Los Angeles' altered landscapes challenge memory itself

By Ryan NouraiGuest contributor

March 13, 2025 3 AM PT

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New imaging from NASA provides a better understanding of the slow, mysterious Palos Verdes landslide. It shows the direction of the earthy movement — west, toward the coast — as well as the velocity, as much as 4 inches per week.

The analysis confirms what those of us who grew up on the superficially quiet Palos Verdes Peninsula have always known: It’s only a matter of time until the turbulent hillside crumbles into the ocean. But it’s happening faster than I ever expected.

It was just last year when the sanctuary where my mother’s funeral was held, on a remarkably foggy June day in 2015, was dismantled. Piece by piece, the glass-and-wood Wayfarers Chapel in Rancho Palos Verdes — designed by Lloyd Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright — was taken apart so that it might be saved.

Across the road from the holy house’s bare foundation, a onetime home of the writer Joan Didion is, given its location, probably in similar danger of falling into the Pacific Ocean.

Didion, who died in 2021, was a Sacramento native who wrote about Palos Verdes with reverence. In the 1960s, when Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, lived on the peninsula in a Spanish-style gatehouse, Didion observed the “slump of the hill” making its strange descent into the ocean. Later, in her 2005 memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking,” about the aftermath of Dunne’s death, Didion returned to Palos Verdes in memory.

The book’s final paragraph is about Abalone Cove, the watery destination of the continuing landslide. Didion and Dunne had swum there, and Didion wrote of “the swell of clear water, the way it changed, the swiftness and power it gained as it narrowed through the rocks at the base of the point.”

“The Year of Magical Thinking” stands out as a paragon of unreliable narration. Didion’s grief ripples backward and forward as she struggles to make sense of time. But over the course of her inquisition into the events surrounding her late husband’s heart attack, her prose becomes sharper, more concise. Didion emerges from the fog of mourning and arrives, with clarity, in Palos Verdes and the memory of Abalone Cove. The landscape serves as a static yet dynamic vessel for her grief.

I ask myself what the coast, with its chaparral, eucalyptus, wide-mawed canyons and thick seasonal fogs, will look like when I return. I also ask myself how I can mourn my parents, both of whom died in Palos Verdes, without the landscape where we created shared memories.

These questions apply more broadly and acutely to Southern Californians after the fires that took 29 lives and displaced more than 13,000 households. For many, the prospect of returning is not financially feasible; for those who are able to come back home, familiar landmarks and much more are gone.

So what to make of this information — of communities irrevocably lost to the fires, of NASA’s confirmation that the hillside will be folding in on itself soon?

After fires ravaged Malibu in 1978, Didion wrote in “The White Album,” that she drove to a nursery on the coast near Topanga Canyon. She found charred bushes, shards of glass and melted metal where once there were orchids. “I lost three years,” the owner told Didion. “And for an instant,” she writes, “I thought we would both cry.”

With that final gesture, Didion experienced the catastrophe with her fellow Angeleno. A memory that no longer has a landscape to live in can be called up by sharing it with someone else. Without the places to return to — Moonshadows in Malibu, the Wayfarers Chapel in Palos Verdes, our own homes — it is more important than ever to talk about what was lost. That is how we keep it alive.

Ryan Nourai is a writer working on a memoir about his late mother’s shooting.