2016: successful, fulfilled — and inwardly starving.

After decades in advertising and the end of a long relationship, I left Zurich, driven less by necessity than by a quiet restlessness. Whether midlife crisis or conscious new beginning, I only knew that my life needed a different color.

With a suitcase full of clichés, music and film quotations, I flew to Los Angeles. I found a city that felt more like a state of mind: chaotic, immense, beautiful and violent, glamorous and poor. Its images seemed suspended in time, haunted by the echoes of Neil Young, The Doors, The Beach Boys, Chinatown and Pulp Fiction.

This book is not so much an emigration story as the record of a late awakening — a solitary confrontation with romance, contradiction and the simple desire to feel alive.