Waldie, D.J.

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Waldie, D.J.

PERSONAL:

Male.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Lakewood, CA.

CAREER:

Public information officer in Lakewood, CA, 1978—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

California Book Award for nonfiction, 1996, for Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir; best book of the year citation, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 2004, for Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles.

WRITINGS:

Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 1996.

Real City: Downtown Los Angeles Inside/Out, photographs by Marissa Roth, Angel City Press (Santa Monica, CA), 2001.

Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles, foreword by Patt Morrison, Angel City Press (Santa Monica, CA), 2004.

Contributor to Close to Home: An American Album, J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles, CA), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS:

D.J. Waldie's Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir tells the story of the author's life in the Los Angeles suburb of Lakewood, California. Lakewood was founded in 1950 in response to the post-World War II housing shortage. It consisted of small, mass-produced houses designed for the budgets of working-class Americans. Communities like Lakewood gave lower-income families the chance to realize part of the American dream of owning their own homes. "Lakewood did represent a significant transformation of American experience in the immediate postwar period," Waldie told Hilary Kaplan on the Next American City Web site. "Where previously working-class people had lived in congested factory towns or in big cities, now suddenly they were living in single-family homes in the flats of the L.A. basin."

Some critics condemned suburbs like Lakewood as "cookie-cutter communities," where enforced sameness placed soul-numbing strictures on families. "From the beginning, it seems, Lakewood was a community predicated upon predictability, order and inertia," Michiko Kakutani wrote in the New York Times. "If people do not mow their lawns regularly, Mr. Waldie writes, their neighbors report them to City Hall. Annual awards are given to homeowners, based on their houses' maintenance, landscaping and overall appearance." Waldie's experience as revealed in his memoir was different. "Lakewood suggests to me certain social relationships that are more communitarian in nature than what I imagine contemporary middle-class values to be," the author told Kaplan. "There is in Lakewood a willingness to rub shoulders with other people in a way that I don't regard as being wholly middle-class. People in Lakewood are obliged to be more in each other's lives because the houses are small on small lots, narrow streets." Waldie tells the story of his community, declared Donna Seaman in Booklist, in a "stamped-out style that perfectly conveys the clash between the community's visible uniformity and hidden eccentricity." In Wylie's memoir, wrote a Publishers Weekly critic, "the author describes both a place and the mindset of a decade."