I had a reader tell me today that one of the things she enjoyed about Not in Time were all the different settings, which she found easy to visualize.
She thought Genevieve’s apartment was especially vivid, which made me laugh, because I made Genevieve’s apartment up out of whole cloth. Garage-to-apartment conversions are pretty common in Los Angeles, but I’ve never been in one. I simply sat down with a piece of paper and a pencil and plotted out how one might be put together and went from there.
Even more difficult was figuring out her parking. Parking arrangements that would sound crazy in other parts of the country aren’t all that unusual in LA. (When we were looking for a place to live there, I had to figure out what “tandem parking” meant in real estate listings.) I drew a diagram of the parking, too, and ended up running it by my husband to make sure it made sense.
(It sounds sexist, I know, but he’s way better at spatial relationships than me.)
Julien’s house was much easier. It’s based on the house my husband and I rented during the time we lived in LA — Culver City, to be more precise. So far, only person who’s read the book has picked up on that. (“I know that house!” my niece said.)
I gave Julien different furniture and changed a few things in the kitchen, but the stove is the same, as you can see from the photo above.
You wouldn’t recognize the house from the exterior, though. I borrowed the landscaping from a place a few streets over.
We lived in LA for less than two years, but I have indelible memories of that time. The first draft of Not in Time was written at our dining room table there, and I mailed the first copy of the manuscript (back when you sent an actual paper manuscript) to my agent in New York from a UPS store on Sepulveda Boulevard.
All these years later, I still sometimes have vivid dreams about Los Angeles.