Edie Meidav reads from her new novel Lola, California (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $17). As girls, the Lolas were inseparable. They navigated 1980s Berkeley with the girlish confidence born of close friendship. Lola One and Two--Lana and Rose--were and were not two peas in a pod. Lana was the only daughter of two intellectuals; Rose an orphan desperate to be a part of Lana's family. Together they made trouble, sunbathed topless, flirted with the wrong boys, and danced their invisible goddess moves. Somewhere between Berkeley and New York City, the Lolas grew apart.
As the novel moves through the decades, Meidav explores the ways choice can be as much a burden as a privilege--from the Lolas' freedom of choice during their childhood in the gravity-free zone of Northern California to the waning of choice in their later years, including some fateful, dead-end decisions each has made, to involvement with a death row inmate's fate.
A native of Berkeley, Edie Meidav is the author of The Far Field and Crawl Space. Winner of a Lannan Fellowship, a Howard Fellowship, the Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman and the Bard Fiction Prize, she teaches at Bard College.
