The inferno that swept through Los Angeles has destroyed homes, but it cannot erase the love, memories, and lived lives that define what it means to call a place home
As the slow, creeping blaze swelled into an all-consuming inferno, spreading across Los Angeles with terrifying force, entire neighbourhoods were reduced to nothing but ash. Homes that once stood as proud markers of stability and wealth crumbled to dust, obliterating everything their owners had once known and held dear. The homes of well-known Hollywood actors like Jeff Bridges, Mel Gibson, and Anthony Hopkins were consumed in the wildfires.
Bridges, the Oscar-winning star of Crazy Heart and The Old Man, watched his Malibu home burn to the ground; it was an inheritance passed down through generations — gone with the wind. Mel Gibson, too, saw his Malibu property “completely toasted” as he recorded a podcast with Joe Rogan. Anthony Hopkins, the two-time Academy Award-winning actor, lost two homes in Pacific Palisades. In a heart-wrenching Instagram post, he shared that, in the face of such devastation, “the only thing we take with us is the love we give.”
Paris Hilton, Billy Crystal, Adam Brody, and many others also lost their homes. Crystal, the star of When Harry Met Sally, reflected on the 40 years he spent in his Pacific Palisades house, where he raised children and grandchildren. “Every inch of our house was filled with love. Beautiful memories that can’t be taken away,” he said. Hilton posted a video of the charred remains of her Malibu mansion, admitting the heartbreak was “truly indescribable,” though she was relieved her family was safe.
Others, like Daniella Pineda and Heidi Montag, shared similar stories of escape — grabbing only what they could as their homes burned away, leaving them with little more than the clothes on their backs. Pineda escaped with only her dog and laptop, her world now condensed to a digital file and a breathing companion. Keleigh Teller shared before-and-after images of her razed home, lamenting, “I wish I grabbed my wedding dress.”
Where the fire’s true lesson lies
For actor Milo Ventimiglia, best known for This Is Us, the irony hit differently. In the series, his character perishes in a fire after his house burns down. Standing before the charred remains of his real-life home, he remarked, “It’s not lost on me — life imitating art.” These stories are easy to consume in isolation, reduced to soundbites of famous people lamenting privilege turned to ash. But their grief, magnified by public scrutiny, mirrors the silent suffering of thousands who have lost homes in less glamorous ZIP codes. For every Bridges or Gibson, there are countless families whose losses will never make headlines, whose recovery will be a lonely, uphill battle.
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This fire, like so many before it, asks us to confront a deeper kind of loss. It reduces homes to rubble, but it also exposes a far more profound reality: the fragility of the lives we build. As these celebrities stand in the wreckage of their once-stable worlds, there is no clear way to measure the weight of what’s lost. In 1990, writer Pico Iyer experienced a similar devastation when a wildfire razed his Santa Barbara home to the ground. Iyer, who had come to understand the material world’s inherent impermanence, wrote about the fire’s strange efficiency, how it moved with almost sentient precision. He was left with little more than a manuscript and his cat, Minnie. What he couldn’t know then — and what those affected today may only begin to understand — is how much life clings to the fragments of what remains.
In his writings, Iyer described fire as an unravelling of certainty. The flames were messengers, illuminating the ways in which the objects and spaces we hold most dear shape who we are. For Iyer, the fire became an experience of confronting the tenuousness of his identity. Without the walls, the photos, the bookshelves, the life he had once lived, who was he? It is in moments like these — when the smoke clears and the ruins are revealed — that we are forced to face the uncertainty that has always been present but often hidden beneath the surface. It’s a humbling realisation: we are not as secure as we imagine. Iyer found solace in the Benedictine hermitage, a place of radical stillness that allowed him to see life with a clarity that had been impossible before. But clarity, in the wake of loss, does not erase the pain of what has been taken. What does it mean to rebuild? What can we rebuild when the architecture of our very selves has been torn apart?
What the fire will not take away
And yet, even in the absence of all that is familiar, something remains. The grief of losing a home is a grief without resolution, without ritual, without closure. We cannot gather our belongings into neat piles; we cannot mourn in the ways that other losses allow. The remains of a home become a ghost — an absence that lingers in our bones. This is where the fire’s true lesson lies. It isn’t the material things we lose that matter most, but the lessons those things taught us. A home holds memories of lives lived — of children’s laughter, of quiet moments shared, of the mundane moments that make up a life. We cannot simply replace these things. They are not items to be bought and sold, but echoes of the people we were when we created them.
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In the aftermath of the January 2025 fires, survivors will grapple with the weight of what they’ve lost. Their homes will be rebuilt, but the sense of home, the deep-rooted connection to the places that once shaped them, will be harder to recreate. Iyer wrote of sitting in the ashes of his loss, confronted by silence and the clarity it offers. The fire had reduced his life to its rawest elements, forcing him to question what truly mattered. His journey toward understanding was slow and often painful, marked by moments of solitude. Basho’s haiku resonated deeply with him: ‘My house burned down / Now I can better see / The rising moon.”
The survivors of 2025 will rebuild. And yet, when they do, they will find that the new walls cannot contain the same stories. The moon may rise again over their homes, but it will be against the backdrop of irrevocable loss. Iyer once spoke of how fire clarifies, stripping away everything that isn’t essential. In the face of destruction, what remains is both clearer and more haunting than ever. Iyer’s experience taught him that, while the material world burns, what is essential survives. He found, as many will after this fire, that the emotional connections we make — the love we give, the lives we touch — cannot be taken by fire. They may be obscured for a time, but they do not vanish.
The moon’s rising may perhaps offer no comfort to those still grieving, to those standing before the charred remains of their lives. For many survivors of the 2025 fires, the moon will rise over a landscape of loss, its light falling on the bones of what was. But perhaps, in the wake of this destruction, they too will find the clarity that fire — harsh and unforgiving — can offer. They will rebuild, but they will do so with a new understanding: the things we cherish may burn, but what is truly important remains. It is, in the end, not the walls, but the lives within them, that make a home.
