A novel about subprime mortgages, ruthless Hollywood economics, and the unraveling of a young marriage. This Is Where We Live tells the story of Claudia and Jeremy, a young married couple (she’s an aspiring filmmaker, he’s an indie musician) who are on the verge of making it. Her first film was a sensation at Sundance and is about to have its theatrical release, he’s assembled a new band and is a few songs shy of an album. They’ve recently purchased their first home—an adorable mid-century bungalow with a breathtaking view of the city of Los Angeles—with the magical assistance of an adjustable-rate mortgage. But a series of seismic events—the tanking of Claudia’s film, the return of Jeremy’s ex-girlfriend (a manipulative, self-destructive, fabulously successful artist), and the staggering adjustment of their monthly mortgage payments—deal a crushing blow to their dreams of the bohemian life and their professional aspirations and make them question their values and their shared vision of the future. As she did so insightfully in her first novel, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, Janelle Brown once again proves herself a trenchant social commentator and a keen and compassionate chronicler of the emotional turmoil, moral conflicts, and knowing compromises of her characters. This Is Where We Live is a novel about the crucible of this economic moment—the way these times play with our hopes, compel us to reckon with our ambition, test our capacity for reinvention, and ask us to question the very things we love.
Author
Welcome to my home on Goodreads. A little about me: I'm the New York Times bestselling author of the novels PRETTY THINGS, WATCH ME DISAPPEAR, ALL WE EVER WANTED WAS EVERYTHING, THIS IS WHERE WE LIVE and the upcoming I'LL BE YOU. My books have been New York Times bestsellers and published in a dozen countries around the world. My books tend to be page-turners with dysfunctional family relationships at their hearts; while my first two books were more satirical domestic dramas, my latest three are literary suspense. I'm also very much a California writer, and my books are set across the state. I'm always happy to answer questions here, but you can also find me on Instagram and Twitter—and if you visit http://www.janellebrown.com you can also sign up for my newsletter. I've known I wanted to be a novelist ever since I was in first grade, when my teacher looked at the whimsical little books I liked to make (and the pile of books I checked out of the school library every week) and said that I could be an author when I grew up. I took her suggestion to heart. It took me several decades to get to novel-writing, though. I first started off as an essayist and journalist, writing for Wired and Salon in San Francisco, during the dotcom boom years. In the 1990’s, I was also the editor and co-founder of Maxi, an irreverent (and now, long-gone) women's pop culture magazine. My writing has also appeared in Vogue, The New York Times, Elle, Wired, Self, The Los Angeles Times, and numerous other publications. I've spent the fifteen years working on my novels, writing the occasional essay, and living in Los Angeles with my husband and two children.
