The Duplex

By Amy Silverberg

As published in The Paris Review

I moved to Los Angeles to sing. When was this? August? June? I was twenty-nine, and those were shapeless months, when the days blended together and I refused to pull them apart.

My landlord was unusually close to her adult son. His name was Jeffrey, and my landlord said he was around my age. I’d never met him even though his apartment was apparently only twelve minutes away. I lived on the bottom floor of her dilapidated duplex; she lived upstairs. Every night I’d fall asleep to the sound of her feet shuffling across the thin wood floor above me.

I slept with my bedroom windows open, hoping for a breeze to carry in the burned-air smell of the city. Instead, my landlord would wake me up in the morning by pulling aside my curtain and thrusting her hand inside my room, offering me a gift—a spare tomato or a pamphlet about the Hare Krishnas.e-dimensional characters, and everything else you’d look for in a good book. Read the full piece at The Paris Review  or  in PDF form here.

In addition to being an amazing writer, Amy Silverberg is one of our Book Club Facilitators. Read more about her (and the rest of our team) on our team page.