Sometimes I think I might not have written ’The Age of Miracles’ if I hadn’t grown up in California, if I hadn’t been exposed to its very particular blend of beauty and disaster, of danger and denial.

Walker reflects on how place can shape an artist’s imagination. California—often idealized for its natural beauty and lifestyle—also lives with earthquakes, wildfires, drought, and other hazards, alongside a cultural tendency to normalize or downplay looming risks. She suggests that this tension between splendor and precarity helped generate the emotional logic of The Age of Miracles, a novel that treats catastrophe not only as spectacle but as something people adapt to, rationalize, and live through. The quote frames the book as rooted in a specific regional sensibility: living amid constant reminders that the world can change suddenly, yet continuing daily life as if it won’t.