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| Francesca Lia Block 1962 (Hollywood, CA) – Present Nationality: American Francesca Lia Block has carved out a unique piece of young adult turf for herself and the characters she has created in a series of novels set in Los Angeles. With the publication in 1989 of Weetzie Bat, she set a new direction in young adult novels: stories of Los Angeles subculture replete with sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll – for the nineties. With a cast of characters ranging from Weetzie Bat, a punk princess in pink, to her lover, My Secret Agent Lover Man, and her best friend Dirk and his boyfriend, to their common offspring, Witch Baby and Cherokee, Block's novels create postmodernist fairy tales where love and art are the only cures in a world without adult direction. In a Los Angeles Times Book Review piece, Ron Koertge wrote of Block: "I admit she's not for everyone. But that's what makes her unique. If she was more homogenized and safe, she wouldn't be herself. And that's her message to her reader. Be who you are – gay, straight, fabulous, literal. She can't cut corners and pander to book clubs and she can't compromise and bowdlerize her own work or she wouldn't be Francesca Lia Block." Block is still somewhat in awe of her instant success and of the stir her books are creating. "I wrote Weetzie Bat as a sort of valentine to Los Angeles at a time when I was in school in Berkeley and homesick for where I grew up," she told Something about the Author (SATA) in an interview. "It was a very personal story, like a love letter. I never expected people to respond to it the way they have. I never imagined I could reach other people from such a very personal place in me." Musing on her success she added: "The whole experience is magical." Block's own life shows elements of magic here and there. Born in Hollywood, the center of the modern fairy tale industry, she was exposed to the power of art and creativity from an early age. Her parents were both artists: her father, who died in 1986, was a well-known painter, teacher, and one- time special effects technician and writer for Hollywood studios; her mother is a poet who once wrote a children's poetry book. "My parents taught me that you could be creative in this world. That it was possible," Block remarked to SATA. A teenager in the late 1970s, Block was fond of going into Hollywood after school accompanied by her friends. "When I was 17 years old, my friends and I used to drive through Laurel Canyon after school in a shiny blue vintage Mustang convertible," Block wrote in an article for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. "The short distance of the canyon separating us from Hollywood made that city a little enchanted." Once in Hollywood they would hang out at Schwab's soda fountain, check out the street scene with all the punk costumes, cruise Sunset Strip, shop along Melrose Avenue, or frolic at the Farmer's Market. It was on one such trip that Block first saw the prototype of Weetzie: "A punk princess with spiky bleached hair, a very pink '50s prom dress and cowboy boots," as she described her in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. It was a momentary glimpse of a hitchhiker that stayed with her over the years, and later a name came to the apparition, for she saw a pink Ford Pinto on the freeway with a driver who looked like that hitchhiker and with a license plate spelling "WEETZIE." The character of this punk princess would ferment for another six years before coming to full bloom in Block's first novel. She continually made up stories about Weetzie and drew her innumerable times – Block came to know Weetzie long before she first wrote about her in a novel. |
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