Paradise and Paradise Lost

Excerpt:

I never imagined myself living in Los Angeles. It was too big a city, and so far from everything and everyone and everywhere I had ever known. And I had certain ideas about LA—a place where everyone was thin and beautiful and famous or striving to become famous. As a black woman from Nebraska, I had no idea how I could possibly find space for myself. For years, I never even tried. As a writer, and a professor in the humanities, I moved from one rural or suburban setting to another—you go where the jobs are, and the jobs are rarely where you want to be. It’s hard to be black everywhere, but it is a special kind of hard to be black in a small town where you will always stand out, where you are always one of a very few.

When I moved to Lafayette, Indiana, in 2014 to teach at Purdue University, I immediately knew I had made a grave mistake. I was no stranger to small towns and rural communities, but Lafayette felt particularly inhospitable. It was particularly inhospitable. The woman I was dating at the time lived in LA, so I started making monthly and then weekly trips to LA. It was expensive but absolutely worth the expense. 

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