THOMAS LARSON

(San Diego Reader, February 12, 2025)

For a couple of decades now, I’ve worked in the memoir trade—writing about the form, teaching and facilitating the craft to hundreds, and yes, actually writing one of my own. My students were everyday folks—in most cases, still enmeshed in the universal trial of families and their unfinished business. And it was the “family tragedy” so many wished to tell—Mom’s betrayal, Dad’s cancer, a sister’s suicide, each subject worthy of a near-and-dear’s take. But worthiness does not displace the ethics of authorship. The most concerned query I got: “How do I avoid upsetting my loved ones with [fill-in-the-blank revelation of awfulness], which I believe damaged me and my family?”

When I wrote my own memoir, I too stumbled on this question and the anxieties it raised. I wrote of the living and the dead, and a few living readers ended up wishing they (or I) were in the latter camp. Well, no, that’s extreme—better to say they wished they’d been consulted. That was the lesson, and it formed the core of my advice: try not to make your story an act of revenge, uglier than it need be, even if some justification may exist. (As such, Mommie Dearest is a masterpiece of retribution.) Instead, try, if possible, to make the memoir an act of community, of compromise, layered with some humility. Invite redemption. Don’t merely gavel out a literary life sentence without the possibility of parole.

(Written January, 2025)

The day after the Eaton fire destroyed much of Altadena, California, one of its residents, the L.A.-centric essayist and podcaster Meghan Daum, recorded a phone talk that begins with a somber recitation of facts and becomes a tragic surrender to fate. The previous evening, warned by neighbors to get out, she packed a few clothes, her computer, her phone, and her dog into her car and fled. The morning after, she says, she learned that “my house and every other house on the street had burned to the ground. The wind was so strong and the water was so scarce that emergency crews and firefighters were virtually helpless.”

(San Diego Reader November 20, 2024)

Life guards

At the top of the Grandview stairway sits a bench, dedicated to the memory of the three women who died under the weight of a 50-ton blockfall in 2019. In a late-July meetup, Dr. Pat Davis, one of the survivors who has fought hard to avenge their deaths, posed in front of the bench for my camera. Behind him is a chain-link fence walling off the condo colony of Seabluffe, many of its units seasonally occupied. As the cliff has weathered and retracted, the community, built in 1974 and numbering 255 units, has crept closer to the edge. Between the ocean-view condos and that edge is a brow ditch for rain runoff; it’s cracked and broken in spots, allowing rain to seep into the bluff.

(San Diego Reader November 13, 2024)

The cliff collapse

On August 2, 2019, at around 1 pm, Dr. J. Patrick Davis, his wife, Julie Davis, Julie’s sister, Elizabeth Charles Cox, and Pat and Julie’s daughter, Annie Davis Clave — all three of them mothers — accompanied by Pat and Julie’s adult daughter, Elizabeth McCullagh, a dozen wave-tagging kids and several neighbor moms, 20 in all, descended a four-sectioned, rickety stairway to picnic on Grandview Beach at the north end of Encinitas. The Davis, Cox, and Clave families were in high spirits. They were celebrating a milestone: Elizabeth Cox’s breast cancer, following a long stressful treatment, was in remission.

(Times of San Diego, October 9, 2024)

After four years of waiting, the Copley Symphony Hall has been remade to enhance the San Diego Symphony sound, its musicians, and their audience response as the Jacobs Music Center. Vacated by COVID and judged acoustically repairable, the venue placed its uneven tone and barnlike feel in the hands of musically-minded engineers.

I remember many concerts at Copley: It wasn’t that bad — nothing like the unwelcome Mandeville at UCSD or the cavernous sepulture of the Civic Center where any theatrical intimacy of, say, a Broadway show, expires about row 12, the balcony patrons listening in from another county. The symphony board agreed. Copley could be overhauled — what with $125 million and computer-driven and ear-tested redesigns.

Fittingly, conductor Rafael Payare, after a donor-showcase first night, Sept. 28, chose Gustav Mahler’s colossus, the “Resurrection” Symphony, his Second, this past weekend to christen its equally colossal retrofit.

(Where Meadows Reside Issue 2.2 September 2, 2024)

1 / It’s the thump of his body hitting the floor. The boards beneath him thud, jostle briefly, and echo. The fading away stills. I’m listening, as I always do, wondering whether his twenty-month-old daughter hears the shaky thud of her father gone down, whether she wakes and feels frightened or soothed by his form nearby and sleeps on. By early afternoon, she should be in deep slumber, following a lunch of brown-sugared oatmeal. I’ve lived in their shadow too long, and the dark speaks to my irresolute nature, namely, that I’ve not fully listened, not fully heard the story of my loss my brother’s been telling me for years, lying there.

That April 1989, Steve, my older brother, was a high-school shop teacher in northern Wisconsin, recently married with two stepsons and a new daughter. That year he was 42; our father predeceased him, as they say, fourteen years earlier, at 61. My dad’s second heart attack (massive is the go-to word) did him in while on a sales junket with Mom in their hotel room.

(Bridge Eight August 25, 2024)

Oh, the sonic pleasures of the 2023 film Tár: casting Cate (body, voice, face: her elasticity, her fearlessness) as the first-ever female conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic; Mahler’s most revelatory symphony, the Fifth; the musician Sophie Kauer who acts and plays the Elgar Cello Concerto; a catalog of ominous sounds, musical and not, bedeviling Lydia and us with its undertow; and the eclectic score, which is both “in” the film and “accompanies” it and, in turn, enchants and destabilizes the ouroboros of making a movie about a musical subject musically. Another oh for the film's diabolical pleasures: Blanchett’s ferocious musical talent and her equally astute bedding skills as she sets up a scholarship program for young women conductors to manipulate them and, in the process, betray her wife, her personal assistant, her assistant conductor who “questions her integrity,” and a protégé who commits suicide.