How 3rd & Agnes actually started
Read the entry Six minutes
I didn’t set out to write a novel.
I sat down to write down some things about my own family — the kind of stuff you carry around for years without ever really looking at directly. I wasn’t trying to make anything out of it. I just wanted it out of my head and onto a page, where I could finally see the shape of it instead of just feeling the weight of it.
Somewhere in the middle of that, a girl named Evynne Monet showed up. She wasn’t me. She was a fifteen-year-old on the wrong side of a line I grew up learning the hard way — the one that splits Los Angeles into two entirely different cities that share a name and nothing else. She had a mother carrying more than she ever explained, a grandfather who ran his household like a man building something with his bare hands, and a boy on a corner who was gentler with her than half the people who were supposed to be.
None of that is exactly my life. All of it is built from the parts of my life I know the truest.
I didn’t understand what I had until I was deep into it — until I stopped writing to get something out of my own head and started writing because Evynne had somewhere she needed to go, and I was the only one who could take her there. That’s the moment a journal entry turns into a novel, as far as I can tell. Nobody tells you when it happens. You just look up one day and realize you’re not processing anymore. You’re building.
Agnes Road is a real street. It’s not a metaphor — it’s an ordinary residential block, the kind you’d drive past without a second look. Tan stucco house, a chain-link fence, a tree that’s still standing there today. That’s exactly why the book is named after it. The biggest things that ever happened to Evynne happened somewhere that looks like nothing at all.
I’ll be using this space to write about the parts of building this book that don’t fit in a caption — the research into Lynwood’s real history that ended up woven through these chapters, the decisions I made about what to change and what to leave true, and eventually, once it’s out in the world, what it’s actually like to hand a piece of your own life to strangers and let them read it.
Thank you for being here for it from the start.
— L. V. Ivy