Lifestorm

Book excerpt: What are we without our possessions? How do we continue when the foundations of our lives are rocked? Lifestorm begins when an upper middle class couple, Amanda and Jeffrey Dunn, return from a Hawaiian vacation to find their Hiller Highlands home destroyed in the Oakland Hills Firestorm of 1991. The loss of their possessions is only the beginning of their troubles. The couple deal with the tragedy differently. Amanda, initially frozen with panic, decides she is more than the things she once owned. Caught up in the rebuilding effort, dealing with her mothers serious injuries, she finds little time for the job that once defined her. Jeff becomes mired in anger, looking for someone to blame. He finds satisfaction in rallying other victims in fruitless suits against the City of Oakland and wars against the red tape of rebuilding. Amanda loses her mother, then finds no support from her best friend, Elaine. New friends, Pamela Macklin, a handicapped artist, and Ramona Prentiss, CPA, help her to choose a new life road. Jeffs twenty-something daughter, Leslie, tries and fails to split up the couple, but the friction caused by Amandas willingness to change and Jeffs anger and inability to move on accomplishes what Leslies hostility never could. The struggles of friends and family to cope with their own feelings of loss and dislocation form a backdrop for the couples strife.