mostly compelling book about a complicated question: if identity is made of memory and memory does not cohere, how do we build a self from the shards?" -Kirkus Reviews
"In this searing book . . . Singer's candor and self-questioning are humbling. She writes with melodic precision and sunshine-soaked imagery, crafting a powerful and memorable memoir." -Booklist
"Love, escape, education, and family . . . These subjects are intertwined in ways that make for emotionally engrossing reading." -Library Journal
"If epic longing for an identity could be cured by entering a story, California Calling: A Self Interrogation is the roadmap. Natalie Singer gives us the beating heart of an immigrant entering that mythic place we call the west. By and through the body of a girl becoming a woman we are reminded just how tricky forging a self is against the fractures and earthquakes and soul fires of life. I could hear and identify with an Eastern European heartsong yearning to find the rhythm called home in the west. I know both of those songs. This book split my heart open and reminded me how much immigrants matter, how much we all carry the traces of of other worlds." -Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water
"Natalie Singer's wonderful debut is about the myths we tell ourselves about ourselves as nations and individuals, and what we do when we learn about the truth beneath those myths. Singer situates California Calling within the geographic, literary and pop culture of the American West but the story she tells will ring true to anyone who is or knows a daughter, a woman, an immigrant." -Rebecca Brown, The Gifts of the Body
"I couldn't stop reading California Calling―I consumed it in one gorgeous gulp. Natalie Singer writes beautifully of an ordinary, extraordinary coming of age. In prose that's lean and elegant and fiercely honest, she captures the big pain and the small, real joys of growing up. This book shimmers like a California dream." -Claire Dederer, author of Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning
"In California Calling: A Self-Interogation, Natalie Singer brings the universal themes of longing and displacement to life in a singular, inimitable voice. California Calling is a story of yearning for a home th
