Ruined Beauty

There’s a moment in “The Clearing” where the speaker watches her husband sink six feet into the ash where their house used to be, his voice rising up: I’m walking on the roof! It’s the kind of scene a director would kill for. Disorienting, darkly comic, and devastating all at once. That moment tells you everything about what Michelle Bitting is doing in this collection: finding the image that cracks the frame open.

Ruined Beauty opens on the January 2025 Palisades-Eaton fires and never fully leaves them. But this isn’t a disaster memoir. It’s an ensemble piece, and the cast is extraordinary.

The father is the collection’s best villain. He stomps through the family home declaring I am the King!, doles out loyalty conditions like a mob boss, and burns through his children’s lives with the confidence of someone who never considers the wreckage. By the time Bitting puts him in a hospital gown, dementia softening his face into something unrecognizable, the scene cuts both ways. He reaches for her hand, thinking she’s someone else. She lets him.

The brothers are ghosts in the truest sense, haunting without appearing. One died by suicide, one by illness, and Bitting renders them in fragments — model airplanes taken to the thrift shop, a Steely Dan playlist at a funeral, the image of them dancing in the wind at the close of “Lost in the Disco Ball.” The ensemble doesn’t need to be living to carry weight.

The pacing moves the way good films do: tight scenes giving way to sprawling set pieces. “MEMORIAL” is a tight, formal elegy — linked couplets, barely a page. Then “I Get You, Norma Desmond” explodes across four pages, pulling Sunset Boulevard, Euripides, Lorca, and a college production at Berkeley’s Greek Theatre into a single careening monologue. It shouldn’t work. It absolutely works.

The ending earns it. “The Grain of Gold Waving in the Sun” reaches for grace and lands it with bread, wine, a gardener’s scythe, and love as the thing that keeps the wheel turning. After everything that preceded it, the fire, the funerals, the father, the chemo, that final note of praise hits like a coda that was written in the first reel, and you just didn’t know it yet.

If the collection has a weak scene, it’s that same closing poem in isolation. Read alone, it feels soft. Read as a finale, after the full weight of what came before, it opens.

Ruined Beauty is the kind of book that plays better on a second read, once you know who doesn’t make it out. That’s the highest compliment.