Francesca Lia Block, with her penchant for ripped gowns and pink and blue cottages, is slinkster cool, as one of her heroines might say. Characters—with names like Raphael Chong Jah-Love and My Secret Agent Lover Man—banter their way through the glitter and grit of Block’s Los Angeles, which is inhabited by a quirky conglomeration of young misfits, genies, fairies and witches. Her books—which include Weetzie Bat, I Was a Teenage Fairy and The Hanged Man—have won many honors for young adult fiction. People in the publishing industry say Block has led a recent surge in more sophisticated books for teenagers. But what matters most to the thirty-something author are the legions of young fans who send her thousands of adoring letters and poems, telling her how they relate to her characters and how her tales have affected their own lives. The funny thing is, Block never meant to become the goddess of the teen literary scene.
"I try not to think too much about age," Block says. "Witch Baby [the hotheaded teen protagonist of her second book of the same name], really that’s a character I could have inserted myself into in my early twenties and it would have been the same story. I don’t think I go, ‘I’m going to write about a teenager.’ Except there is something about a person who’s very emotionally feeling and open and intense that I’m drawn to writing about."
Block was an undergraduate at University of California at Berkeley back in 1989 when she wrote Weetzie Bat, her first book and the beginning of a series that now includes Witch Baby, Missing Angel Juan, Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guys and Baby Be-Bop . Weetzie Bat, which details the adventures of a blonde surfer girl named Weetzie and her makeshift family, was snapped up by HarperCollins. While the author’s original intention was to make it a fable about and for her twenty-something peers, HarperCollins marketed it as a young adult book. Ten years later, Block is one of the most highly respected authors of young adult fiction, known for capricious stories infused with mystical elements and strong female characters who grapple with the harsh aspects of modern life, like AIDS, drug abuse, eating disorders and incest. At the same time, her books are laced with loopy humor: The name of Weetzie’s boyfriend—My Secret Agent Lover Man—is a constant source of difficulty for other characters:
"My Secret Agent Lover Man is very cute and cool," Dirk told Weetzie.
"Your Secret Agent Lover Man?"
"No, I mean your Secret Agent Lover Man. Where did he get such a weird name?"
Weetzie just smiled beneath her feathered headdress.
And so Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man and Dirk and Duck and Slinkster Dog and Fifi’s canaries lived happily ever after in their silly-sand-topped house in the land of skating hamburgers and flying toupees and Jah-Love blonde indians.
