"When I was moving to California with one of my best friends, Austin, we packed up everything in his car and we were driving out. Everything was just stuffed. We had a little Kia Sephia. We stuffed everything in the car, including the CDs. We couldn’t find the CDs anywhere, we couldn’t find his CDs and mine were all packed away—we couldn’t get to them. The only CD we had in the CD player was By The Way. We had that whole CD on repeat. It reminds me of leaving the safety of my parents' home to move to California where I was convinced I was going to be gang-raped. I had some seriously rape-able buttcheeks. 10 years later, they’re slightly less rape-able"

"I know this film may seem out of place on this list, but for pure entertainment it’s my favorite. As a child I got to see this in Cinerama. Criterion did an incredible job mastering it, and I love all the extras on the Blu-ray—especially the maps of locations in southern California where it was shot."

"That was in 1994. That was right around the time I was finishing college and moving to California, in that period of my life, and I was secretly interested in the entertainment business but didn’t tell anybody. There was something about the writing and the music and John Travolta’s resurgence. Sam Jackson was just a badass motherf—er. I love Tarantino’s writing."

"I first read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (written by Charlotte’s sister Emily Bronte) when I was in college in California in the late 1960s. They are two of my favourite books because they’re just so brilliantly written. The beauty of both these classics is that they were fantastic when I was a teenager and they still appeal to me now as a 63-year-old woman."

"They’re a 1970’s California band with great haircuts. My mother used to play me this song when we drove to school every day. It’s the only CD we had in the car, so I heard it every morning for two or three years on repeat. It reminds me of my childhood. The melodies in this song are so incredible, and I feel like they subconsciously inspired me a lot."

"Wanda was my mentor and has such a sharp, vicious, lyrical voice, her poems almost come off the page and sing to you. I revisit this book often. Wanda was and is considered the voice of Los Angeles. She wrote about everything from growing up in the tough neighborhood of Watts California, to writing for a soap opera, to the objectification and marginalization of not only being a woman, but a woman of color."