Life in LA

About Life in LA

My name is Claire Bidwell Smith. I am 30 years old and I live in Chicago.

I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia the only child of two much older parents. They both got cancer when I was fourteen. My mother died when I was eighteen and my father died when I was twenty-five. For better or for worse, these events have shaped everything about who I am today.

I moved to Chicago almost a year ago from Los Angeles where I lived for five years. Just as I never really imagined living in Los Angeles, I never imagined living in Chicago. But I fell in love with a writer named Greg Boose and that was that. We got married on July 19th, 2008. Read the modern-day story of how we met and fell in love in this  post.

Much of what I write about here has to do with me being a 30 year old woman living in a big city. I often write about the lows, the contemplative afternoons, the twisting, manic screaming that wells up inside of me, the strange encounters, the nightmares and lucid dreamscapes, the falls, the pushes, the soft sounds.

But those aren't everything that I am. I have a Bachelor's degree in creative writing and a Master's degree in clinical psychology. I've worked as a psychotherapist in community clinics and I'm currently working as a grief counselor for hospice. My house is filled to the brim with books, my calendar with dinner dates. I’ve been to over 20 countries and I’m obsessed with both maps and menus. I have three cats and a lot of houseplants.

And I'm a writer. I've always been a writer.

The Book

In March of 2007 I quit my full-time job on a lark to write a book. I got up every morning and wrote from 9am to 2pm before running to the clinic or to school. I completed the entire book in 10 weeks. I chronicled my book writing process here on the blog. You can read about it beginning here. And you can read an interview with me on Media Bistro about my book writing process here.

The manuscript has yet to find a publisher. I’m currently working on revisions of the first draft. You can listen to me read from passages of the book at the bottom of this page.

The Blogs

I started my first blog, Life in LA, in June of 2003. I was living alone with my father in his condo in Orange County. I was twenty-five years old and he was eighty-two. He died on August 5th, 2003. I was holding his hand.

In October of 2003 the Sydney Morning Herald named mine one of the best blogs in the world. I quit writing Life in LA shortly after that. I started it up again again in August of 2006. If you'd like to read the original Life in LA you can do so here. If you'd like to read the more recent one, you can do so here.

The blog I write in almost every day is called Life in Chicago.

I also write a blog with my husband Greg called She Wrote, He Wrote.

Please visit www.clairebidwellsmith.com to check out travel and food writing clips and find links to more writing.

Thank you for visiting!

Life After LA

I'm sitting on the deck again. It's not quite 9AM. I'm eating a banana chocolate chip muffin and drinking coffee and it is, in fact, wonderfully windy today. It's cool out and the sky is filled with big, blustery clouds. The air smells like rain and I realize that I had forgotten about the smell of rain, like depth and possibility.

I spent most of yesterday crying. For no real reason. My life just feels so upended and all the things that make me happy and sparkly and adventurous don't seem as present or as plangent. But feeling sorry for myself is really quite lonely and unoriginal. And it's something I've already spent enough time doing in this life.

Greg came over last night and I made the loveliest dinner of spicy chicken sausage, farfalle and a spicy tomato-basil-vodka sauce, topping it all off with a heaping dollop of ricotta. I'm realizing as I write this that it's one of my strongest tendencies: cooking to ward off insecurity.

I've been doing it for years. When I moved back to Vermont after my mother died when I was eighteen it was the middle of winter and I was dreadfully depressed and isolated. And so what did I do? I cooked. Night after night. I spent my afternoons wandering the aisles of the local grocery store, picking out ingredients for whatever recipe I had chosen from The Joy of Cooking and then I spent the evening carefully destroying the kitchen in my attempt to make Potato Leek Soup (serves 6-8) or a flaky pastry crust for Quiche Lorraine (100,000 calories per serving).

I went on like this for months, cooking and crying and soothing myself in this strange culinary sort of way. I've refined the process a bit in my older age, reducing the crying, cooking healthier dishes, lessening the isolation and adding in a nice bubble bath here and there.

Okay, I'm rambling. I'm procrastinating.

Thanks to everyone for all the input on what I should do about Life in LA. Despite all of your wonderful suggestions, I'm still unsure. A couple of months ago I bought the domain www.clairebidwellsmith.com and I would like that to be my actual url, I think, but that still leaves the question of what to do about the title of the blog. And it's been Life in LA for so long that it does feel sort of strange to change it.

But really. I live in Chicago now. I need to do something about this.

The Windy City

The Windy City isn't so windy today. It's just a little breezy. I'm sitting on my deck in my new apartment drinking coffee and writing in my various journals.

Last night, sleeping alone in my new little house with its high ceilings and tall windows, I woke up almost every hour, opening my eyes to take in the open door frame, the quiet rooms beyond, the dresser in the corner. Around 3AM I lay curled against my pillows staring out the bedroom window and realized that I could see the very top blinking tips of the spires on the John Hancock building downtown.

I've been in Chicago for five days now and so far it's been mainly spent unpacking and organizing my new home. On Monday there was a lazy afternoon stroll by that beautiful lake and on Saturday night friends from Los Angeles were in town. We went to the most amazing restaurant, Tango Sur, and then later a group of us ended up sprawled across the big leather bar chairs at the W downtown. It all felt wonderfully normal and relaxed.

I've been trying to be good at keeping my insistent worries at bay, tamping down the threatening stress levels which mainly stem from money and job issues but yesterday, after a day spent job hunting and wiring money into overdrawn bank accounts, I came home and collapsed in a sobbing heap on my bed. I curled up against the pillows and just wept.

And it was a funny sort of crying I realized after a while. Or perhaps the most appropriate kind of crying. Because as I lay there, tears staining my pillow, I realized that I wasn't crying because I was sad or particularly scared or worried. Because I'm not. I'm not sad that I moved here. I don't really miss Los Angeles or my old home. I miss my friends but I know we'll see each other soon and I can always call them. And I'm not even that stressed about the other things. Although money and a job loom transparent right now, I know their edges will sharpen soon enough.

I was simply crying for the enormity of it all. Eventually I picked myself up and drew a warm bath where I soaked for a long time letting all the tension of the past few weeks dissolve and dissipate.

And now here I am, a Wednesday morning, on my deck with my pets and plants and cup of coffee. I have a full day ahead of me with job searching and working on my book and other submissions. I have emails to return and things to unpack, laundry to finish.

Oh, something funny about my new apartment. Below me live a bunch of college guys and they're all very young and sweet and funny and they happen to have the only laundry in the building and it's free but you have to actually go into their aparment and down into their basement to use it. And they don't mind at all. When I hesitated to just walk through their back door (which they never lock) and into their kitchen with my laundry basket they assured me that I would get used to it. And over the course of the evening I kind of did. I tip-toed through their living room several times, always one or two of them sprawled across the couches, playing video games, drinking beer, or passed out snoring softly.

I'm really kind of delighted by this aspect of my new life. There's something so funny and sweet about it all. I'm going to make a big batch of banana chocolate-chip muffins today and I think I'll leave some on their counter the next time I go through with the laundry.

Oh, and I really need to figure out what to do about LIFE IN LA. Any ideas?

Life in Chicago

Well, I officially live in Chicago!

I arrived on Friday in the late afternoon. The last day of driving flew by, my foot pressing harder and harder on the gas pedal in anticipatory energy.

My boyfriend was waiting for me at my new apartment when I arrived and, with the help of friends, we unloaded all my stuff into my new place. The last couple of days have been a blur of unpacking and organizing, trips to Target and Whole Foods, waking in the middle of the night to stare sleepily out foreign windows.

The strangest thing about being here in Chicago is that it just doesn't feel strange at all. When I left my aparment alone for the first time this afternoon and walked to the train station, I felt perfectly at home, as though I'd walked that walk a thousand times.

It's warm afternoon as I write this. I'm wearing a grey t-shirt and the stereo sounds good. I've got dinner plans and I can hear the train going by.

I'm 29 years old and I live in Chicago. My whole life is happening right now.