“When I hold what’s been lost or forgotten in my gaze, it feels like love,” Elizabeth Hall writes, in Season of the Rat. In this work of hybrid nonfiction, we find glimpses of a forgotten history of Laguna Beach gay bars, lost stories of Southern California cults, and numerous methods of controlling the burgeoning rat population of Los Angeles. Rat behavior becomes a central obsession for Hall after insomniac nights listening to a rat scurrying across her roof. Deep in research about rat behavior and predilections, Hall sees signs of their presence everywhere, from shaking branches and shimmying garbage bags to a license plate that says RATLORD.

Taking place over a two-year period leading up to COVID lockdown, Season of the Rat is spare and sprawling. Living with an ex in a railroad apartment that offers little privacy, Hall ruminates on subjects as varied as Orange County strip malls, Laguna Beach gentrification, the “hippie mafia,” and, of course, whether rats experience empathy. This book scurries and meanders toward the “slip of blue” of the ocean “at the bottom of a dead end street,” that moment when everything lights up. “I find myself searching for these dead ends everywhere I go. Those bright instances of flight.”

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore: In Season of the Rat, the rat is both a motif and a central character, an irritant and an inspiration, a metaphor and a literal pest, a research subject and a narrative tool, and so I thought I would start by asking you about this rat, and about your partnership in this book. 

Elizabeth Hall: I love how you’ve portrayed the rat as a partner. I prefer to write towards someone or something. I’m a social animal, after all. 

I’m realizing now that I often write in response to irritation. Perhaps the real-life rat’s greatest gift to me was how much it irritated me. The rat forced me to engage. At the time, I had few other housing options, and I was nervous about reporting the rat to my landlord. So I accepted that it might never be gone. 

Part of my motivation to research rats was to sensitize myself to the rat’s plight. Through books I started to empathize with them. I saw their complexity. Of course, this newfound empathy did nothing to lessen the physical fear I felt whenever I heard the rat scratching above my head. That, too, surprised me. Before the rat moved in, I had prided myself in my ability to alter my own reality and feelings through storytelling. The rat quickly exposed the absurdity of my attempt to rescript fear into love.

Rats quite literally offered me a new lens through which to see my living situation, my writing, and ultimately, the world. The structure of the book, like its content, is informed by rats’ compulsive foraging, a behavior shaped by the need to navigate scarcity and unpredictability. 

MBS: So, as a social animal, you are foraging too, I love this. What would you say you are foraging for?

EH: Sustenance. Reading and research are forms of foraging for me. Whether through engaging with the news or a novel, I’m on the hunt for new ideas, new pleasures, new ways of moving through the world.

My approach to selecting what to read or write is informed by the forager’s mindset: anything, anywhere, can be a site of nourishment. I’m attracted to engaging with things that unsettle me and challenge my beliefs. That’s part of why I became interested in writing about the black rats in L.A. They’re both voracious and omnivorous. They have preferences for sure, but they’ll eat almost anything when necessary. They’re constantly pushing against the boundaries of their own taste. 

I also literally forage for food. Not out of necessity but pleasure. Nutrient dense wild greens like dandelion and lambs quarter grow abundantly in L.A. and most cities. Although often dismissed as weeds, they offer more fiber and vitamins than kale. The main difference between weeds and their cultivated counterparts is where they grow, not what they offer. Weeds tend to grow in unwanted places, like the sides of freeways. For me, foraging is a practice rooted in the belief that there are no “wrong” places to find sustenance. 

MBS: You also forage for the lost history of gay bars and gay culture and gay life in Laguna Beach, now an emblematic site of reactionary conservative straight wealth. What does it mean for you to connect with these gay bar rats, and the history of celebration that came to a halt due to the AIDS crisis, which in part allowed for the transformation, gentrification, and homogenization of Laguna Beach?

EH: Bless the bar rats! They offered me an alternative way into the story of Laguna’s vanishing queer scene. As a recovering critic, my natural impulse was to focus on the gentrification and homogenization aspects of the city’s story. I wrote those parts first. But then I discovered the bar rats. Barflies like Paul Lynde and Rock Hudson inspired me to zoom out and look at the culture of the bars themselves, how it felt to smoke a cigarette on the patio. If I had not zoomed out, something important would’ve been lost: queer pleasure. 

Alongside the city’s conservative evolution, pleasure and play abounded. As did grief. The loss of life due to AIDS fundamentally shifted the culture, character, and real estate landscape of Laguna. But I didn’t want the good times to be a footnote, a preface to the important stuff. I also didn’t want to stop at the good times. For me, gay bars can’t ever be the utopias we often want them to be, not now or in history. Bar scenes like the ones in Laguna were affected by the same race, class, and gender hierarchies that exist outside the red lights. The bar rats let me know it was okay to talk about those things and the dizzy zip of a poppers hit in the same space. 

MBS: Yes, when people overly romanticize the history of gay bars they avoid talking about these hierarchies that are always present—tell us more about what you found. 

EH: The scene in Laguna was overwhelmingly white and wealthy. Many of the regular patrons were Republican. Even as the artists who performed at, say, the Boom Boom Room, were often diverse. Mexican American and an Anaheim native, Rudy de la Mor was a frequent cabaret performer. But then, as now, lookism and ageism were rampant. That’s not to say people were barred from entry. But, at a queer bar, where one goes for community and intimacy, it's not enough to be allowed entry; you want to be welcomed, desired. And I think the bar scene there offered a limited range of what was perceived as desirable. Places shape not only who and how we desire, but also how we see our own desirability.

MBS: Speaking of welcome, and desire, and place, let’s not forget about cults—how does the history of cults fit into this book?

EH: In the 1980s, my parents were members of The Family, formerly Children of God, a cult that was founded in Huntington Beach in the late 1960s by David Berg, a disgraced preacher from Texas with an appetite for red wine and young women. The cult still exists today. Both my sister and I were born into the group, and my parents' involvement was always shrouded in mystery once they left. Because of this lineage, I was predestined to become a cult chronicler.

But personal history wasn’t the only reason The Family interested me. California has always been a hotbed for cults, but I associated Huntington Beach with surfers and toxic suburbia. The city of today was vastly different from the one Berg encountered when he moved there in 1968. The shores were still dotted with oil derricks. There were tomato fields, tarred telephone poles, and unpaved roads. The beach was then a gathering spot for the unhoused and drug addicted teens. The discovery of the oil rigs and zooted up surfers would’ve been enough to intrigue me, but then there was Berg, a real shapeshifter.

I’ve always been enchanted by persona, and for me, it's been all too easy to see persona as synonymous with a certain je ne sais quoi. I took it for granted that being a cult leader meant you’re charismatic. Berg upended these expectations. 

To me, Berg increasingly came across as an insufferable hack who had clumsily cobbled together an image and personality based on other people. His style evolution alone fascinated me. He was 49 when he arrived at the beach, and he wore black slacks and black suspenders affixed with tiny silver clips, the standard fit for a seasoned circuit rider like him. Within a few weeks of observing the local hippie fashions, he had abandoned his starched shirts and pressed slacks for billowy blouses and makeshift caftans. He grew his beard out, let his hair flow white and wild. He also attended sermons at Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove and pilfered much of his early teachings from its preacher Robert H. Schuller. 

Honestly, it broke my heart to discover that Berg was just an ordinary man, not this charismatic visionary who could seduce droves into following his prophecies. The question that kept gnawing at me: if it wasn’t charisma that attracted people to The Family, what did? More and more I discovered desperation. A lack of other viable options. What seemed like a minor realization became central to a key theme in Season of the Rat: people often stay in abusive environments not because of love or obsession, but because they lack resources and alternatives.

Reading about the gay bars was originally a fun diversion, my research side piece, if you will. The bars kept me reading about Orange County, but I didn’t have to read about depressing stuff like coercion and abuse. The bars also offered me a way out of my obsession with uncovering my family history. At least temporarily.  

MBS: In size, this is a very spare book. And yet it’s sprawling with ideas. I’m curious to hear more about how you nurtured the form.

I’m drawn to the deceptive power of diminutiveness. In American culture, smallness is often dismissed, mistaken for insignificance. But I’ve always gravitated to slim books that hit hard: Marguerite Duras The Lover, Renee Gladman’s Juice, Jenny Boully’s The Body, Mary Reufle’s My Private Property. I appreciate how these writers use absence--silence, fragmentation, and erasure--to create meaning. What’s not said becomes as important as what is.

I remember being really shocked when I learned that Duras was a big Hemingway Head. Her first several drafts of The Lover were rejected from publishers because they sounded too much like him. His machismo repelled me, but through the lens of her love, I read him. And I found myself appreciating elements of his style. The structure of his sentences exhilarated me. Joan Didion once said she loved Hemingway because “there was withheld information in his sentences.” They created meaning primarily through rhythm, and this rhythm was only possible because he kept so much back. 

MBS: Earlier you mentioned your attempt to rescript your fear of rats into love. Another rat in the book is your ex-boyfriend and roommate. About halfway into the book you describe a camping trip together, when at night you’re lying in your tent high on ecstasy, and you hear the tent unzip as he comes in to sexually assault you. This rape hovers over the text as you are still living together in a railroad apartment where he needs to go through your bedroom to reach the bathroom. But you don’t come back to the details of the rape. Instead you show how it deadens your experience of the world and impacts the panic of everyday survival. This feels especially impactful, and I wonder if you could talk about your choice to keep the rape in the background while it underscores everything. 

EH: You’re such an intuitive reader, and I really appreciate that you honed in on showing the impact rather than the act itself. 

One thing early readers often said was that when the rape scene first appears, they weren’t sure what was happening. That was intentional. It’s not immediately clear what I’m describing. You might need to read it more than once to fully understand. After it happened, he initially denied it was assault, even though I said, “You raped me.” He blamed the drugs I’d taken. Then, he said he thought we might get back together, so it somehow seemed okay. It took him a few days to come clean. I also had to replay the event multiple times in my own head to be sure what had happened really had happened. I wanted to preserve that confusion in the book—because it was real—but not in a Lifetime movie kind of way, you know, the crying on the shower floor.

That’s not to knock Lifetime entirely. I grew up watching those movies. They taught me a lot. They showed me how to recognize rape when it occurs between friends, classmates, lovers. They taught me not to blame myself. But they also turned tragedy into entertainment. In many of those films, rape is clearly framed as a violation, a criminal act, but it’s also aestheticized. The movie is a product meant to be consumed. I didn’t want to aestheticize my own assault. I didn’t want to create more tragedy porn.

More than anything, I wanted to keep the attention on me. So often in narratives of assault, the focus shifts to the perpetrator—who he is, why he did it, what consequences he faces, where he is now. I remember once telling a therapist about the assault, and the very first thing she asked was, “What happened to him?” When writing the book, I took pains to avoid detailing anything about his interiority or who he was as a person beyond his interactions with me. In Season of the Rat, he’s the cold distant moon, and I’m the planet he’s orbiting. 

The decision to keep the rape in the background was also a formal one. I wanted to let its emotional residue shape the narrative, rather than flatten the experience into a single traumatic flashpoint.  

MBS: You write, “I never allowed myself to say, ‘I feel unsafe here with him.’ If I said it aloud, my fear would become a verifiable fact.” In a book filled with the search for so many verifiable facts, this feels especially telling. Talk about this fear, and how it works in the book.

This is a really perceptive question. The repetition of “facts” throughout the book was purposeful. I wanted to reflect the tension between what I could uncover in my research and what I refused to face in my personal life.

One of the things that draws me to research is the desire to solve some sort of problem. With the cult research, I was trying to solve the mystery of my parents’ past, which had been hidden from me. In both my writing life and real life, I struggle to sit with uncertainty. I want to know, and I want to be in control. Facts give insight into why things happened the way they did. They help make sense of a time and a place. 

But when my ex and I broke up, everything in my life became unknowable.  I needed to solve the problem of being too broke to afford my own apartment. My own precarity scared me. I convinced myself that platonic cohabitation was a solution. That I could manage it. I also believed I knew everything about my ex; we had dated for a decade. Even after the rape, I still felt I was in control. I thought, oh I’ll lock my bedroom door, as if that would protect me. 

My inability to recognize and accept my own vulnerability then still astounds me. And yet, I see that pattern resurface all the time. This belief that if I’m smart enough, prepared enough, I can steer my own fate. 

One thing rape teaches you, however bruttally, is how profoundly interconnected we all are to each other. Every action we take is in relation to others. I used to hate the feeling of dependence. Now I’m more willing to ask for help, even from strangers. I see vulnerability not as something to hide or outwit, but as something that binds us to one another.

MBS: As the book gets closer to 2020, I felt anxious about how the emergence of COVID-19 would make everything worse, and yet this is a different kind of pandemic story. You escape into a new relationship, and this allows you to leave LA and quarantine together with your girlfriend in San Francisco. Talk about this escape, and the presence it allows.

Speaking of asking for help, I told my girlfriend how scared I was to stay in my apartment with my ex, who I didn’t feel was taking quarantining seriously. I hadn’t yet told her what had happened between him and me. But when I said I felt unsafe, she told me to come to her. She rented me a car. Although she had a good job, she traveled a lot and lived in a 300 sq ft apartment with a loft bed, no stove, and a detached bathroom. She put a space heater in the bathroom so I wouldn’t freeze when I got up in the middle of the night to pee. Being with her in that space felt like heaven. And yet outside the apartment, it felt like the world was ending.

I felt guilty having access to so much love amidst so much horror. But as the week passed, I started writing again. I wrote poems. I drafted essay outlines. I started eating, really eating, and realized I’d often been too sad to eat at all while living with my ex. At night we played Uno and ate curry. I glimpsed, maybe for the first time, what happiness might look like.

But alongside that happiness was the tragedy of COVID. The chaos, the misinformation, the isolation, the deaths. Every day brought news of unimaginable loss and equally unimaginable indifference. People refusing to quarantine or wear masks, insisting life should go on as normal, as if only the elderly were dying, and as if that made it acceptable. 

During that time, I learned that love isn’t an antidote to horror. It doesn’t cancel it out. But it can still bloom beside it. Even small love—with friends, pets, books—can be generative. A reason to keep going.