The Ruins of California

I'm feeling the emotional hangover of a beautiful book come to an end.  A story of a girl who I feel like I’ve known and loved in real life, of her father and her half brother and her grandma and her father’s lovers. It's called The Ruins of California, it's written by Martha Sherrill, and I think you should read it.

Inez Ruin is a little girl growing up in California. She lives with her mom in abuelita’s house, and occasionally she travels north to San Francisco to be with her father.

Paul Ruin is tall, dark and handsome.  He’s brilliant, interesting, honest, and self-important.  He’s a professor who dates his students and has an opinion on everything.  He does things that I want to do for my little girl one day, like reading all of her assigned reading throughout her scholastic career, and sending a check for $1,818.81 on her 18th birthday.

Inez narrates the whole thing, hopping forward through the years and the styles and phases and friendships and loves, with varying degrees of interest, disgust, passion, regret, and always with a sense of humor. She is in so many ways a girl that I know, and reading this book was like learning the childhood I never knew and rarely imagined.

This book popped into my hands at the local library.  I liked the cover and I opened to a page in the middle, read a few paragraphs, and decided it was well-written and worth a try.  Now I can’t imagine my life without having read it.

How does somebody make such a beautiful thing?  How does one craft out of paper and words a complete reality that is clear and full of people that I know and love?  To me this is the most impressive thing I’ve ever seen or felt or held - this little book that took me so deeply into its story and made me imagine my future and helped me understand the people I’ve known.

As my mom says, we’re all multi-dimensional, existing simultaneously in many different places and times.  A writer like Sherrill can tap into these other realities and simply open the door to let us see them.

I often talk about believability - in books, in movies especially.  I can’t enjoy a movie if I don’t find it believable.  It doesn’t have to be a true story, though, or even a reality that I’m familiar with.  It just has to be a reality, and I think we know when something is real or not by how we feel when we see it or read it.

The Ruins of California is real, and as I linger in the space it just left in my life and in my heart, I’m seeing everything a little bit differently.