A cartography of Hollywood and transformational wanderings, back in print in April 2025 from Northwestern University Press.
A daylight traipse through early-aughts Los Angeles, Hollywood Notebook encapsulates the powerful feelings and hopeful futures of twentysomething Wendy C. Ortiz. In this boundary-defying sister memoir to Bruja, Ortiz navigates internal maps as she traverses external palm-treed streets, moving through her youthful twenties and into the pensiveness of her thirties. Peering at what lies ahead while dipping her toes into the past, Ortiz shows us that there is no place like Hollywood to unearth the joys of success and the blows of mistakes—both realized and denied. An innovative and bold examination of the daytime roaming mind, Hollywood Notebook is a cartography of love, loss, and transformation in the face of a brilliant psyche in a vibrant city.
“Hollywood Notebook is a cheat sheet on surviving necessary breakdown in order to build something all the more beautiful in days to come…Whether sick with fever or inundated with desire, [Ortiz] writes toward total embodiment.” –Erin Vachon for The Missouri Review
“[S]uffused with the heritage of the city as a place for writers…Ortiz quietly observes the day-to-day life of the writer, the smell of food in the diners, the heat, the locales where writers hang out. An optimistic book that also reveals the hinterland and grain of a writing culture that goes back 100 years.” —The Guardian
“Wendy C. Ortiz is establishing herself as a powerful voice in the literary community… Readers who like their heroines scrappy and their prose lyrical will delight in Hollywood Notebook’s intimate descriptions of a restless mind at work.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“The entire project becomes nearly reminiscent of the self-musings of Maggie Nelson, if Nelson were consulting astrological charts rather than philosophy…Hollywood Notebook, then, is a sui generis gem, and one to take advantage of immediately. How often can we read a stranger’s journals so guiltlessly, and with such satisfaction? Ortiz inspires it — she’s laid herself bare, and in doing so dug deep in a way that so few memoirs can actually achieve.” —Jeva Lange, Electric Literature
“With Fire in Her Heart” review by Lauren Eggert-Crowe for Los Angeles Review of Books