Sonya Walger, who lost the house in Los Angeles, released the first book

Sonya Walger lost everything when the fire of the palisades swept Malibu and shaved it Family houseHigh on a promontory in the Big Rock district. “It was a way of life, from life to countryside,” explains Walger, who temporarily refers with her husband and two children in the house of Santa Monica of a friend.

A voracious reader, Walger has lost, among other precious articles, its vast collection of books, which contained everything, from contemporary fiction and romantic poetry to precious childhood books with its griffoned annotations on the fringes. These lost journals were the raw material of the first novel by Walger, “Lion”, a recovered memory book published at a time of incalculable loss for Walger and his family,

A piece with a fine and beautifully observed grain, “lion” – Tuesday – is the story of the heavy dynamics and often guarded between a loving and intelligent girl and her unstable, charming and self -obeyed father, and how the push and the attraction of their relationship lead over time to a slow and unrealizable break. Tented by the daughter (no one in the novel receives a formal name), the “lion” is arranged as a mosaic; Disappear scenes from the long arc of the life of the two characters rub against each other in a transparent story that goes back and forth through time. History works like memory itself; The narrator's past informs the present.

The narcissistic father Rakish of “Lion's” is based on the father of Walger, who divorced his mother when Walger was young and then kept his life with the length of the arm even though his daughter aspired to fill the gap. “I have always had trouble with this idea of ​​how to capture itself on the page, replicate the experience and trap it in the amber of words,” explains Walger, an actor who had recurring roles in the “lost” and “for all humanity” shows. “And it seems to me, when I connected my newspapers, these are also fictions in a way. It is not my life. It is a story that I have told about my life.”

“Lion” is at a certain level an act of restoration, a chance for Walger to present to his children the grandfather whom they have never known. “They were so young when she died,” she said. “And it hurt me to think that they did not know his stories, because these are so extraordinary stories.”

The novel begins at the end, the day after a parachuting accident that seriously hurts the father. From there, Walger evokes a man of action, an adventurer of Jet-set who swirls through Peru and Argentina in a great act of improvisation, a cycle of wealth and column for the narrator of Walger, the father becomes a mythical kind which works on the intestinal instinct and the adrenaline induced by drugs. It is enough to say that it does not have time or patience for the education of children.

Many anecdotes of the book come from Walger's reviews. “My memory is horrible,” she says. “So I went to the newspapers and scrutinized memories and I started to assemble the moments. Then, like a small piece of cold clay, I just worked and worked them, until they warm up.” It was only when she had put a critical mass of these stories that the notion of creation of analogues between her father and the life of Walger as a child and a parent began to merge into his mind. “I wanted to make this parallel between the way I am a parent and how I was a parent, and how this is how we become who we are and how we take stock of whom we are.”

The path of Walger's life was radically divergent from that of his father. She won the honors in English at the University of Oxford while playing roles in local theatrical productions, and came to Los Angeles in 2000, when she won her first important part on the HBO series “The Mind of the Marié Man”. She attributes to her mother to have kept her on the stable path. “I cannot overestimate what it was to live in my mother's care,” she said. “I don't think I would be who I am without her.”

The writing of fiction was a permanent interest, even after the acting career of Walger acquired the field. “I read everything. Books were my north all my life, ”she says. “But it allowed me to be deeply intimidated by the idea of ​​writing and publishing a book. I hold the bar so high for myself. ” Walger had trouble with the “lion” at the beginning, until it landed on the idea of ​​using the continuous present as the “wire of pearls” which maintains its non -linear story. “Then it happened very quickly,” she said. “I had found the door I needed to cross.”

The door is always open. Walger finished another novel, which will be published at the beginning of next year, and works on her third book, which she managed to save fires – among the few elements she recovered, there are three notebooks which contain the first draft of the book. “I only allow myself to read the right books,” she says. “If a book is bad, I throw it through the room!” I knew that “lion” should be something I would like to read. ” She hopes others feel the same.