What – or who – gets left behind when you decide to blaze your own trail in life? What matters more: your family or your dreams? These questions are at the heart of Melanie Benjamin’s novel “California Golden,” her latest in a long line of bestselling historical fiction novels.
Set along the alluring beaches of late 1960s Malibu, the novel follows the intertwined lives of three women: Carol Donelly, whose only desire is to surf, and her two neglected daughters, Mindy and Ginger.
The book opens from the perspectives of Mindy and Ginger, who hatch a plan to learn surfing so Carol doesn’t abandon them. Mindy becomes a natural at the sport and goes on to star in movies, while Ginger falls behind and finds herself amid a growing counterculture of hardcore drugs. But the ocean remains at the heart of this plan and the lives of these sisters.
“The ocean and surfing is a great metaphor for life,” Benjamin says. “There are times you catch that perfect wave, and you ride it in and you're on top of the world. But then there are times you wipe out miserably. … It's unpredictable – but it's always moving.”
From the eyes of Mindy and Ginger, their mother seems like a monster. But when the book transitions to Carol’s perspective, Benjamin says we start to understand how she struggled to break the mold of “the housewife” to become what she really wants to be – a surfer.
“We may not excuse the things she does to her daughters … but at least we might understand that, for every trailblazing woman … there's a sacrifice to be made and there are people who will get hurt,” she says.
The book also explores the ugliness underlying 1960s California, specifically the racial tensions between white people and people of color. Benjamin introduces a Hawaiian character named Jimmy Cho, who struggles with his rage at white Californians for claiming the sport of surfing as their own.
“How surfing became synonymous with white California teenagers, that's a real mystery … since it started in Polynesia,” she says. “When we do talk about surfing … it is cultural appropriation, pure and simple.”
Benjamin is currently on a tour to promote “California Golden.” She will discuss her book at the Nomad Eatery in El Segundo on September 15 at 11:30 a.m. She has a book-signing at Chaucer’s Books in Santa Barbara on September 18 at 6 p.m.