In this version of Berkeley, summer nights are “hot and sticky,” Victorian houses dot the Berkeley Hills and eight lanes of Highway 101 run along the waterfront. After a wildfire burns thousands of homes in the hills and the Berkeley Rose Garden, protesters gather in a CVS parking lot and demand turning some of the charred single-family plots into low-income housing. The crowd chants, “Rebuild a Better Berkeley! Berkeley for all! Share the wealth! Nuestra casa es tu casa!”
This is the Berkeley depicted in the new book, A Fire So Wild, a work of fiction. Sarah Ruiz-Grossman wrote the novel her first in 2021 during the pandemic isolation. She and her partner lived on the second floor of a house in the Berkeley Hills from the summer of 2020 to the summer of 2022. On Feb. 20 at 7 p.m., Ruiz-Grossman will read from the book and sign copies at Books Inc.
While Ruiz-Grossman has taken liberties (and made some errors) with some of the city’s attributes, she insists a class battle due to climate change is bound to happen — in Berkeley and elsewhere — due to economic inequities. Ruiz-Grossman gained some insights into the aftermaths of wildfires when she worked for the Huffington Post as a social justice and climate change reporter in the Bay Area. After selling the book in 2022, she has been writing novels full-time.
On a phone call from her home in Venice in Southern California, Ruiz-Grossman, 33, talked to Berkeleyside about how she came to the subject matter, her knowledge of local liberal politics and how the climate scenario is likely to unfold in the coming years.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
As part of your reporting, you went to Santa Rosa and Paradise after the wildfires and spoke to survivors who shared their stories with you. What were some of their truths you incorporated into the novel?
One of the experiences that I tried to translate through the character of Sunny involved an unhoused couple who had been living in a tent at the time that the fires came through Paradise and had to flee the fire by foot. They were given a trailer to live in by a good Samaritan who wanted to help, but the good Samaritan phase after a disaster fades pretty quickly. Time goes on and the status quo comes back into play. By the time I met this couple they were being told by the owner of the trailer that they had to go. They end up being people who have been neglected and don’t get any services.
Similarly I was able to interview a pretty well-off upper-class lesbian couple who came through the fire OK. They lost their home and were placed into a rental they could afford because they had really good insurance, but internally the system of the family had completely fallen apart. One of the parents had to take off because she couldn’t get through a normal day of work. I tried to translate that there isn’t anybody who comes out of a wildfire unimpacted. They’re all affected whether they have it together financially or not.
Why did you choose to set the book in Berkeley?
Berkeley is a really special place and community. It has a deep history of social justice, protest and progressive politics. It also has a lot of complications, with a thriving university and a thriving housing crisis with generations of folks who’ve lived there for a really long time. For a community that loves to celebrate its diversity, you see a lot of folks being pushed out in favor of tech wealth. All those things come into play when you look at housing and climate, the people and neighborhoods. Berkeley had all the pieces to tell the story. And I lived here so I was able to have my feet on the ground.
In a couple of places, you refer to the hot summers in Berkeley. Typically, summer temperatures rarely go higher than the low 70s. I’m guessing that in the novel you’re envisioning a hotter future?
No. I was referencing the summer of 2020. There was a very intense heat wave that covered the whole area. It was when the August Complex in 2020 farther north was sending ash into the region and the sky turned orange. Because Berkeley was not used to having such heat, we didn’t have any air conditioning in our apartment. It was so hot but we couldn’t open the windows because there was ash outside and it was bad for our lungs. We didn’t have an air purifier. It’s not every day, but this is the reality now in the Bay Area.
You seem to come down especially hard on rich liberals who live in the hills, who are depicted as well-intentioned hypocrites who will throw their money at do-good causes, like affordable housing, one of the main themes in the book. They drive Teslas, sip champagne, laugh at bad jokes during fundraisers, “never get their hands dirty” and live “cookie-cutter lives.” Have you known people like this?
I had neighbors when we were living in Berkeley who were lovely people and yet were in agreement with our local council person Susan Wengraf in opposing a state proposal that would allow two ADUs (Accessory Dwelling Units) per parcel to provide more affordable housing. They said they were worried about parking: Will there be enough spaces for all involved? Could it be a fire hazard? At the end of the day it was typical NIMBY (Not In My Backyard). They also like to think that they care about the world and are good people. At the end of the day you have to decide if you are able to look at your own complicity or not. [Ed. note: Read Berkeleyside’s coverage of the debate over whether to limit ADUs in the Berkeley Hills and how new housing could affect emergency evacuations from hillside neighborhoods.]
The poster child for that certain type of white liberal is one of the book’s main characters, Abigail, who lives in a house with a pool in the hills with an African American wife and bi-racial son who’s a senior at Berkeley High. She’s a queer, Jewish lawyer who “knows the right people” and pays a therapist $260 per hour to learn how to be grateful. She wears Eileen Fisher and carries a tote that says, “Give a Shit! Don’t Eat Meat!” Without spoiling the ending, she ends up being the character who undergoes the greatest arc in the book.
Abigail undergoes significant change in the end and you have to wonder what reasons are behind it. Is it because she realizes the role she plays as a cog in the system or that she’s lost the high opinion of her spouse and her child and makes changes in order to look better in their eyes. Does it matter as long as she does the right thing?
By the way, Berkeley just got its first Eileen Fisher store, on Fourth Street. So you were onto something there.
That’s funny.
You also weave in an Indigenous perspective into the book. The site of a planned high rise is a shellmound in West Berkeley. Clearly, you must have been inspired by a real-life plan to build a 260-unit building on contested Ohlone land on Fourth Street. Unlike the high rise in the novel that dedicated one unit to affordable housing, the Fourth Street project proposes 50% affordable housing. Does that make you feel hopeful?
It does. Berkeley’s a place where there is a hearty enough activist community that often won’t let folks get away with not doing the right thing. Berkeley has already shown itself to be a place where we can ask, how do we move through this climate crisis and housing crisis in a way that’s more sustainable.
How do you see the coming years? Do you believe, as your book implies, that the kind of class battles that take place in the book will come to a head during climate crises — even in a place like progressive Berkeley?
Yes, they’ll certainly come to a head. I don’t know if I feel optimistic about things being resolved in a way that creates more equity versus more inequality. If we look at the past decades in our country as a whole, capitalism has only served to widen the gap between the wealthiest and the bottom half of the population who are living more and more precariously, with less well paid and fewer stable jobs. I do know that the climate crisis is going to bring a lot of these problems of racism and poverty and inequality and job conditions to a head, certainly. The growing labor movement gives me hope. Though they’re entrenched in powerful corporations working against this as we’ve seen. We’ll see how that shakes out.
As tough as you are on some of the characters — Abigail in particular — you redeem most of them by the novel’s end. For readers who exhibit some of your characters’ undesirable traits, what would you want them to take away from this book?
I hope that people don’t come away thinking that I believe I know all the right answers here. We’re all reckoning with how to live ethical lives in a very unethical system of white supremacist, hetero-patriarchical capitalism. There are not many simple moral choices. I make decisions every day, like getting on a plane to go see family that are counter to the values I espouse on climate. What I hope people come away with is taking a more honest look at these occasions and owning how we participate in the crisis that we criticize and that we do the right thing to the extent that we can in terms of how we vote, how we prioritize these issues and who we stand up for in as small a circle as our friends our family our workplaces.
