In Search Of Us goes back and forth in time between a mother and a daughter when they are each 17 years old. In the present day, Angie, a biracial girl growing up with her young, single white mom, Marilyn, has unanswered questions about her father, and about herself. The only thing Marilyn’s ever been able to tell Angie about her dad is that he died in a car accident before she was born. But when Angie discoverers evidence of an uncle she's never met she starts to wonder: What if her dad is still alive, too? So she sets off on road trip to Los Angeles with her ex-boyfriend, in search of the truth.

Simultaneously, we go back to LA in the late 90s, where 17-year-old Marilyn is growing up as a mildly successful child actor, never quite able to live up to her mother’s fantasies of stardom. When she and her mom run out of money and have no choice but to move in with her volatile uncle, Marilyn quietly counts down the days until she can leave for college and finally begin a life that belongs to her. But everything changes when she meets James, the boy downstairs, and falls in love.

This is a story about family, about identity, about life-changing love, about the importance of history, both personal and collective. And, In Search Of Us is my love letter to Los Angeles.

When I began writing the book, I thought back to my first year in the city. Twenty-two years old and just out of college, I had moved here only months after my mother’s sudden death. I was, in many ways, in search of her. My parents had spent the early years of their romance in LA—they’d gotten engaged and married here, and it is the city where I was born. Because we left when I was only about three years old, I didn’t have any of my own memories of it. Instead, I had a few old photographs, and my parents’ stories. Stories about my mom’s first apartment—she fell in love with the little Hollywood studio only to realize, after she’d signed the lease and gotten back on the 101 freeway, that there was no kitchen sink. After she made burritos for dinner, she and my dad used to do the dishes together bent over the bathtub. I heard tales of the restaurants where they ate, the streets they drove, the city view from the rooftop where my dad proposed. I saw my mom’s head tossed back in laughter at the beach in old photographs, saw her fishing or playing in the waves or staring into the distance, dreamy. When I moved back here on my own as a young adult, I went looking for her on those same beaches, in those same restaurants, on those same streets—I had a sense that there was a city beneath the city: the city of my parents’ invisible past. There was some part of my mother—who had lived before I was ever alive—that I hoped to discover. That sensation stayed with me when I wrote about Angie in LA for the first time, searching for her father and for her own invisible past, and as I wrote about the love story between Marilyn and James that preceded her birth.

After 9 years here, LA has become my home, and I now have my own memories and meanings associated with it, which also became the inspiration for the Los Angeles in the book. It is where I where I wrote my first novel, and where I used to walk on the beach dreaming that it might find a reader somewhere in the world to whom it might matter. It is where my father, my sister, and I scattered my mother’s ashes. It is where I met my husband, where we got our first apartment together (and it is in that apartment where I wrote In Search Of Us, staring out the window at the view of half-sky and straggling palm trees). It is where we got married, where we honeymooned on the beach—the same beach that my mother stood on in those old photographs—and soon, where our daughter will be born.

While I was writing In Search Of Us, I spent a lot of time walking around with my headphones on, listening to songs from the mixtape that James made Marilyn, listening to Angie’s music, catching snippets of songs from passing cars and adding them to playlists, taking in the city and seeing my characters here, exploring and revisiting the places that were special to me, and that became important to the book. Here is a mini tour of some of those spots!

In Search of Us by Ava Dellaira

This sweeping multi-generational love story introduces readers to mother-and-daughter pair Marilyn and Angie.

To seventeen-year-old Angie, who is mixed-race, Marilyn is her hardworking, devoted white single mother. But Marilyn was once young, too. When Marilyn was seventeen, she fell in love with Angie's father, James, who was African-American. But Angie's never met him, and Marilyn has always told her he died before she was born. When Angie discovers evidence of an uncle she's never met she starts to wonder: What if her dad is still alive, too? So she sets off on a journey to find him, hitching a ride to LA from her home in New Mexico with her ex-boyfriend, Sam. Along the way, she uncovers some hard truths about herself, her mother, and what truly happened to her father.

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