Reaching For The Star

Erin Somers on navigating adulthood—and a minor celebrity—over one misspent stint in L.A.

- Erin Somers

MY CLOSEST brush with fame occurred in Los Angeles in summer 2009, when I had a friend who knew a famous actress. I was not in the actress’s entourage; I was adjacent. Adjacent to people adjacent to fame is a very L.A. designation.

I was 24 and had moved from New York that spring to become a screenwriter. How I would do this I did not know. Whenever the question was put to me by my parents, I would reply that I was young and full of promise and would figure it out. That proved difficult. I lived in a beige apartment on a desolate stretch of Venice Boulevard with a balcony covered in bird shit. I drove an early-2000s Chrysler Sebring convertible, lusterless gray, loaned to me by a friend’s parents for $50 a month. I took a job at J.Crew. I couldn’t afford to park in the nearby garage on Wilshire, but a coworker taught me that it closed at 11 p.m., at which point the arm went up for the night. If you could wait that long, you didn’t have to pay. So every day I lingered after my shift, sometimes for hours. Mostly I read in my car. That’s what life was like when I met the actress.