For me, Los Angeles is more than a city.

It’s a story we’ve been telling ourselves for more than a century.

Sunshine and shadows. Movie stars and murderers. Mansions and motels. Freeways and foothills. Beaches and back alleys. Reinvention and regret.

But beyond the movies, books, headlines, myths, and legends is another Los Angeles—the one experienced every day by the people who actually live here.

The Long Hello is novelist Michael Lister’s ongoing attempt to get to know that city.

Michael lives and writes 2,500 miles away in Florida, but increasingly his fiction has brought him to Los Angeles. Research can tell him where the streets go, when a building was constructed, or what happened on a particular night.

But research can’t tell him what a city feels like.

For that, you have to talk to people.

Writers. Filmmakers. Journalists. Artists. Musicians. Cops. Detectives. Bartenders. Booksellers. Historians. Actors. Lifelong Angelenos. Recent arrivals.

People with stories to tell.

Each episode begins with a person and a simple question:

Tell me about your Los Angeles.

Welcome to The Long Hello.

My continued and long introduction to L.A.—One Story at a Time.

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