Essayist and critic Richard Rodriguez is the author of Brown, Hunger of Memory, and Days of Obligation. Before participating in a panel on the past and future of L.A.’s global image-on which he was the only person to wear a tie, as he pointed out in the green room-he offered his thoughts on writing, the city, and celebrity sightings.
Q. What’s the worst thing about being a writer?
A. That no one reads.
Q. What’s the last thing that surprised you?
A. The traffic on Bundy today. I used to live in L.A. when I was a young man, and it was an extremely generous city in those years. It told everybody you were beautiful if you ran every day and drove a sports car. Then you turned 32 and L.A. sent you somewhere else. You come to a city that you knew well-and suddenly there’s stasis. It makes you feel older, and it makes the city feel older.
Q. What do you like best about L.A.?
A. [Pauses, laughs.] I used to love to see movie stars shopping at Ralph’s at 2 in the morning. You never saw movie stars otherwise, they’re never around. And then you’d see Van Johnson at Ralph’s. Fred Astaire went to an Episcopal church on the coast. The drama of watching a movie star in real life is so moving to me, and so thrilling and so on, and shocking in many ways. I love that.
Q. What’s your biggest pet peeve?
A. Kids and cell phones, and texting on the street. … Instead of being alive-the loss of youth to technology is so shocking to me. I keep telling them to turn off that stupid machine! My generation invented it. It’s a middle-aged technology that the young have taken as their technology.
Q. What dish is your specialty when you cook?
A. I cook only on Friday nights. So on Friday night the last eight years, because my partner is a man of repetitive behaviors, I cook risotto. I probably cook the best risotto in the world.
Q. What’s your secret?
A. Patience. You have to love it a lot.
Q. What’s your most prized material possession?
A. I lost one of my kidneys to cancer a few years ago, and the one that survived is my most prized material possession. My left kidney.
Q. Do you have a favorite plant or flower?
A. Eucalyptus.
Q. What book changed your life?
A. A collection of short stories by D.H. Lawrence which I read in high school. I’d never read anything like that-a working-class son of a coal miner, a writer in England, writing about that. I didn’t know you could do that on a page. I don’t imitate Lawrence in my writing, but he gave me a kind of permission which I’ve never forgotten.
Q. What’s the most unusual job you’ve ever had?
A. Being on television-I have a non-TV face and a non-TV voice.
Q. When is it OK to lie?
A. When you write.
*Photo by Sarah Rivera