Nobody's Property Episode 03: My Mother's Egg

For a few years while I was growing up, a book called How to Do Your Own Divorce sat undisturbed on a bookshelf by our living-room fireplace. It just sat there, its paper spine facing out, between Passages and Last Things. This was in Southern California, on an alluvial fan of the San Gabriels, in a little falling-down house on Twelfth Street in Claremont. We moved there when I was five years old. My father’s parents, Charles and Edith, had fronted him the down payment for the house and planned to hand over the title when Dad came up with the roughly three thousand dollars to pay them back.

Music by Kristin Hersh: kristinhersh.cashmusic.org or www.kristinhersh.com

Here's an interesting resource. Love the cover photo of the couple on the beach!

Nobody's Property Episode 02: Chaparral

When I was two years old, my parents and I lived for a while in a cottage up Laurel Canyon. There is a picture of me from this time: I'm wearing toddler-sized cowgirl buckskins, my red hair is in high pigtails poking out each side of my head, I'm smiling, and I'm holding a toothbrush. Remember, this was less than two years after the Manson Family came down from the Ranch and murdered Sharon Tate and her guests up on Cielo Drive. The crazed women tasted blood and used it to scrawl PIG on the door. They crashed more than a party; they crashed a culture. And across the continent and the ocean, people were looking for my Aunt Jenny.

Music by Kristin Hersh: kristinhersh.cashmusic.org or www.kristinhersh.com

Larry Harnisch mentions Pershing Square in a blog post.

Nobody's Property Episode 01: Tiny Dancer

I’m on the middle road from San Francisco to L.A., the 101, doing seventy behind a Chevy Chevelle past open-bed trucks hauling vegetables and buses hauling field workers, twin port-a-potties towed behind them. I noticed the Chevelle pulling out from the center divider outside Salinas—the gray dust it kicked up matched the primer that coated its aging body. Now every bus and truck it passes I blow by moments later, easing back into the right lane once I see both headlights in the rearview. I’ve had the feeling before of being in sync with another driver on this long curving road, traveling together with a stranger: the feeling that I'll make it to where I'm going.

Because someone else seems to be going there too.

Music by Kristin Hersh: kristinhersh.cashmusic.org or www.kristinhersh.com

Nobody's Property Episode 00: Situation/Story

November 4, 1971
Jennifer Rose Cooke, a girl from California, just turned 18, goes missing in a frigid forest in West Germany. She has been hitchhiking. First she caught a ride with a trucker, then with a West German soldier. Maybe she was trying to visit a young professor she had met on the boat over from New York. On that trip, he had heard her say she might throw herself overboard.

April 28, 1972
Another girl, just turned three, lives with her parents in a house in Laurel Canyon that lets the California rain in. Her biggest fear is of the brown snails in the garden; she will not cross the brick path if one is there. It is her father's twenty-sixth birthday; on this day his sister Jenny's remains are found. Officially, she died "of exposure," although a murder investigation is begun and the file remains permanently open.

Music by Kristin Hersh: kristinhersh.cashmusic.org or www.kristinhersh.com

An excellent book on Memoir: The Situation and The Story: The Art of Personal Narrative, by Vivian Gornick (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2002)