Malibu Burning: How the City's Greatest Writers Experienced Its Fires

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Imagine: The year is 1845. You, your wife, and your seven children sell your farm and buy a covered wagon. You load it with everything you own, hitch up the family mule, and trundle off, leaving the clapboard houses and hard pews of your sleepy New England village behind forever. You make your way to St. Louis, gateway to the plains. As you load sacks of flour and beans into the wagon, you survey the bustling city around you, and the great expanse to the west. Once you set off on the Oregon trail, into 2,000 miles of unsettled country, once you make your way across that wide Missouri river, you’ll be on your own.

On the trail west, you see great grasslands stretching beyond the horizon; towering, snow-capped mountains; parched and dry canyons; sparkling lakes — things you never imagined you would see when you were just another farmer. You encounter great herds of buffalo at rest on the plains, thousands of them like some great living organism, and hear wolves and coyotes howl at night.

These wonders extract their price. A rushing river sweeps away one son. Cholera takes two daughters. By the third month your diet of stale biscuits and jerky has resulted in scurvy. Your muscles grow weak, your teeth begin to rot. Your wife is silent, she looks at you impassively. You wonder if she hates you for what you’ve done. Your remaining children are listless, their faces hollow from hunger.

Yet something calls to you. When you reach California, you turn off the trail and head south, away from the other pioneers. You make your way down the hot, flat Central Valley until you come to a little hamlet called Los Angeles, a sleepy outpost filled with cow herds and orange groves. You turn the wagon west again and keep going. You’re so close now. You begin to smell the ocean. Your senses sharpen. And then, you crest a final hill and you see it: a landscape of pristine beaches and verdant hills, where the scent of bougainvillea fills the air and shorebirds wheel in the sky. It is the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen. You know in your heart that the loss you experienced was God testing you, seeing if you had the mettle to make it here to the terminus point, to the promised Eden, to the golden land.

Of course, nothing like this ever happened. Most of Malibu (an anglicized version of the Chumash Humaliwo, “The Surf Sounds Loudly”) was in private hands all the way until 1940. First, it was held under a Spanish land grant. Later it functioned as a ranch owned by the powerful Rindge family, who fought bitterly to keep interlopers out until the widow May Rindge, land-rich and cash-poor, was eventually forced to sell. Hardy pioneers did not drive Malibu’s great land rush: movie stars and real estate magnates from an already thriving Los Angeles did. Yet drive the Pacific Coast Highway on any given summer day and you can’t help but feel amazed that the dream was real, that there really was a place like this waiting for the people who talked of heading west to fulfill the nation’s Manifest Destiny. A hundred-degree summer day in inland L.A. is a breezy eighty in Malibu. The air intoxicates, it’s impossible not to roll down your windows when you drive. Pull up to any given business — seafood shacks, breweries, grocery stores — and you’ll find that the employees actually do look like Sydney Sweeney or Point Break-era Patrick Swayze, that they actually do address you in that laid-back surfer-dude drawl.

Behind the beaches sits the great inland; miles of winding roads through the scrubby Santa Monica Mountains, full of vertiginous ascents and blind curves. Here the bustle and activity of the shore is replaced by a stillness, a curious lonesome feeling. The sunset light takes on a deeper golden hue, it reflects off rock formations that often look more suited to Colorado or Arizona than the Pacific Coast. Low-slung houses and ranches sit behind gates. You can spot horses cantering on the trails, the sea reflected behind them. This vernal paradise, this Fiddler’s Green, this Land of Cockaigne a mere ten miles away from the traffic-choked 101, how can it possibly be real?

Malibu, to the Angeleno, represents a promise that life here is more than sitting in traffic and scrambling to cover ever-increasing rent and failing in various ways to accomplish your dreams. Even at the end of the worst day, it seems to say, there are still green hills and sparkling blue waters waiting for you, if you care to drive to them. It also, to many, represents everything loathsomely unequal about the city. To these critics, the fires that periodically ravage the area are a kind of biblical judgement, a punishment for its vanity and hubris. This sentiment sits behind the most famous piece of writing about the region, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.”

When I mentioned I was writing something about Malibu, my friends, good lefties all, would inevitably ask if I had read “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.” Like Play It As It Lays and the Canter’s menu and the Hollywood sign, it is, at this point, one of Los Angeles’s essential texts. The essay, which makes up the third chapter of Mike Davis’s Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, begins with a furious contrast between the “intolerable ovens” of inner-city Westlake, where “[a]mid hundreds of acres of molten asphalt and concrete there is scarcely a weed,” and the beaches of Malibu, “suffer[ing] through another boringly perfect day.” It then goes on to point out that the two neighborhoods, though one is very poor and the other very rich, share an extremely high incidence of fire. In Westlake, they are caused by overcrowded tenements; in Malibu by dry vegetation, coastal canyons, and powerful Santa Ana winds. Logic would dictate focusing L.A.’s firefighting resources on Westlake, whose problems could be solved through political means. Instead, enormous resources are diverted to protect the beachside homes of Malibu’s wealthy residents. The disastrous policy of “total fire suppression,” which requires putting out every wildfire as rapidly as possible and thus discourages controlled burns, means that when fires do occur they are far bigger, stronger, and more destructive than they might have been. And each time a fire sweeps through, the subsequent federal tax breaks and relaxation of land use regulations, meant to benefit those impacted, allow Malibu’s elite to expand their empires. They buy up lots that the middle class can’t afford to rebuild on, pushing them further out of the area.

In other words, everything insidious about modern urban politics can be found in Malibu: the comforts of the wealthy are privileged over the necessities of the poor; ecological realities are ignored in the quest to build more homes with nice views; and social services come in one tier for the wealthy, and another for the rest of us. (During a period of heavy flooding in the 1970s, Davis writes, the Malibu Colony development, home to numerous musicians and movie stars, was declared a disaster area thanks to a personal call from Dallas actor Larry Hagman to Governor Jerry Brown.) Even access to the area’s natural beauty was hard-won. Though all coastal beachfront below the high tide line is technically public property and many neighborhoods include easements that allow for public access, homeowners have installed fake signs, locked gates, and private security in efforts to deter beachgoers. For years they have gone to court, as David Geffen did, to protect the sanctity of their waterfront mansions. When a local environmental journalist launched an “Our Malibu Beaches” app, giving visitors an easily accessible guide to where they could and could not legally go, locals were incensed. At every step, the region’s amenities have had to be wrested from those who would hoard them for their own.

Davis, who died in 2022, is a sort of romantic hero of the L.A. left. He marched with the Teamsters and the Panthers and the Brown Berets, dodged rifle fire during the Watts riots, and led his wide-eyed university students on tours of the toughest parts of South Central. Driving a truck by day and pouring over Marx at night, Davis educated himself into becoming one of America’s great left-wing polemicists. He is revered by many in my aforementioned social circle, many of whom, not coincidentally, speak of the scruffier parts of L.A. as the real city, and of everything west of the 405 as a playground for privileged airheads.

And yet it’s difficult to treat “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” sharp and accurate as it is, as the last word on the subject. There is something too ascetic for me in Davis’s evocation of L.A. as a place where the perfidious rich float among the hills and beaches in a grotesque parody of heaven, and the saintly poor are condemned to a stinking concrete hell. In one of his last interviews, he said he was ready to die, but when he looked at the world he still felt “extraordinarily furious and angry. If I have a regret, it’s not dying in battle or at a barricade as I’ve always romantically imagined — you know, fighting.” It’s very admirable, to fight to your last breath, and there is certainly much in the world to be angry about. But my admiration can’t help but be tempered by a certain sadness at the idea of dying with shelves full of Marx and Fanon and mourning the unfinished revolution, finding redemption in nothing but the struggle, missing the small miracles of being alive out of preoccupation with the big injustices. Davis was no doubt a kind of saint. But when he drove down the Pacific Coast Highway, did he feel anything like the sense of awe and gratitude that I feel?

Chalk it up to my own failures of spirit that I feel more kinship with Joan Didion, Malibu’s other most famous literary voice, though she only lived there for eight years. Her second nonfiction collection, The White Album,opens with the titular essay, a fragmentary chronicle of the “demented and seductive vortical tension” that crept across the city like smog in the late 1960s, climaxing with the night of the Manson murders: the hippie dream ending in disaster, the promised paradise lost. The book ends with “Quiet Days in Malibu,” a vision of paradise ever-so-briefly found before being lost again.

Didion — alongside her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and their daughter, Quintana — moved to 33428 Pacific Coast Highway in 1971, looking for an escape from the pressures of Hollywood. This was before, as Davis details, Malibu was completely captured by the ultra-wealthy. Back then it was possible for Didion and Dunne, successful but by no means loaded, to buy a house on the ocean, way out past Zuma and Trancas and El Matador, near the Ventura County line. In “Quiet Days in Malibu,” she writes of her time in the house as a time of “shared isolation and adversity”:

“[W]e all knew one another’s cars, and watched for them on the highway and at the Trancas Market and at the Point Dume Gulf station. An accident on the highway was likely to involve someone we knew. A rattlesnake in my driveway meant its mate in yours. A stranger’s campfire on your beach meant fire on both our slopes.”

As well as writing about her own experiences, she profiles several local characters, of whom the most memorable is the orchid breeder Amado Vazquez. Didion comes to his greenhouse to eat lunch, and Vazquez explains to her his art: the subtle differences in shape and color of each orchid type, the process of breeding new hybrids, his travels through Europe and South America on the trail of the flower. But each time she offers to buy a plant, she is gently refused. It is only later that she discovers that the orchids are rare and valuable stud plants, each worth “from ten thousand to more than three-quarters of a million dollars.”

For Didion, with her veneration of rectitude and hatred of vulgarity, the dignified, gracious Vazquez is emblematic of all she loves about the wild coast and its inhabitants. He is an aristocrat of the spirit, coming to this beautiful stretch of land not to coarsen it by building a seafood shack, surfboard shop, or gas station, but to invest years of his life into creating yet more beauty. Didion’s Malibu house, like the packing list reproduced in The White Album and her famous thanksgiving dinners, has become part of her aesthetic mythology. A 1972 Vogue shoot from that house — with its fruit in wire baskets and hand-painted flowerpots and dinners on the weathered terrace — continually makes the rounds on social media. Like everything in her often-fetishized life, it is a model of understated and unflashy good taste.

But taste, of course, won’t save you when the hills start to burn. Inevitably, fire intrudes on the community Didion so lovingly depicts, in the form of the Agoura-Malibu firestorm of 1978. Her description is apocalyptic: “Refugees huddled on Zuma Beach. Horses caught fire and were shot on the beach, birds exploded in the air. Houses did not explode but imploded, as in a nuclear strike.” (Davis, for his part, quotes one witness of the same fire who claimed that the flames “turned thousands of wild rabbits into balls of flaming fur that darted insanely about, only to start new fires at the spots where they fell.”) The Didion-Dunnes had sold their Malibu home a few months earlier, but, at the end of the essay, she drives back to visit Vazquez. There is nothing left of the greenhouse and the orchids but “shattered glass and melted metal,” a life’s work gone up in flames.

In Davis’s essay, Malibu’s uniquely destructive fires are a policy choice; in Didion’s they are simply something that arises as a part of life’s inevitable cycle of failures and tragedies. Though one may put all one’s efforts into creating something beautiful — breeding orchids, arranging flowerpots and curtains just so, building a stable marriage — one has to be prepared for it all to come to grief in the end. Didion’s most abiding moral position is her elevation of self-respect and personal responsibility, the idea that one has a duty to keep oneself together no matter the state of the world, that one must avoid taking refuge in sentimentality or solidarity-speak. This is, I think, generally good advice. Yet it leads her into a slightly blinkered view of Malibu. It is not entirely accurate, even in 1978, to characterize the region as a hardy frontier town whose residents are tested, Job-like, by random disasters. And though political gadflies may lack Didion’s decorum and icy cool, without their efforts no one with a net worth under eight figures would be allowed to set foot in Malibu in the first place, and fires would be seen purely as acts of nature, rather than a result of specific decisions. To achieve a synthesis of these two perspectives, we must turn elsewhere, to the greatest living writer of contemporary Los Angeles.

In 2025, fire came to Malibu again. The most destructive conflagration in Los Angeles history wiped out the affluent Pacific Palisades neighborhood and leapt the highway to set the beachfront burning, destroying many landmarks of Malibu’s eastern half. Only eight months later appeared Bruce Wagner’s Amputation, “the first novel to be written about the inferno that obliterated two Los Angeles cities in January of 2025.”

As is often the case with Wagner’s novels, one could be forgiven for suspecting Amputation of being nothing more than a gimmick, not only because it was written and released with such haste, but also because of its cast of characters, which include Stephen Colbert; L.A. mayor Karen Bass; a Jewish anti-Zionist heiress and her Sheldon Adelson-esque father; a Hollywood stunt double working for Timothee Chalamet; and the reclusive daughter of May Rindge. Admittedly the novel is not as strong a piece of writing as Davis and Didion’s essays, nor does it reach the heights of Wagner’s ROAR and The Marvel Universe, two of the great novels of our greatness-starved century.

But what it does do — what all Wagner’s recent novels do — is provide a framework for thinking about Malibu and Los Angeles that unifies political fury and spiritual redemption. Amputation is a furious satire of our callous modern celebrity and political cultures. Yet it also recognizes that we who perpetuate them are all shambling and broken — prisoners of our upbringing, ideology, or personal demons — and that we are no less worthy of grace or respect for that fact. In a series of short interlocking chapters, the aforementioned celebrities and side characters each go through a spiritual trial brought on by the fires: Colbert experiences hallucinatory visions of his dead brothers while trapped under a fallen tree. Bass goes through a rebaptism after an encounter with an old friend who chose religion over politics. Esther, the heiress, offers momentary redemption to a marauding looter in a kind of postmodern update of “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” And Marjorie Rindge, elderly granddaughter of the fierce widow who once owned all of Malibu, dies in the arms of Roderick, the stuntman and horse trainer, who may be the reincarnation of her first love, with whom she “galloped on ridgelines and painted chaparrals through the incense of wettened sage, manure and the hidden smells of her own sex—cloaked in windy, winding, moonflower mystery.”

By using these celebrity or celebrity-adjacent figures as protagonists in his novels, Wagner has cracked a code. If novels have lost much of their potency in our culture, it is partially because the bourgeois audience who initially embraced them now live in a great, unfolding, episodic novel told in real time on social media, a panoply of characters and voices beyond the wildest imagination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists. Yet conspicuously missing from our ongoing hyper-novel is any sense of compassion for its characters. No figure in our contemporary mediasphere could ever be portrayed with the depth and grace of a Raskolnikov or a Casaubon; rather, they are indistinct avatars onto whom we feel free to project our own worship or hate. By writing about them with extraordinary empathy, Wagner takes these figures and shatters the mental image of them that lives in our collective consciousness. Wagner has publicly spoken of his distaste for the vacuous liberalism exemplified by Karen Bass and Stephen Colbert, and his fury at the institutional failures that made the 2025 fires much worse than they might have been. Yet Wagner, though his novels are often shocking, scabrous, and offensive, never takes a cheap shot at them or extends them anything other than a profound attempt at understanding. This is true for all his characters, real and fictional: obese influencers, henpecked husbands, Z-list celebrities, disgraced scammers — all figures typically made the object of derision or mockery. Through this exercise of unsentimental compassion, his novels feel not like the accomplished formal exercises of a dying art or weak versions of last year’s headlines, as all those novels about social media, incels, or A.I. do, but like works that bring a deep and earnest belief in the possibility of transcendence and renewal to the stupidity, clamor, and post-satire absurdity of contemporary life. That is to say, novels with a real reason to exist.

Wagner’s art is an art of extremes, where the sacred and profane intermingle. So it is natural that he’s drawn to Malibu, because the extremity of its beauty gives rise to extremes in turn, both wonderful and terrible. Here on the frontier, on the edge of things, all feelings are magnified, all differences become starker — even the colors seem more intense. To deal with that magnification, one has to do what Wagner does and find a middle way, somewhere between Marxist polemics and Abercrombie advertisements. One has to accept that it is not a capitalist trick: that one really does find something life enhancing and spiritually renewing in regions of great natural beauty, that there is something heroic about not just leaving these places alone but integrating them into the human project, so that they might spawn the essays of Joan Didion and the novels of Bruce Wagner; the bleak and ragged ’60s-hangover records that Bob Dylan and Neil Young wrote in Malibu; the beatific teenage symphonies of the early Beach Boys; the washed-out noir of The Long Goodbye and Inherent Vice; the aesthetic purity and simplicity of surfing. And one also has to accept that all this beauty will one day burn.

I became interested in the literary history of Malibu because I was looking for the source of a feeling. Earlier this year, I briefly found myself living near there, staying for six weeks in a tiny cabin in Topanga Canyon during a particularly turbulent time in my life. When I finished work for the day I would often get in the car and take the winding canyon road south, which runs past the sleepy town center and then between two great cliffs, curving and dropping, curving and dropping until it takes a final turn out of the valley and you see the blue mass of the ocean stretching before you. And then I would turn right, onto the highway, and just drive, with no fixed destination in mind, trying to dissolve into the rushing wind and the pounding surf. I knew it could never be mine, that I’d only ever be a visitor, and I knew every one of the beach houses with their Teslas and Rivians resting in their driveways was the result of a terrible, grinding process of extraction and exploitation, and I knew eventually it would all go up in flames, maybe next month or maybe in five years or maybe in twenty, but almost certainly sooner or later.

Yet in those hours, driving with the windows down and the music loud, I felt a great peace, as if the landscape itself was reassuring me that every trial could be overcome and everything flawed and broken in the world could eventually be made whole again. One day, it seemed to say, we would all forgive one another and find the fulfillment we were looking for. We would all be okay, we would all be absolved, we would all be renewed, here in Malibu, in the arms of the great, bountiful Pacific.

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From Wikipedia: “The Chumash are a Native American people of the central and southern coastal regions of California, in portions of what became Kern, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura, and Los Angeles counties.”

Including the restaurants Moonshadows and Reel Inn, and the Topanga Ranch Motel, built by William Randolph Hearst.

As I write this, the unavoidable storyline is the unmasking, exposure, hounding, and eventual suicide of the Cambridge professor and serial fabulist Jason Arday, a story straight out of Philip Roth or Ralph Ellison.