{"id":16142,"date":"2025-07-17T10:37:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-17T10:37:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/16142\/"},"modified":"2025-07-17T10:37:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-17T10:37:11","slug":"bug-hollow-author-on-unchosen-family-love-amid-differences-rebuilding-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/16142\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Bug Hollow\u2019 author on unchosen family, love amid differences, rebuilding life"},"content":{"rendered":"

Six months after wildfires tore through Altadena and Pacific Palisades, we\u2019re still wrestling with what\u2019s been lost. Novelist Michelle Huneven<\/a> is rebuilding her home after the Eaton Fire. Her latest book, Bug Hollow,<\/a> opens in 1970s Altadena, as the Samuelson family copes with their son\u2019s death. He died in an accident during his first few college days. Readers follow his parents, sisters, and family friends across multiple decades and locations as they struggle with grief, dislocation, and addiction. Ultimately, they manage to find love and meaning.<\/p>\n

Huneven, who teaches creative writing at UCLA<\/a>, has collected multiple honors for her writing, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. Bug Hollow has been deemed a great summer read by The New York Times, Oprah Daily, and The Boston Globe.<\/p>\n

Huneven tells KCRW that while her family is doing relatively well post-fire \u2014 they \u201chad a soft landing and good insurance\u201d \u2014 she\u2019s sad. That sorrow didn\u2019t hit immediately because of all the shock and tasks to do, like buying clothes, she explains.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Three times a week, she also visits her property to water the surviving roses, and negotiate to get rid of trees and stumps that the Army Corps of Engineers didn\u2019t remove. The process is long and involved, she describes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The rebuilding process has already broken ground. Her family owns two properties, she clarifies. They\u2019re building a little house where their rental used to be, so they can live there while their larger house gets rebuilt too.\u00a0<\/p>\n

She initially waffled on rebuilding, wondering what the point was if the house(s) would burn down again. \u201cBut then you realize it’s your home, and you miss it, and you love it, and you love your neighbors, and you want that again,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"
An exterior view shows the kitchen corner of Michelle Huneven\u2019s house. Courtesy of Michelle Huneven.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Altadena is a magical place full of nature, art, and culture \u2014 as Huneven writes in the book \u2014 because she was born and raised there, she explains. After leaving for college and living in various places, she returned and in 2011 bought a house on a flag lot one mile east of her childhood home.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt just was so wonderful to return to the smells and the sounds of Altadena, the morning doves, and the morning cooing, and the quality of the sunlight, and having the mountains close. It just was in my blood. I’ve always described Altadena as populated by artists and sore heads.\u201d<\/p>\n

She clarifies, \u201cA sore head is somebody with their own agenda. I mean, it’s like every now and then, somebody says, \u2018Let’s incorporate Altadena.\u2019 And everybody says, \u2018Yes, yes, what a good idea.\u2019 And then they say, \u2018Well, we’d need a revenue stream, so let’s put in parking meters.\u2019 And then it’s like, \u2018Forget it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"x-Bug
Michelle Huneven is the author of \u201cBug Hollow,\u201d \u201cRound Rock,\u201d \u201cOff Course,\u201d and other books. Courtesy of Michelle Huneven.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Bug Hollow, the daughter, Sally, has her own personality and is the character whom Huneven identifies with most, she explains.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cShe’s the youngest, artistic in a family that maybe doesn’t quite know what to do with that impulse. And I find her to be the heart of the book. The mother [Sib] is very much like my mother. And Sally \u2026 and I share the same relationship, which is a mother who’s not particularly interested in us, and yet to feel this very strong bond, like my mom was a school teacher, like Sib is in the book, and yet she took no interest in my schoolwork. And she took deep interest in her students\u2019 schoolwork. And yet, at the same time, I had this deep love for her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why was Huneven\u2019s mom more interested in other students\u2019 academic work? Because they had emotional distance, so she was able to be more objective with them, Huneven explains.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the book, Sib is a complicated, seemingly brilliant character who curtailed her ambitions to have a family. However, she\u2019s not particularly maternal, seems frustrated, and has a drinking problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Huneven says her own mom poured herself a drink right when she got home from teaching, though she didn\u2019t have a drinking problem as strong as Sib\u2019s.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Addiction and alcoholism come up in Huneven\u2019s other novels. She says she\u2019s interested in the subject because of her personal involvement with it. She\u2019s now been sober for 37 years.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’ve never liked the plot: \u2018Are they going to drink next? Oh no, they’re trying to be sober. They’re going to drink next.\u2019 \u2026 But I am interested in how people recover from alcoholism. In this novel, it’s not really a subject, and it’s not identified as alcoholism. I was treating it differently. I was treating it more as a way that families live with alcoholism without ever saying the word or without even recognizing it themselves. It’s just the fact that mom drinks a lot of Hawaiian Punch with dunks of vodka in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Huneven acknowledges that maybe the book is autobiographical in the sense that her mom drank daily, \u201csometimes she got pretty woozy,\u201d but her family never said the word \u201calcoholism,\u201d and never suggested she needed to stop imbibing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"
\u201cPeople say to me about the fire, \u2018Oh, it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.\u2019 And it’s not. It’s the biggest thing that ever happened to me, probably. But losing people that you love is really far worse,\u201d says Michelle Huneven. Courtesy of Michelle Huneven.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Chosen family is also a theme in all of Huneven\u2019s earlier books, she points out. Bug Hollow is her first book about unchosen family \u2014 the one you\u2019re stuck with.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI guess with parents \u2026 they can be very difficult, they can be very unsupportive, they can be very distant. I had many issues with my father, for example, he was disapproving and competitive. \u2026 And yet, when he got older and he lost his memory, and I would go to see him \u2026 you would just see love shining from his eyes. And so there’s that basic love, and then there’s all the personality elements that get in the way of us connecting with other people perfectly. So I was interested in dealing with \u2026 just love that exists in a family, no matter how much we don’t get along with each other or how different we are. \u2026 And also when we don’t get it from our parents, where we do get it? And people do seek it out from one another and create these chosen communities.\u201d<\/p>\n

One character also says in the book, when she realizes she can\u2019t do anything to change the fact that someone close to her has died, \u201cAll was well, well enough, the world still ached with beauty.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Huneven explains that life is incredibly beautiful and we are blessed to be alive to see it, but simultaneously, we lose loved ones, which is probably the most painful experience.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople say to me about the fire, \u2018Oh, it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.\u2019 And it’s not. It’s the biggest thing that ever happened to me, probably. But losing people that you love is really far worse,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Six months after wildfires tore through Altadena and Pacific Palisades, we\u2019re still wrestling with what\u2019s been lost. Novelist…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16143,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-16142","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16142\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}