Zosha Lyons is not an impulsive person. But just over a year ago, in April 2024, the 25-year-old made an offer on a house just 20 minutes after seeing it for the first time—even though it was 2,000 miles away from the city where she’d planned to spend her twenties.
In college, Zosha’s goal had always been to move to Los Angeles to become a screenwriter, with her high school sweetheart, Whitaker, in tow. Instead, the young couple were buying a three-acre plot in Perry County, Indiana—the place where they both grew up.
“This sounds bad,” she told me sheepishly, “but we thought we were better than this. We wanted to move away and prove ourselves.”
Zosha had worked hard to get her MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside, about 50 miles outside of Los Angeles, and she spent her final year strategizing about how to move to the city and break into the film industry. But when she graduated in the summer of 2023, Hollywood was in the middle of the writers strike, and Lyons realized: No matter how hard she tried, it might be impossible to find a job that allowed her to support herself, let alone one that fulfilled her.
“We would have been poor,” Zosha said. “It would have been me probably taking production-assistant jobs and trying to work from the bottom.”
She and Whitaker started having the kind of conversations couples might once have saved for their late 20s. “We want four kids, and I want to be done having kids by the time we’re 30,” Lyons said. “I’m doing all this math in my head constantly.” Faced with the choice between their work and family, they realized: “What was important to us was not really our careers.”
Then Zosha came across an offer she couldn’t refuse.