Los Angeles · 1995
She filled an entire journal before she admitted what was happening.
A journal. Silver Lake. 1995. Four pages at a time. In your mailbox.
For readers 18+. The journal gets intimate.
The story
She was an assistant director in 1995.
Which meant she was a director who fetched coffee.
She’d been watching the industry long enough to know how it worked, and watching it work that way long enough to be quietly furious about it. She was talented. She was patient. She was running out of both.
In August, she noticed a camera operator on a production she was working. She wrote about him once, almost as a footnote. Then again. Then a third time, with the kind of detail you use for people who’ve started to take up space in your head without asking.
She did something impulsive. It changed his life. She told herself that was the only reason she kept thinking about him.
She wrote about all of it. The frustration. The ambition. The slow burn of wanting something you can’t name yet. And eventually — when things between them finally broke open — she wrote about that too. In the kind of detail you only commit to paper when you think the journal will never leave your hands.
It did. Four pages at a time. Starting from the beginning.
For readers 18+. The journal gets intimate.
How it was found
A storage unit in Silver Lake was cleared out in the spring of 2019. Most of what was inside went to donation or trash. One box didn’t.
Inside: a journal. Spiral-bound, soft cover, the kind you buy at a drugstore. Handwritten in blue ink, starting in August 1995. No name on the cover. No name anywhere inside.
She wrote about her work — the long hours, the small indignities, the way the industry made you wait. She wrote about Los Angeles: the light, the traffic, the bars on Sunset, the friends who stayed and the ones who left. And she wrote about a man she noticed on a film set in August.
She didn’t know, when she started writing about him, where it was going. Neither did we. Neither will you.
The subscription
The journal runs for a year. The story doesn’t end when it does.
When one story concludes, the next begins — no action required, no gap between letters.
One year of letters
$129 / year
Save 23% — billed once a year
Two envelopes a month · Cancel anytime
Month by month
$14 / month
Billed monthly
Two envelopes a month · Cancel anytime
What arrives
Open the envelope.
Every mailing is a few pages further into Kate’s journal. Plus a few things that arrived with them.
— 4 Journal pages — scanned, lined, torn edge
— A sketch, a napkin, a note she kept
— A mixtape track listing with a Spotify link
— Occasionally, something from him
Two envelopes a month. Every subscriber starts from the beginning.
For someone you love
Give someone a story they won’t be able to put down.
Gift subscriptions are prepaid — no auto-renewal, no surprise charges. Choose six months or a year. The first envelope ships when you want it to.
If they get to the end of their gift and want to keep reading — and they will — they’ll have the option to subscribe on their own.
- 6-month gift (12 letters) — $79
- 12-month gift (24 letters) — $129
August 4th, 1995
Read a fragment.
The city unfurled beneath a hazy morning sun, all faded promise and sun-bleached potential. Seven years I’d been here, collecting almost-breaks and not-quite-chances like parking tickets. Back in ’88, I’d driven down from San Francisco with my Bachelor of Fine Arts still warm in my hands and the specific delusion of someone who had never actually tried to make it in Los Angeles. I came to be an actress. Turns out I’m better at telling other people where to stand.
— from the first entry