From Brentwood and Santa Monica to Malibu Colony and Sullivan Canyon, Buchanan’s memoir follows a Southern California childhood of speed, privilege, instability and an enduring determination to keep moving.

Before Cat Buchanan was old enough to drive, Southern California had already taught her about speed.

In Girl in Flight, she recalls a family world of powerboats, sports cars and spontaneous movement. Her parents raced powerboats at Lake Tahoe, Marina del Rey and Lake Arrowhead and water-skied to Catalina Island. Journalists, Buchanan writes, dubbed their circle the “Smart Set,” although she suggests “Fast Set” better captured their financially fueled fun lifestyle.

Their garage reflected the same appetite: an Aston Martin, a Gull Wing Mercedes and later a Jaguar XK120 raced at Torrey Pines, Stockton and Santa Clara, where British racing driver Stirling Moss appeared on the scene and dubbed the new Jag, “An attractive alternative to the purchase of a Beverly Hills bungalow.”

Against that glamorous background, Buchanan constructs a much more complicated Los Angeles childhood.

At three, she moved to 708 South Barrington in Brentwood, a 40-unit apartment building owned by her mother and grandmother. Buchanan had the run of the building and developed relationships with residents who, knowing she was neglected and famished, fed her weekend breakfasts.

Those memories sit beside Buchanan’s account of periods when her mother’s drinking confined her to bed for days on end. The Santa Monica Pier becomes part escape and part playground. Years later, Buchanan jokes that her expertise at Skee-Ball could be traced back to her grandmother’s endless supply of dimes, used to distract them both from her mother’s vast consumption of Seagram’s .

Humor repeatedly arrives that way, immediately beside something much darker.

Los Angeles Through a Child’s Eyes

Buchanan’s local map stretches across the city.

At an early Montessori school, she gravitated toward reading and remembers when, at four, a classmate announced a plan to cook her in a stew because of supposed ancestral cannibalism. Buchanan refused to return, until adults discovered why, preserving this progressive educational paradigm.

The Hollywood connections came early and continue throughout the narrative. Marlon Brando’s son Christian attended the school, Buchanan writes, while classmate Tyrone Power Jr. celebrated a fourth birthday at Trader Vic’s in Beverly Hills.

At Bonner School, where Buchanan started at five, friendships expanded into neighborhoods such as North Rockingham Avenue, where she remembers trick-or-treating for hours across all twelve mansions surrounding a friend’s sprawling home above Sunset.

But horses provide the memoir’s most consistent theme through Los Angeles.

Buchanan learned to ride at Will Rogers equestrian center in Pacific Palisades and later stabled her horse in Malibu. Riding bareback in Malibu Colony involved navigating beneath the Pacific Coast Highway and timing trespass access around the tide.

At River Ridge Riding Stable, another refuge, Hollywood unexpectedly enters the frame. Buchanan recalls spotting Gregory Peck flying a kite and addressing her To Kill a Mockingbird hero as Atticus Finch. Peck, she remembers, answered by saying, “So I’ve been called in screen credit”.

Elsewhere, Buchanan remembers Farrah Fawcett as a tenant residing in the Barrington property and recounts family stories involving a young Elizabeth Taylor researching her role in National Velvet.

By adolescence, Buchanan had moved to 1780 Old Ranch Road in Sullivan Canyon, a Cliff May-designed ranch house where indoor and outdoor California life seemed to merge. Fruit trees, horses, beamed ceilings and Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon give the episode a ready-made film setting ripe for adaptation.

The glamour, however, never fully eclipses the alienation underneath it.

That is the tension that keeps Girl in Flight from becoming either a celebrity scrapbook or a conventional misery memoir. High society meets instability. Trauma is wrapped in humor. Expensive cars and glamorous restaurants share pages with emotional turmoil, friends and a child learning that freedom cannot always be bought.

The result is edgy, fast-paced and highly visual: airplanes, race cars, beaches and horses constantly moving through the frame, but Buchanan ultimately points the story toward resilience rather than defeat.

Her search for her connection eventually leads to a reunion with her half-sister, giving the memoir what Buchanan calls its “happy Hollywood ending.”

Published by Woodbridge Publishers, Girl in Flight is available in Kindle, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook formats, with Buchanan narrating the audiobook herself.

View Girl in Flight on Amazon