L. A. Women

Set in the glamorous but corrosive world of 1960s and 1970s Hollywood, the novel alternates between two timelines. In the present-day chapters, set in 1975, celebrated writer Lane Warren searches for her missing former friend, Gala Margolis, while struggling to finish a novel she has been secretly writing about Gala. The flashback chapters trace their complicated friendship from 1965 to early 1975, revealing the betrayals that led to Gala's disappearance.

The story opens at one of Lane's weekly Sunday Salon parties at her Laurel Canyon home, a Los Angeles neighborhood long associated with counterculture. Lane, an essayist and novelist in her late thirties, hosts these gatherings with her best friend, Charlie McCloud, the charismatic and closeted head of publicity at a major record label. Her husband, Scotty Ryan, a successful gallery owner, puts their twin daughters to bed upstairs. When a guest reports that Gala, a writer and longtime figure on the Hollywood scene, has vanished, Lane outwardly dismisses concern but privately feels dread, compounded by the novel she has been writing about Gala without her knowledge.

A flashback to 1965 establishes how the two women met at a Laurel Canyon party. Gala, a twenty-five-year-old Hollywood native raised in a magic prop workshop by unconventional parents, is a magnetic, six-foot-tall force of personality. Lane, a twenty-eight-year-old journalist newly arrived from New York, watches from the margins. When a predatory musician corners Lane and assaults her, Gala intervenes and elbows him away. They part without becoming friends.

Months later, Gala introduces Lane to Charlie at a New Year's Eve party. Over dinner weeks afterward, Charlie reveals he is gay, a fact Lane accepts without hesitation, and their bond deepens into the central friendship of both their lives. Charlie takes Lane to the Troubadour, a storied Los Angeles music club, where she watches Gabriel Ford, a young British drummer, take over lead vocals after his band's singer collapses onstage. Lane feels drawn to Gabriel, but Gala claims him first.

Gala reshapes Gabriel's career, rebranding his band as Belle Vue and overhauling their image through sheer force of personality. She also delivers transformative feedback on Lane's debut novel manuscript, identifying its core flaw: Lane is hiding from her protagonist's painful backstory. Gala pushes Lane to excavate her own childhood, revealed in harrowing detail. Lane's mother, Alys, experienced a mental health crisis after Lane's birth, developed addictions to pills and alcohol, and never showed Lane love. After Alys's overdose when Lane was fourteen, she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital; Lane's father drank himself to death three years later. Galvanized by Gala's critique, Lane rewrites the novel over three intense weeks. Published as The Ringtail, it becomes an instant bestseller.

Lane marries Scotty, whose steadiness feels like an antidote to her chaotic upbringing, despite Gala's warnings that Scotty is a closet traditionalist. Meanwhile, Charlie's secret relationship with Elijah Jones, a studio engineer, ends after Charlie narrowly escapes a police raid on a gay bar and refuses to attend a subsequent protest, a loss that drives Charlie to channel his grief into managing Lane's social world.

As the years pass, Gala's writing career blossoms with a monthly Hollywood column for Vogue and a well-received essay collection, Inhalation. Lane discovers she is pregnant with twins and struggles profoundly with motherhood, unable to separate her love for the girls from her certainty she will fail them. Her second novel, The Unraveling, is a critical and commercial disaster. After a devastating New York Times review, Lane and Scotty fight bitterly, and he orders her out of the house.

From a hotel room at the Chateau Marmont, Lane commits her most consequential betrayal. Her editor, Esther Mazer, mentions she is considering publishing Gala's first novel. Lane, consumed by envy, tells Esther that Gala uses heroin and that Gabriel substantially contributes to Gala's writing, assertions that are exaggerations or outright fabrications. Esther cancels Gala's meeting. When their New York trip falls through, Gala and Gabriel attend a house party in Laurel Canyon instead, where Gala finds Gabriel slumped in a bathroom after a relapse. She flees and encounters Scotty outside, both emotionally devastated. They sleep together. Minutes later, a gas leak ignites and the house explodes, killing Gabriel and five others.

The media blames Gala for Gabriel's death, and she spirals into heavy substance use. Scotty confesses the affair to Charlie, who brokers a secret deal: Scotty will pay Gala's rent in exchange for her silence, protecting Lane's marriage. Lane visits Gala only once afterward. Gala tells her pointedly that they were supposed to be in New York the night Gabriel died, the trip canceled because of Lane's sabotage.

Lane begins writing about Gala, telling herself she is preserving a story that deserves to be told. Esther offers a large advance. When Gala discovers the book through Esther, she arranges a confrontation at a restaurant in Chinatown. Lane tells Gala she is "a junkie and a punch line" incapable of telling her own story. Gala accuses Lane of spending her entire life watching others from a distance: "You will never be great. Not because you're a woman, but because you're a ghost." In the aftermath, Gala wakes on a freeway shoulder following a near-fatal drug binge and decides to leave Los Angeles.

Back in 1975, Lane's search for Gala unravels the secrets kept by Charlie and Scotty. She discovers they encountered Gala at the Magic Castle, a private club, and finds a rent receipt listing Scotty as the payer of Gala's rent. Scotty confesses everything. Lane shoves him at a party in front of their guests and realizes she is completely alone. A rogue wave nearly drowns one of the twins during a beach outing, crystallizing Lane's fear that she has become a danger to her own children.

Lane drives to Berkeley to visit her mother, whom she has not seen in twenty-three years. Alys, now calm and sober, lives in a small co-op. Lane asks the question she has carried her whole life: "Am I like you?" Alys tells her no. She explains that the hundreds of letters she sent over the years were not requests for forgiveness but attempts to ensure Lane would remember her beyond the worst moments. Lane resolves that even if she shares her mother's tendencies, she will fight against them every day.

Lane separates from Scotty, moves to Topanga Canyon, and cancels the book about Gala, agreeing to repay the advance. She returns to journalism and begins learning to mother her daughters on her own. Among Scotty's returned belongings, she finds Gala's gold cigarette case, a keepsake Gala once claimed was stolen from Marilyn Monroe. On the back, Lane notices the engraved initials MM. Recalling Gala's old story that Monroe faked her death and fled to Paris, Lane buys a plane ticket.

After days searching Parisian cafés, Lane spots Gala at a nightclub bar, her hair dyed red. Gala walks out without acknowledgment but leaves a note directing Lane to a park the next morning. They meet on the Île de la Cité, an island in the Seine. Gala, turning thirty-six, tells Lane she had "the uglies," a term Gala uses for periods when grief hardens the heart and the world looks uglier than it is. Rather than fulfill everyone's expectations of her destruction, she chose to disappear. She appears clear-headed for the first time in years. Lane apologizes for what she told Esther. Gala's face darkens but clears; she offers no apology for sleeping with Scotty. After Lane leaves, Gala pulls out a journal and continues writing her own novel. She has no idea where the story will end, but she wants to find out.