Radio Curious: David Ebershoff– "Southern California, 1903 – 1945", Segment 1

Originally Broadcast: July 29, 2003
In this program we visit with David Ebershoff, author “Pasadena,” a book about storytelling. “Pasadena” is the story of Linda Stamp, a young girl born and raised on a rural coastal area near San Diego, California, beginning when she was born in 1903. Linda learned the many different ways of the sea as she grew and married into a wealthy Pasadena family.

This is also a book about choices, some which we think through, and some which determine our fate even when we were unaware of the magnitude of the moment.

With the novelist’s freedom to he uses his sense of story, where it begins and where it ends. As the middle part of the story is built, so are the character’s lives, juxtaposing the times and places in their live times.

In many ways, California itself is the novel's main character. We get to see what the land must have been like when it was a wild, teeming frontier, just on its way to being transformed by fishermen, farmers, land developers and tourists.

David Ebershoff is currently an executive editor at Random House, and lives in New York City. When and I visited by phone in July 2002, I asked him to describe the kinds of things in his life that prompted him to write his second novel “Pasadena.”

The book David Ebershoff recommends is “Middlesex,” a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides.
David Ebershoff's website is: www.ebershoff.com.