A sense of place is pretty important to me in my work, and my childhood all took place in San Francisco, which not everybody lives in San Francisco, but I did. And so I have tried consciously to sort of bring the atmosphere of that city into my books. And sometimes it comes into my fiction work too. So I wrote a book called Ghosts, where they spend a lot of time on the beach in Northern California, which is not the sunny California beach that some people think of. It’s windy, it’s chilly, it’s very damp, it’s usually very gray. And that’s what it’s like in San Francisco in the summertime.
So all of my summer interludes in my books are me, like shivering under a blanket and wearing a jacket, and, you know, kind of hiding out and feeling sad. And I remember when I first turned in Smile and the editorial team was looking it over. One of the notes I got was, “It’s really hard to tell the passage of time in your stories.” And I said, “Well, that’s because we don’t have summer, fall, winter, and spring like you do in other places.” And so that’s just like a natural progression of time that most people are familiar with.
I’m like, “We didn’t have that.” We had commercials on television telling us it was Christmastime. Sometimes people had Christmas trees, and there were certain songs that people sang. Like that was how we knew it was Christmas, not because we were building snowmen, or drinking hot beverages, or anything like that. We drank our hot beverages in the summertime because it was foggy then. So that’s just true, like it’s just true of that place.
I’ve always been really tuned in to how that makes my body feel. Just the fact that in October the light is lower in the sky. Like the leaves didn’t change, we didn’t have that like crisp fall air that you get on the east coast, but because the light was lower. Every October I was like, “Oh, it’s almost Halloween.” So maybe I was just more in tune with the natural world than some people. But, you know, San Francisco has interesting architecture, and there was a huge earthquake when I was 12. So I put that into Smile.
And kids always ask me, “Was that really true? Did that really happen?” I’m like, “Yeah. It’s on Wikipedia. You can look it up.” But mostly what I hear from is parents of kids who are like, “Oh, my gosh. I was there too,” or “I remember when that happened ‘cause I was watching the world series,” and it happened as that broadcast was on television so people all over the country got to experience it. And those are the little details that give you context, and I never say explicitly, “It was 1989.” But, you know, it does give it a sense of place, and a sense of history, I guess, which that’s pretty cool.
