‘Rich People in Santa Barbara’ Offers a Wealth of Coastal Flavors

Elizabeth Gilchrist had long imagined writing a book about Santa Barbara. 

“Since I was 14,” she tells me over the phone from her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. “I grew up in Santa Barbara…. The place has always spoken to me.” 

For years, the idea stayed tucked away, like a note in the margins. It resurfaced in 2019 at a noir writers’ conference outside Montpellier in southern France.

By then, Gilchrist had largely stopped introducing herself as a writer. Doing so inevitably led to the question “What have you written?” The answer — two novels, Your Cheatin’ Heart and Second Chances — felt unsatisfying. Both were long out of print.

But after talking with other writers at the conference, she relented.

“Yes,” she admitted, she was a writer. And when the conversation turned to whether she was working on anything new, she mentioned an idea she had carried for years.

“For a long time,” she began, “I’ve wanted to write a book about Santa Barbara.”

The reaction surprised her. People leaned in. They asked questions. “I was completely treated like a writer.”

It was the push she needed.

In February she released Rich People in Santa Barbara, a pair of noirish novellas set in Santa Barbara. On Thursday, March 19, Gilchrist is returning to the place that inspired it all, holding an author talk and signing at Chaucer’s Books.

The first novella, Montecito Peak, set in 1990, follows Barbara Palmer, a wealthy Montecito woman in a relationship with a peevish alcoholic, who soon falls in love with Mike Brooke and wants to leave her marriage. Novella two,The Polo Club, set in 2000, follows Lydia Graham, who is in a happy marriage but reconnects with a man from her past and realizes it was a terrible mistake. He threatens her marriage. She wants him gone. 

Originally, Gilchrist planned for just one novella, The Polo Club, but after writing it, she realized it was too short to run on its own. So, she wrote Montecito Peak. Both stories exist in the same world but are completely separate stories.

Still, they follow a similar plot centering on women who are the main character, who “find themselves in situations where there is a man who is getting in the way,” says Gilchrist. “There’s a man who, if he wasn’t around at all, it would really simplify things — they both [force the women to] take matters into their own hands.” 

Gilchrist notes that making the characters wealthy is partly a practical choice: It removes everyday money worries so the story can focus on their emotional and moral lives instead of “how will they pay for this?” In the Polo Club novella, money is more active — it shapes power, motives, and social dynamics inside Santa Barbara’s elite. Overall, wealth is less about glamour and more about the way it quietly structures who has freedom, status, and leverage in the world of the book.

Are the characters based on real people? No, she says; they are “totally made up.” But, she offers, “there are certainly bits and pieces of real people.” Santa Barbara, however, is a main character. She jokes, “You can deny the people are real people, but you can’t deny that Santa Barbara is a real place.”

Gilchrist grew up on Parra Grande Lane in Montecito. One way to really tell if someone is from Santa Barbara, she says, is to ask them what school they went to. She went to Santa Barbara Junior High; spent a few years in school in Sedona, Arizona; finished her senior year at Santa Barbara High School; and then attended UCSB. She had a house in Santa Barbara but moved away in 2007. 

When I spoke with Gilchrist, I had just finished the first novella and would read the second later that evening. As someone who grew up in Santa Barbara, I found the book evoked a powerful nostalgia for a version of the town that feels increasingly distant, even if I wasn’t yet born to witness some of the places she touches on: the Miramar as it used to be, the since-closed restaurants, the less-crowded roads, and the earlier social world.

Then there are the smells that remain no matter how much time has passed: the orange-blossom-like air, the minty aroma of blue gum eucalyptus.

“It’s a meditation on nostalgia,” she confirmed. 

For a while, she wasn’t sure if or when the Santa Barbara book would happen. Now that it has, she speaks about it with a sense of quiet completion.

“Oh, how nice, you know — I actually wrote it,” she reflects. “I could die happy.”

Elizabeth Gilchrist is holding an author talk and signing at Chaucer’s Books (3321 State St.) Thursday, March 19, at 6 p.m. For more information, see chaucersbooks.com.