“Barbara pursed her lips and said we would begin the harvest in a few days. I would stomp the grapes with my bare feet and purple my palms. We would make wine, for better or worse.”

“At the center, the ellipse was a shelter, a hurricane’s eye, an intake of breath. I wanted to lay down there, to hold his hand, never to leave.”

“According to Jacaranda, the protagonist of Eve Babitz’s Sex and Rage, ‘California was the only conceivable place on earth to be.’”