Los Feliz Confidential: A Memoir

Nora Novak

Published July 2017

Before it was gentrified, Los Feliz was a crumbling Mediterranean mansion above the boulevard, a spiral staircase built for a grand entrance, and a basement full of secrets — including, allegedly, a jar of real human heads.

Nora Novak’s blistering, glitter-dusted memoir opens in the fall of 1977: quaaludes kicking in, Iggy Pop on the turntable, a rotating cast of Hollywood scenesters filling the living room of “the Big House,” and Nora — in Charles Jourdan heels and a Roxy Music–worthy getup — playing hostess to it all. It’s the kind of scene that feels like it can’t possibly be real. It was.

But the party is only half the story. Novak traces her path from a two-year-old immigrant on a cramped Dutch ocean liner out of Rotterdam, to a Pasadena childhood shadowed by a complicated, exacting father, to the fashion, art, and music-soaked chaos of 1970s and ‘80s Los Angeles — a city of glam rock, punk clubs, trust-fund bohemians, and the kind of friendships that burn bright and don’t always last. Along the way she runs with a cast as unforgettable as any novel’s: a Gatsby-esque alcoholic boyfriend playing at respectability, a soul-sister partner in glamour, musicians and artists on their way up or already flaming out.

Written with candor, dark humor, and an eye for the telling detail — the cracked Venetian mirror, the mirrored ice bucket, the exact shade of YSL Opium — Los Feliz Confidential is both a loving eulogy for the friends the era took too soon and a defiantly unsentimental portrait of what it actually felt like to be young, beautiful, and reckless in a Los Angeles that no longer exists.

For readers of Please Kill Me, Just Kids, and anyone who’s ever wondered what really happened at the party after the party ended.