You’re Leaving When?: Adventures in Downward Mobility

Actress Gurwitch (Wherever You Go, There They Are) examines life in Los Angeles in these delightfully snarky essays. Gurwitch writes of embracing the home-sharing trend and taking in a colorful array of roommates, most notably Jean Luc—a bacon-loving, chain-smoking 27-year-old Frenchman—and later, a young couple and their pet rabbit. She respectfully recounts supporting her former son, Ezra, as they identified as nonbinary and queer, an experience that taught her to relearn her pronouns “one day at a time.” Gurwitch can find humor practically anywhere, even in articulating every Angeleno’s worst fear: the probability of a major earthquake: “When the Big One hits, it’s going to be a rollicking ride,” she writes about her house, which is directly over an earthquake fault zone. The city’s weather patterns (“Our weather forecasts should simply read: ‘Biblical’ ”) are another favorite target. While her style is mostly irreverent, Gurwitch also has a serious side, which comes out in her frank writing about being a mother with a kid in rehab: “I wore my consistent lack of improvement as a badge of honor. I was reliably inept. In a world that was constantly changing, at least I was consistent.” By turns bittersweet and hilarious, these spot-on musings will strike a chord with anyone stuck in a spot of bother. Agent: Lynn Johnston. (Mar.)