ANAHEIM, Calif. — Sonya Walger hadn’t yet unpacked her family’s evacuation go-bag from December’s Franklin fire; it lay unused by the front door. Then, on Jan. 6, hurricane-force winds began punishing her Malibu neighborhood.

That night, the one before the Palisades wildfire, felt different, she says.

“I’d had a bad feeling,” says Walger, who’s lived with her family in the Big Rock neighborhood for nearly two decades. After making hotel reservations to avoid the heavy winds, she and her husband, the television writer and producer Davey Holmes, agreed that at the first sign of a fire, they’d vacate with their children. The morning of Jan. 7, they did.

“As we left, there was a huge, thick cloud of yellow smoke that just blew right across the ocean,” says Walger. “We’ve lived up there for 18 years, and I’ve never seen that before.”

That was the last time she saw her beloved neighborhood, home, and library of books, cookbooks and personal journals.

“It’s all gone,” she says. Walger and her husband didn’t learn of the house’s fate until the next morning when a neighbor sent them a photograph. “We haven’t been back yet. I can’t … I just can’t face it.”

Walger describes Big Rock as a close-knit community that kept in contact via WhatsApp as the winds blew and the fire spread. Her house, she says, was the one always filled with friends and guests.

“This was our third child, this house. This was a very, very special place, and a place that our entire community came to. It was the house that everyone spent Christmas and Thanksgiving and Easter at,” she says. “We never didn’t have people staying. We never didn’t have 10 people coming for lunch on Sunday. I’m a cook. I love cooking. I love hosting. So it was that house. It was the house that everybody came to. So the loss is so immense in so many ways and to so many people.”

As an actor, Walger is known to many as Penny Widmore on the TV series “Lost” as well as for roles on “The Mind of the Married Man” and “For All Mankind.” She is also now a debut author: “Lion,” her slim, elegantly crafted autobiographical novel about growing up with a glamorous, problematic and often-absent father, was published by New York Review Books in February, just weeks after the fire.

“I think in this moment where I and others feel so adrift and cut off from everything that was familiar, normal, routine,” she says. “To have the book as this touchstone … a sense of continuity and sense of a thing in the world that can’t be burned … is very reassuring.

“I feel tremendously fortunate to have this little piece of balsa wood to cling to and keep me afloat,” she says.

“People are like, ‘God, how are you managing a book launch in this moment?’ And I’m like, ‘How are you getting through this moment without one?’”

A novel approach

Although “Lion” is based on her own experiences, Walger knew she wanted to approach the story of her life – which at times found her bouncing between her mother or boarding school in England and her father’s life and subsequent marriages in Argentina and Peru – as fiction.

“I made the decision early on. On the most basic level, I have a notoriously faulty memory; in no way do I trust myself to be a sort of harbinger of truth,” she says, explaining why she decided not to write the book as a memoir, despite spending about two years reading exemplars of the form by Mary Karr, Ocean Vuong, Tobias Wolff and Natasha Trethewey.

“’I’m not writing a memoir,” she says. “I’m not interested in offering my life as any sort of thing of interest for the world. I don’t want anyone picking it up thinking, ‘Oh, Penny from ‘Lost’ wrote a tell-all,’ you know? I very much wanted to avoid that.”

Instead of focusing on her time working on a popular television show, the book examines her parents’ dramatic courtship, brief union and her own experiences with her father in the intervening years. Told in short, powerful chapters that are always in the present tense, Walger shares evocative details about her dad, a charismatic rogue who, among his exploits, took up skydiving in his late 50s.

“I am an inveterate journal keeper and have kept a journal for years and years and years. Or I did. They’re all gone. But I did have 25 years of journals, so I went to the journals in order to harvest them for little, I don’t know, kernels of memories or thoughts or observations I’d had.

“I was trying to work them into something bigger. And as I did – and this is the years of being an actor, you know – sort of closing my eyes and inhabiting that moment from inside it, imagining what my father might have thought when he first met my mum, or what it might have felt like to be alone in a hotel room in Kinshasa, aged 26, having never spent a minute in Africa,” she says, referring to moments in her parents’ lives she’d only heard about in their stories. “These are fictions.

“The artist in me, the author in me, wanted the right and the opportunity to be inside those moments,” she says.

“In honest truth, I wanted and want to write literature,” she says. “That was my lofty, ambitious goal.”

A glamorous disaster

Asked to describe her father for those who have yet to read the book, Walger says she often resorts to lists to describe him.

“He was larger than life. He was a racing car driver, Formula One. He was a polo player. He was a serial lady killer. He was a father to several. He was a cocaine addict. He lived all over the globe,” she says.

“He was the kind of man that is just so mesmerizing and charismatic and wonderful to sit next to at dinner or maybe have as your godfather,” she says. “He just isn’t necessarily who you want as your dad.

“He was immense and sort of legendary – and people met him for very short amounts of time and felt the charisma of him. He was deeply flawed and narcissistic, and I think we could generously call him neglectful as a dad,” she says, mentioning his long absences and a stint in jail. “And I had a mum who never spoke ill of him and compensated for his manifold neglect, which meant that I just grew up loving him.

“So there was a lot of disentangling to do in my adult life. And then he died very suddenly. So I wanted to get the stories down. That was really the birth of the book,” she says, thinking of preserving these stories for her own young children.

“I couldn’t bear that all these extraordinary, glamorous, disastrous stories should disappear with him,” she says. “So that’s how ‘Lion’ was born.”

The love of the lioness

The novel opens with a section called “Lioness,” in which Walger’s narrator describes the thankless litany of labors performed by her mother, “the one who did not stray.” These tasks include staunching blood, ignoring lies, returning books, paying fees and – quite often – combing out the lice, to name just a few from the recitation of fierce, loving gestures.

However, for all these efforts, the book is not about Walger’s mother, but her father – a man who, rather than wait in line at the post office, crammed his newlywed wife’s carefully written thank-you notes to family and friends back in England into the garbage.

“My mother tells me she will never read this,” writes Walger in that first section. Understandable, but it’s hard to imagine someone as caring as she’s presented – and who Walger says never spoke ill of her father – sticking to such a vow.

She didn’t.

“My mom not only read the book but was there at The Strand for the opening night of it, the launch of it. And it was very, very meaningful and very moving to have her there,” she says, adding that the novelist Katie Kitamura suggested Walger read that chapter at the Feb. 20 event.

“It felt like a unique moment to be able to have my mum in the audience and to be able to read ‘Lioness’ out loud to her in public. I don’t know that that’s something we’ll repeat in the world,” she says. “So yes, I have a mum who has seen the light, thank God, and read the book and is, I think, enormously proud.”

And about those letters stuffed into the garbage?

“My mum would be deeply appreciative that you felt the absolute agony of that moment,” she says. “52 years later, of all my father’s many sins, it is the one that makes her blood run cold that those thank-you letters never arrived.”

The lost library

As a lifelong reader, Walger says the destruction of her personal library at home hit hard. Books she’d held onto since childhood, a lifetime’s collection of cookbooks and 25 years worth of journals, burned up in the fire.

“The books are the great loss,” she says, having taken only a handful of titles she’s been using for research for an upcoming third novel when she’d left. (Her second book is already finished and being prepared for publication.)

Her friends, it turns out, understand the depth of her loss.

“Barely a day goes by that a box doesn’t arrive from somebody, somewhere who’s sending me books,” she says. “NYRB, my lovely publishers, sent me a box full of their back catalog. And my editor, Susan [Barba], who edited ”Lion,” sent me the most beautifully curated box of books.”

“That’s so lovely because then with every book comes a story, you know? Part of what you lose in a fire is your story. You lose all the stories – where I bought that cookbook in Greece and that plate came from Morocco,” she says. “All of that goes in the fire.”

“Of course, you can replace things, but … to have them replaced by friends feels very, very touching.”

Walger’s circle demonstrated the sense of community they share wasn’t lost in the fire – it was forged into something stronger.

“The lovely coda to this is that because my friends know me so well and know what my house looked like, one of them did a private GoFundMe for my library, and unbeknownst to me, all my beloved friends have come together and made a GoFundMe for me to replace not just all my books, but my cookbooks because … I had a wall full of beautiful old and new cookbooks and my kids books.

“At The Strand the other night, the lovely friend in question is the actress Kate Walsh. She had arranged it,” says Walger. “And as I finished the conversation, she got up and said, ‘Everyone, just one second; I just wanted to give you this.’ And she presented me with this card with the names of all my friends who had contributed to the fund to restock my bookshelves.

“It was all I could do not to ugly-cry in front of a hundred people at The Strand.”

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