Hollywood Notebook: Essays

by Wendy C. Ortiz

A cartography of  Hollywood and transformational wanderings, back in print

 

A daylight traipse through early-aughts Los Angeles, Hollywood Notebook encapsulates the powerful feelings and hopeful futures of twentysomething Wendy C. Ortiz. In this boundary-defying sister memoir to Bruja, Ortiz navigates internal maps as she traverses external palm-treed streets, moving through her youthful twenties and into the pensiveness of her thirties. Peering at what lies ahead while dipping her toes into the past, Ortiz shows us that there is no place like Hollywood to unearth the joys of success and the blows of mistakes—both realized and denied. An innovative and bold examination of the daytime roaming mind, Hollywood Notebook is a cartography of love, loss, and transformation in the face of a brilliant psyche in a vibrant city.

208 pages, Paperback

Published April 15, 2025

About the author

Wendy C. Ortiz is the author of Excavation: A Memoir (Future Tense Books, 2014), Hollywood Notebook (Writ Large Press, 2015), and the dreamoir Bruja (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016). In 2016 Bustle named her one of “9 Women Writers Who Are Breaking New Nonfiction Territory.” Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, The Rumpus, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the National Book Critics Circle Small Press Spotlight blog. Her writing has appeared in such venues as The New York Times, Joyland, StoryQuarterly, and a year-long series appeared at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Most recently her “Urban Liminal” series of texts appear alongside signature graphic representations of the projects of Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects in the book Amplified Urbanism (2017). Wendy is a psychotherapist in private practice in Los Angeles.

Visit Wendy at wendycortiz.tumblr.com or at her website, wendyortiz.com.

Reviews

[Margaret T]

not for me <3