Precarious beauty: Claire McEachern’s new book is a reflection on Malibu
Evelien Lupo (McEachern photo); University of Nevada Press
In “Coyotes and Culture,” Claire McEachern writes, “Up until recently, the beauty of the earth seemed to stand outside any other than seasonal or epochal change.”
| October 2, 2025
In November 2018, Claire McEachern was living in Malibu on a horse ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains when the Woolsey Fire breached Highway 101 and surrounded her home.
Fortunately, her family was prepared with an emergency evacuation plan, which helped them preserve their home and escape safely. Soon after, McEachern felt a need to write about living in this wild terrain.
“It all had been percolating in my head for some time,” said the UCLA English professor, a specialist in 16th- and 17th-century British literature. “Then, everything came to a head and was sort of unleashed by that fire.”
McEachern wrote about the experience in an essay called “The Fire Files,” which was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2019. But her urge to document life amid Malibu’s rugged topography persisted.
Over the next few years, McEachern produced 20 essays inspired by the unique environment in which she lived. Those reflections are collected in a new book, “Coyotes and Culture: Essays from Old Malibu,” which was published in September by University of Nevada Press.
McEachern said she was a bit naive about California when she first moved from New Hampshire in 1990. She was captivated by a clichéd image: a picturesque beauty that appeared on postcards and in travel magazines, a lush landscape full of palm trees and sunshine. Over time, she learned that danger lurked amid the beauty.
‘More suited to the lyric than the narrative’
In one of the new book’s essays, she writes: “Trouble has a plot. Beauty doesn’t. This makes it hard to write about. It is beautiful where I live, and the beauty is not static — there are seasons, creatures, cycles of birth and death — but its beauty always seems more suited to the lyric than the narrative, place rather than time, vision not verbs…. Up until recently, the beauty of the earth seemed to stand outside any other than seasonal or epochal change.”
Beyond exploring the abundant but precarious natural wonder of Malibu, the collection also dispels some of its myths — including that the town is teeming with surfers and celebrities. McEachern writes about her own experience living among the residents of what she calls “old Malibu.”
“They’re the people you don’t hear about,” McEachern said. “The locals who kind of belong to this world. They’re middle class or lower middle class. They’re the teachers, the lifeguards. In 25 years of living there, I never ran into a celebrity.”
Other topics in the collection include the difference between East Coast and West Coast cemeteries; gardening in a desert; the American myth of the Eastern schoolmarm who comes West and marries a cowboy; and the misconception that Los Angeles has no culture at all.
The ranch where McEachern lived had been in her husband’s family since the Civil War. Through the generations, they, and the property, survived many fires. But the 2018 conflagration would be the last. In 2023, McEachern and her husband, Warner Mandeville, sold the property and moved with their two daughters out of town.
“We felt safe in Malibu for years,” she said. “But the only way to save your house in a fire in a place like that is to stay and fight it. My husband had fought many, many fires and defended the house many times, but it’s a young man’s job. And my kids are too young to start defending their house from fire, and I don’t really want them doing it. So we decided we needed to leave.”
McEachern had written extensively about British literature and poetry over the years. (Her “Believing in Shakespeare: Studies in Longing” was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018.) But her recent foray into personal essays has been intoxicating, she said.
“I got letters and responses from people, and it was like, ‘Oh my god! Someone read what I wrote!’ I enjoyed the voice that it permitted me, which was not a scholarly voice, and I found it very liberating.”
Upcoming events
McEachern will serve as moderator for a Q&A with Stephen Greenblatt, a Harvard University Shakespeare scholar, at the Luskin Lecture for Thought Leadership, Oct. 9, at 5 p.m. Visit the event website to register and for more information. (Read a recap of the event on UCLA Newsroom.)
On Nov. 13, at 5 p.m., the English department will host a reading and book release reception for McEachern. Learn more at the UCLA English website.