In 2014, Young Lee, the co-founder of the Los Angeles Frozen Yogurt chain, Pinkberry, was sentenced to seven years in prison for assaulting a panhandler named Donald Bolding with a tire iron. Lee explained that Bolding had flashed his tattoo of two stick figures having sex, as he and his fiancé prepared to merge onto the 101 freeway. The offense was apparently unbearable enough for bystanders to have to pry Lee off of his victim. The blowup marked the beginning of the end for the once trendy frozen dessert chain, although Pinkberry’s faded green and pink facade can still be spotted dotting the occasional Los Angeles strip mall.
This disturbing scene could have easily appeared in Vanessa Roveto’s The Valley (a void) (ITI Press). Froyo and fragility remain alive and unwell in this hilarious and gutting novella. Roveto’s third book and first novel chronicles two lonely lesbians, Madeline and Victoria, who wander the San Fernando valley, overcome by self-loathing, addiction, the desire to create, and an even stronger yearning to be loved. Roveto, who grew up in North Hollywood, writes the valley through Madeline and Victoria’s two commiserating perspectives. Their alternating voices tell a story of recurring consciousness; the trajectory of a cyclical life that refuses to unwind itself into a single narrative. Madeline is the reason Victoria writes, and their lives mirror one another, until their paths converge in a sort of uncanny valley twist.
Anyone who lives in Los Angeles can tell you that public space is private space. Millions of cars passing one another along hundreds of mile long freeways. Everyone siloed, whizzing by in their own isolated containers, thinking their own “important little thoughts,” as Madeline’s mother refers to her ruminations. It’s the solitude that drives Roveto’s characters crazy; lunacy that turns into writing ideas, or inspiration for movies: a feeling, a Rublev-esque shot of a cooked shrimp-ring, or the city’s smog; “really compelling shit,” which Madeline and Victoria sometimes confuse with reality.
As David Lynch, Paul Thomas Anderson, or any other number of LA directors will tell you, the valley is cinematic. The landscape is garish, sprawling, and desolate, but the women are small. Victoria and Madeline are both locals, physically diminished on account of popping Adderall and Xanax in between hunger strikes – self-soothing, albeit untenable regimens spurred by intergenerational trauma, as much as citywide power struggles with carbs. Madeline, who is nineteen, stops eating after her father abandons her family. Victoria, who is hermetic and tragic, hardly consumes anything besides dehydrated rice noodles. Her ex-girlfriend, Dora, describes her as a “mysterious lesbian.” Celibate and forty-two, she almost reinvents herself as a poetry professor in Last Chance, Iowa, until her twin brother, Will, drags her home by way of his suicide. She considers her grief and her chastity as she walks by lesbian couples on the street:
In the seventeenth century, the only option for an intellectual was to become a nun – or kill yourself. Conversely, in the early twenty-first century, celibacy is the heretical move and I am all for it, pressing mute on eros and wrapping it in a monastic death shroud. But let’s be honest, and by ‘let’s’ I mean let me: deep down I’m afraid to give up abstinence for fear I’ll fall right back into some pretty debased patterns that haunted my 20s, and which trickled into my thirties.
Victoria’s sexual hunger and crazed sadness, her sense that she has been “rendered nonexistent,” as a femme lesbian over forty, all lead to literal starvation and disappearance. But anorexia isn’t a metaphor, it’s a real symptom of surviving the daily humiliation of womanhood and aging. Victoria and Madeline are both losing their minds, both “barrelling toward obsolescence.” Both characters think their sadness may actually be inherited – that their minds are bound to deteriorate with their bodies. At a Karaoke bar in Van Nuys, Madeline’s mother explains, “to lose your partner and your mother, be inundated with fake celebrities and burning bushes, to find yourself in a new world changing at an unprecedented pace – i believe my greatest achievement is staying alive.” Like their mothers, Madeline and Victoria question their invisibility, as much as their will to live. And if one is hardly seen, hardly even exists, doesn’t even have anyone to share a meal with, then what is the point of eating?
Self-denial, sexlessness; they’re ways of seizing control. As with Chris Kraus’s Aliens & Anorexia (Semiotex(e), 2000), Victoria recalls the philosopher Simone Weil. Weil is celibate and anorexic, bursting with self-hatred evidenced by literal and sexual starvation. But Victoria, Madeline, and Weil’s fasting are not strictly private acts. These stereotypically female modes of self-destruction hold universal significance. Roveto’s and Kraus’s use of the confessional first-person voice is not so much about self-exposure as an exploration of the inner workings of the mind. The abjection these authors describe is wrapped up in grief, failure, and obsession. The attempt to make sense of one’s life, to exert some control, maybe even heal a little through one’s art.
Victoria’s homecoming slingshots her back into a painful childhood, fraying the boundaries between past and present. In the valley, she is confronted by her mother’s deranged distress, her younger sister’s histrionic personality, and not just Will’s absence, but the glaring truancy of a father who abandoned her family decades ago. She dreams of reencountering him, each of them bringing an inventory of what they’d like to say to each other. First on her list: absolution, second: admitting she stole cash from his pants pocket as a child to buy herself a doll she called “Bad Daddy.” Will, who was always there to comfort her after her father left, can only be conjured through regression, by coming undone. Home and the valley become a frame of mind for Roveto’s characters, more than a specific place. As she writes in a series of stage directions throughout the novel, “The desert air crisps up the context.” And while context evaporates, so does sanity, abstracting the scenery until it fades entirely into a hazy backdrop.
At nineteen, Madeline is already as cynical as Victoria. She lives in a tract home somewhere close to Van Nuys, with her dejected mother, her “abnormally theatrical” sister, and her brother Guy, who occasionally emails her from one room over. Her home feels cold and haunted, affectionaless and distant. Madeline spends most of her time alone in her room trying to write, or paint, except for when she’s working at Whole Foods, where she meets an older woman named Dora (yes the same Dora), who takes her out to “yoghurt yoghurt, the humbert humbert of frozen yogurt parlors.” Realizing she might be in love for the first time, Madeline considers, “despite my mental suffering which has taken on literary dimensions, i do think that being in love is a way out.” Whether Madeline is seeking a way out of her hometown or her own skin is hard to say.
While countless L.A. authors meander through Southern California ennui, isolation aggravates instability and paranoia in The Valley (a void) in a way that immediately recalls Bret Easton Ellis’s most recent novel, The Shards (2021). Like Ellis’s “Bret,” Madeline is young and impressionable. They are two teens on the precipice of adulthood, figuring out who to become, or whether they’ll even get there. Both stories consider the grating performance of everyday life. Bret, another young writer, tries to force an image of “the tangible participant,” the popular Buckley High School student, rather than the lonesome, closeted, addicted teen, spiraling into an ominous, potentially fabricated reality. But as opposed to the endless detail included in Ellis’s novel – long car chases down Valley Vista Boulevard, early 1980s fashion, epochal Beverly Hills restaurants and their trendy menus (cc: the chopped salad at La Scala, which Ellis mentions in at least three chapters) – Roveto, who is a poet, exercises restraint. Her writing remains compact and direct, hitting notes of humor and heartbreak from one line to the next. Still, both books wield a romantic, tragic vision of L.A., with solitude as inescapable as the sun. These characters believe they can be saved by love, by encountering anyone who sees them, who allows them to see themselves.
But Roveto allows for the possibility of solace. Victoria reconnects with her and Will’s mutual ex-girlfriend, Sasha, following his death. Their intimacy and their shared grief remind Victoria that hope might exist somewhere off in the distance:
Though my face can stop traffic, the stop is north of North Hollywood. But maybe there is a woman for every woman and another woman for every other woman. Maybe not love at first sight but love at second sight, or sightless, the kind of blind love one hears about in the same way one hears about aliens: someone who could both know us and love us.
Having a crush on someone is one of the best feelings in the world, as Madeline explains. Love is the only thing that makes people happy, which isn’t an argument so much as a fact. Without connection, what would we be living for? But one needs purpose and self-assurance, to sustain love. Madeline and Victoria’s chances are slim. These characters are brilliant, but not wise; smart people who can’t help but hate themselves. But Roveto plays with the absurd, self-indulgent nature of tragedy. As her intermissions shift to the second person, morphing into pseudo self-accusatory revelations, she writes: “you begin to suspect you’re actually your own twin. You are a piece of art capable of criticizing itself, endlessly passing back and forth between your own hands a doll’s teacup filled with human tears.”
Much like Jen Beagin’s protagonist, Greta, in Big Swiss (2023), in The Valley (a void) there is an inner child who needs healing. Greta is a 40-something Angeleno too, and a victim of familial trauma. Like Madeleine and Victoria, Beagin’s characters are racked with legacies of grief and bad coping. Intergenerational romance provides a temporary escape from their pain, but the boundaries of the geographic container force a kind of reckoning.
Greta runs away to the Hudson Valley following her mother’s suicide and a recent break up with a man named Stacy. She works as a transcriptionist for a sex therapist named Om, who paints his nails OPI’s “Lincoln Park After Dark,” and holds his American Spirits between pointer and ring finger. Like everyone in the Hudson Valley (and the San Fernando Valley), he’s more than a little on the nose. Meanwhile, Greta is sexually dead, but she becomes infatuated with one of Om’s clients: Flavia, a twenty-eight year old Swiss woman with a harsh accent and anorgasmia. She’s in therapy because the man who beat her, almost to death, is being released from prison up the road. Still, Greta and Flavia are both skeptical of the trauma plot, of reading into their past to figure out how to live in the present. Like Rovetto’s protagonists, Greta and Flavia are primed for self-destruction. Still, they provide each other with some temporary comfort, but love doesn’t heal Greta with any immediacy. In trying to parse her own troubling behavior, she writes letters to her dead mother. “I’ve always thought of myself as a non-wallower, someone who isn’t particularly prone to self-pity, who’s mastered the (mostly lost) art of sucking it up, but then I wouldn’t be lying around in the antechamber, writing notes to my dead mother, would I?” In the inverse, Victoria receives a slew of post-mortem text messages from her brother: “these days are slated to be really stressful. astrologically the worst time period in years.”
These characters beg for a sign, to know that someone on the other side is reaching out, making this side more livable. Greta, Madeline, and Victoria are desperate to find joy, or an escape, but mostly, they find their redemption in writing. It’s the creation of beauty that acts as a counterpoint to grief. Both Big Swiss and The Valley (a void) revel in the monologue, the journal entry, a kind of inward attempt at healing; transferring suffering onto paper to give one’s pain context. We are all addicted to the past, and to understanding our childhoods. The trouble is the near impossibility of writing about family, or home; the people and places these characters want to belong to, the love and care they desperately need, but haven’t secured. Their only chance is to tell their stories, back to themselves even, to get to the bottom of that original sense of anomie, to finally accept the things they’ll never be able to change. This is how recovery works. “People are flawed and have limitations,” as Madeline says, “and asking someone to change who they are, to simply undo these limitations, is not only hurtful but also a complete exercise in utter futility.”
There’s a fairy grotto in the front yard of Victoria’s mother’s house in Studio City. Unkempt, full of coins and rot, it’s a pit of despair – a metaphor for all of those old dark feelings these characters refuse to resurrect. Standing at its edge, Victoria realizes that the bravest thing someone can do is get old, deal with death and loss, and somehow pull through. The Valley (a void) skillfully suggests that it’s a worthwhile journey – sticking out the pain, learning from it – but the road is better traveled with someone by your side.
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Kenzy El-Mohandes is a writer based in Los Angeles.
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Vanessa Roveto, The Valley (a void) is co-published by ITI Press and SPBH Editions.
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