"Idiosyncratic Routine"

Lakewood Grid Housing

In Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, Waldie plays with boundaries in a unique way. Just like the rigid confines of his suburban Southern California community, Lakewood, Waldie established a set form for his writing using guidelines for each chapter. He discusses the grids and patterns of the suburbs and created his own grid with a maximum for each chapter: “No section is longer than a single, double-spaced, typed sheet of paper. That was my grid—the boundaries of an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch rectangle of white” (182). Certainly, my short attention span fares better with the short chapters, but I also thought it was an extremely creative way of addressing structure in relation to Lakewood. It showed the way in which his thought process was possibly affected by growing up and living in Lakewood for his entire life so far. Instead of longwinded accounts of the development of the community, Waldie uses the unique form to provide snippets of history, all the while interjecting anecdotes of his neighbors, parents, etc. In the dialogue at the end of the book, he addresses Holy Land as a memoir, saying, “It doesn’t look much like one. And it doesn’t have some of the things memoirs are supposed to have. Holy Land is a memoir of a place more than an account of a life” (181). While it may not look like a traditional memoir, Waldie certainly shares some personal information within the brief yet engaging chapters, among the hard numbers and silly tales. I was particularly interested in the way in which he wove details of his parents’ deaths into his story of Lakewood. He sometimes even appeared to write in the third person about it. He seems so affected by his house and life in Lakewood, and certainly by the reality of continuing to live in his parents’ home after their deaths. While a normally structured and conducted memoir might be a lot to take when writing, or reading, about such a difficult topic, the structure allows for him to only present and deal with his two major losses in pieces. It is as if he finds comfort and encouragement in the self-prescribed grid of his book in the same way he finds comfort within his suburban gridded community.

Location