A letter from/to Angel Olsen

On Los Angeles, disasters, and 'the symbolism of starting over.'

This is the first entry into this new series called The Public Letter Project— I invited anyone who feels so moved to send me a letter, and I’ll write public replies to a few of them. Sort of like an advice column, but without advice. More details here.

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On the first day of this year, Angel Olsen sent me a photograph of a page she’d just written, a short missive about Los Angeles that has now taken on a different meaning, as Angel and her husband live close to one of the areas of major destruction.

(Before you ask— yes, I’ve been an avid Angel Olsen listener since she released Half Way Home in 2012; we met in 2022 after I was hired to write an introduction for her last album, Big Time.

I love love love actual handwriting, but I also typed it up here for easier reading—

The storybook existence of Asheville had been irreparably changed for me, and Los Angeles made the most sense— not only for Max but for my spirit, my livelihood, my connection to others to be saved. But sometimes I do miss the sound of a storm parting the sky. I mis that dark green haze of a tornado about to land. The most we get is an earthquake— which I have to tell you is more talked about than necessary. I love many things about this place. I never thought I’d understand it, but here I am finally free to be myself and also anonymous, in “Hollywood, California.” I found myself telling someone: I feel seen and safe knowing there are like-minded creative people walking around just like me— sitting with the uncomfortable and embarrassing fact that they’ve exploited themselves as artists and simultaneously have to learn to let go of the self they cared so deeply about expressing to the world in the first place. I’m surrounded by clowns who’ve found their higher power, and there’s nothing, no place in the world like it. It’s not just sunsets and stars. It’s the symbolism of starting over— dying and being born over and over for the sake of communicating parts to a soul. And parts to a soul are not always pretty, funny, engaging, charming, but the ugliness is just as important when trying to decipher the truth of any matter. My biggest, ugliest moments and losses have saved me as well— as a perimeter around the real joy and love in my life, and getting through them has given me faith I just couldn’t have if it had all been easier.

Dear Angel—

I read this the moment you sent it, in the Dulles Airport on my way back to my adopted home of Mexico City, but it’s taken me a minute to respond.

A week after you wrote this, much of Los Angeles was engulfed in flames. Like so many people, I was anxiously watching the line of fire approach my friends’ neighborhoods and trying not to send too many worried texts. Many of those friends are also artists and therefore, like you, already live with a certain kind of intensity and uncertainty at all times. Yet such a natural/unnatural disaster has an even wilder intensity and uncertainty, which isn’t to say that artists are uniquely equipped to handle them. In fact, I’m not entirely sure what kind of parallel I’m trying to draw between artists and disasters. Perhaps it’s something about the recovery, something about the dying and being reborn in your work (as you wrote) only to die and be reborn again; a fire or flood or hurricane or tornado is a larger and much more material version of something we’re trying to make and unmake and remake all the time, in miniature. Maybe that means we’re generally worse at handling them calmly; the jury is out.

This feels somehow related to your idea that these like-minded people you’ve found in LA have all necessarily “exploited themselves” to work as artists. Exploit is such a bold and painfully true word for the shadow side of making things for a living. Writing itself always feels real to me. Publishing feels (always always) unreal. I tend to feel like a clown, and not necessarily one that’s found her higher power.

I wonder how your feelings about Los Angeles have changed or strengthened or added new layers in these past weeks, as you’ve been volunteering and living in the smoke. I lived in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit, and those first years after the storm I fell into an intense love with the city, even as those years made it clear to me that I didn’t have what it truly took to live there forever. But post-Katrina New Orleans also led me to write with a lot more clarity and charge. The first things I wrote about were the recovery efforts, the volunteers, and the people who made the city what it is and was. I won’t say the hurricane itself was a teacher (or if it was I admit now I learned nothing) but the city itself was my teacher absolutely (in addition two human teachers who guided me so much at the time, Mark Grote and Martin Pousson.)

You’ve been making LA your home for a while now, but I know you also had such a long and deep relationship to Asheville, NC, which is still very much recovering from Hurricane Helene. I don’t want to end on such a bummer note, as it feels like so many of us are living between one disaster and another, or watching one disaster on the internet while bracing the arrival of a new one, but I continue to have faith in artists— the people who pay attention— to be transformed by what they witness, no matter how painful or humbling, and to spread that transformation outward. You’ve told me you’ve been writing more and that makes me so glad. Words can’t rebuild a home or a place, but at the risk of sounding totally sentimental, I do think they’re a part of what gives people the strength to recover from anything.

Sentimentally yours,

Catherine