There is a passage in Daniel Deronda, George Eliot's final novel, that urges the benefits of passing one's childhood in a well-loved place. Pitying the heroine whose unrooted early years have left her without inner guidance in a venal, aimless milieu, the author is prompted to reflect: A human life, I think, should be well-rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth,... a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbours, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood.

I marked these lines in my copy of the novel with the sense of my own deprivation. My childhood "spot" was a large Spanish-style house in Beverly Hills, California. But how can George Eliot's prescriptions apply to a place like Beverly Hills, a film-world town where not a single family goes back for generations and even the palm trees are arrivistes in an artfully transformed desert? What does such a place offer? What does it determine? I retain my early memories—of our house, friends, a fig tree in the back yard, even as George Eliot would have it, a series of cherished dogs. But do these suffice to anchor a life? More than anything else, Beverly Hills for me is the place that I was happy to get away from. At 15, fortified by notions of culture and opportunity culled