On the morning of January 8 this year, Meghan Daum lost all her possessions when the home she was renting in Altadena, California, was incinerated in the Eaton wildfire. Meghan has kept an audio and print diary of the aftermath of this cataclysm, which is full of her trademark insights and mordant wit.

Last month, Meghan released a new collection of her essays, titled The Catastrophe Hour, which is not about the fire—the book was finished before that—but which is eerily prescient about the disaster to come. We are delighted to publish an excerpt from the title essay, which follows Meghan’s pursuit of a home of her own, in the decade before the wildfire robbed her of everything. —The Editors

The kind of energy that many people put into pursuing sex and romance I put into looking at, thinking about, and occasionally attempting to buy real estate. I look at online listings with the self-loathing compulsion of a pornography addict looking at Pornhub. I hate myself, but there I am, again and again refreshing the page to see if a new listing has popped up in the last 10 minutes, doing deranged mathematical calculations in which I hope to arrive at a different answer than the correct one, which is that I am nowhere near being able to afford a house in Los Angeles, where the median home price is close to a million dollars.

Back in the summer of 2017, I bought a 9,500-square-foot parcel of land in the foothills of northeast Los Angeles for $265,000. I paid for this with money from the sale of the house I’d owned with my ex-husband, an amount that might have afforded a nice home in a Midwestern city, but was barely enough for a one-room condo in Southern California.

The idea was to build a modest house of my own. All modesty aside, this is a next-level insane thing to do, but I have always been insane about real estate and I guess I wanted to level up in that department. In fact, it was the recognition of my own insanity that led me to the belief that spending several years and tens of thousands of dollars drawing plans, securing permits, battling neighborhood councils, and paying for costly reports before taking out a monstrous construction loan would be better for my mental health than trying to buy an existing house in the normal way.

At that time, an average two-bedroom, one-bathroom house in the northeast LA neighborhoods that I consider home would nearly always sell for well over the original asking price, often with multiple cash offers. That meant that if I wanted to purchase an 800-square-foot house in decent shape in a neighborhood I liked, I’d need many, many hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash.

So I cleverly thought I’d take the cash I did have, hire an architect who was also a trusted friend, and slowly begin preparations on a tastefully minimalist home that I was told shouldn’t cost more than $400,000 to build.

In other words, even if the project went massively over budget (which it definitely would) I would still be able to get financing on a construction loan and come out in the end with a house worth far more than what I’d put into it. Even if the place was rendered unaffordable thanks to mortgage, insurance, and property taxes, I could put it on the market and make enough profit to buy the aforementioned 800-square-foot house. Never mind that the attendant financial panic would likely shave years off my life...