This book split my heart open and reminded me how much immigrants matter, how much we all carry the traces of other worlds. LIDIA YUKNAVITCH, The Chronology of Water

California Calling is a lyrical self-interrogation of obsession, emigration, and identity. Natalie Singer’s story opens in a courtroom on a witness stand, where she’s forced to testify in a family breakup that changes the course of her life. At sixteen Natalie emigrates from Montreal and the secrets it holds to the golden promise of the California Bay Area, just as her Jewish ancestors fled Russia and went west for a new life. Through uneasy rituals of high school pep rallies and college sex in boats and the backs of pickups, to a summer tracing a serial killer through the heart of Gold Country, to an eventual journalism career in San Francisco and the deserts of Palm Springs, Natalie aches to forge an American identity. At once an intimately unflinching memoir and a probing examination of the family and cultural myths that shape us, California Calling calls upon history, reportage, witness interrogation tactics, music and pop culture, and the iconography of the West to explore whether we can cure loneliness through landscape. Ultimately, California Calling is a search for a state of belonging.

Natalie Singer's profile page

A mostly compelling book about a complicated question: if identity is made of memory and memory does not cohere, how do we build a self from the shards?

Kirkus Reviews

In her captivating literary memoir… Singer’s story comes through brief and lovely snapshots of moments, captured in language that is visceral and vivacious… a work that is both raw and incandescent, but whose most powerful reveals will perhaps reemerge in the reader’s consciousness only after the fact. This is a California that, as promised, truly does belong to all.

Foreword Reviews

In this searing book… Singer’s candor and self-questioning are humbling. She writes with melodic precision and sunshine-soaked imagery, crafting a powerful and memorable memoir.

Booklist

Love, escape, education, and family... These subjects are intertwined in ways that make for emotionally engrossing reading.

Library Journal