Wild Thing

The first time I read Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat (Harper & Row, 1989), I was blown away—and I wasn't the only one. Not only was Block talking about topics—sexuality, nontraditional families, death, despair, and AIDS—that were rarely discussed in young adult literature, but she talked about them with an entirely new voice—dazzling on the surface, true to the depths. Teen literature would never be the same. The story of Weetzie Bat, Dirk and Duck (the gay fathers of her child), My Secret Agent Lover Man (her lover), Witch Baby (a dark-spirited infant left on their doorstep), and many other vibrant characters would span five books, incense some conservative critics, and inspire legions of fans. In no small part because she never thought she was writing for young people, Block ushered in our current golden age of teen lit, daring both readers and writers (myself included) to live their lives more boldly. For her many remarkable contributions to young adult literature, Block is the recipient of the American Library Association's 2005 Margaret A. Edwards Award, sponsored by School Library Journal.

Just 42, Block might seem too young to belong to the lifetime-achievement club. But for the past 20 years, few authors have taken more risks in their writing. Whether exploring incest in The Hanged Man (1994), producing one of the first heartfelt gay love stories in teen literature, Baby Be-Bop (1995), or creating contemporary fairy tales in The Rose and the Beast (2000), Block has always challenged herself and her readers. Her latest novel, Necklace of Kisses (2005, all HarperCollins), is another bold step, taking her famed protagonist Weetzie Bat into middle age—with magical consequences. Like many of its predecessors, Necklace of Kisses transforms Los Angeles into a place of both anger and possibility. It is a place—and a feeling—that Block has been navigating ever since her childhood.

Block has solid West Coast credentials. She was born in Hollywood (the backdrop of many of her books), grew up in the San Fernando Valley, survived North Hollywood High, and graduated from the University of California-Berkeley in 1986. Three years later, she got her big break. While working at an art gallery in L.A., a family friend, children's book illustrator Kathryn Jacobi, sent the manuscript of Weetzie Bat to editors at Harper and Row Children's Books. Much to Block's astonishment, they published it. These days, Block, her five-year-old daughter, Jasmine, and three-year-old son, Sammy, live in Culver City, CA.

You come from a family of artists. What was it like to grow up in your house?

I would paint with my dad. I would do all kinds of projects with my mom. I would dance for my parents. My dad would shine a little spotlight on me, and I'd put on these big shows. I was always writing stories, making little books, and giving them to my parents. My dad would tell me the Greek myths as my bedtime stories. The emphasis was on creativity as a part of life.

It sounds like you've always loved words.

From the time I was a little girl, my mom wrote them down, acknowledging that what I said was valuable. They weren't words, they were always pictures. They were filled with light. They were filled with feeling, like my dad's paintings.

What were you like as a teen?

I got into this punk thing. I cut my hair, wore the vintage clothes, the engineer boots, and lots of jewelry. I went to punk clubs and slammed around and stayed out late and got drunk and went in cars with people who drank too much. I was just kind of out of control. I was very attracted to the dark—I saw it as a romantic thing, not fully destructive. It was the time of the band X, and some really creative, poetic stuff was going on. That really drew me—to see that poetry could make people move and sweat and dance and throw themselves off a stage. Poetry could do that, if you put it with fast music. That changed my life, that realization. But there was also a really self-destructive aspect to my interest in it.

How so?

I was involved in a scene where people wore swastikas as decorations. I remember, I said to this girl I knew, "Do you know what that is?"' She said, "Ooh, it's just cool." She was clueless. So that kind of thing was destructive—the real masculine energy of it. But there was also a way to blend the masculine and the feminine, like with the Go-Gos. In the beginning—before they were all polished—they were this really fast, hard-core punk band. But they were cute. That also changed my life, because I went, "Oh, you can be this girl and have fun, and you can also do something really wild and out there and on the edge and not be some traditional Barbie-doll model," like all the girls at my high school who were cool. It's always this contrast between the dark and the light, the feminine and the masculine, that's interested me. And for me in those underground clubs, somewhere in there, was that spark. It's such a great metaphor—going to a really dark place, but then appreciating these simple and beautiful sparks of light that exist.

When did Weetzie first appear?

In high school I started writing short, odd, little punk-influenced stories. I think one was about a girl who was angry with her boyfriend, and she got this Ken doll and did some voodoo thing on it. That's around when Weetzie came as a character to me. I was a teenager, and I was driving on the freeway in the Valley. I saw this Pinto, this weird box of a cartoon-looking car. It was light bubblegum pink, and at that time you never saw a pink car—ever, ever. On the license plate it said WEETZIE. And I just remember the moment—the time of day, the way the sky looked kind of smoggy—everything. And there's this bleach-blonde head of this girl in this car. All of a sudden she was just this person—a name and an image can just inspire you to create. So I started writing these little stories, and she eventually became my alter ego.

Hollywood is a big part of Weetzie's world. Was it also a big part of yours?

In my later adolescence it was. I remember seeing The Girl Can't Help It with Jayne Mansfield—that was right when I had also seen The Decline of Western Civilization [a documentary about the early '80s punk movement]. Those two films were really linked for me. There was that whole obsession with old Hollywood—and the punk scene was happening, of course, in all the places where the old Hollywood stuff had been.

What influenced you as a young writer?

I read One Hundred Years of Solitude [by Gabriel Garcia Marquez] my freshman year of college, and it just saved my life. In Latin American culture, magic is just part of life. It just happens. I read this wonderful article that said in Latin America, someone really does disappear overnight. There's so much uncertainty. There are these extremes that happen, and it translates into writing that expresses that.

Reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, I discovered that magic isn't less valuable than realism, and magic doesn't make a novel less of a significant, literary work. After I read that book, I felt I was free to put all the stuff in Weetzie that I really liked, that I didn't think was really what anyone else would like.

So that's what I was reading, along with Emily Dickinson and H. D. [Hilda Doolittle]. I started writing some short stories that were very serious and dark and very minimalist, and I knew I wanted to start writing something that later became The Hanged Man. I also started my own little comfort story, and that was Weetzie Bat.

How did the story evolve?

I would be walking through the hills of North Berkeley, to the house where I lived with a bunch of people I didn't know. I was very isolated that freshman year. And I was telling myself this comfort story, and started writing it down—not to turn in for my classes, just for myself. I took that earlier Weetzie character, but she had really changed, because I had lived as her for a while in L.A., with the bleached hair and the clothing and Dirk and all of that.

What did you hope to discover by living the life of your alter ego?

My ultimate fantasy was to find my own family, to create a nonjudgmental, very loving, unusual, beautiful little family in a perfect little environment, where we could live in that alter-ego world, where everything was full of magic. And there would be no loneliness. There would be no…well, there were dads dying—there was sadness and dark-ness, too. But because of the contrast with the rest, it was something I could manage, and I could write about.

What's it like to go to those places in your writing?

Whenever I write about anything sad or painful or dark, I become this observer. As soon as you become an observer, you're not saturated with the emotion, and you don't identify totally with the pain. You become separate from it. And that's what writing has always served me as. It's why I've always been more healthy as a writer than in my daily life—because I've been able to detach from the pain. Especially when I can infuse the sadness with all this magic, I'm very safe and healthy. So when I was writing Weetzie Bat that's how I was processing all this stuff—the dark stuff, my dad dying my senior year of college, and the beautiful stuff, the nostalgia for Los Angeles. I was using fairy tales, and mixing them in. I was reading poetry, so I wanted to have imagery all the time. And it just turned into this little book. I didn't think people were going to take me seriously as a writer because of the book. It was just something I needed to do. The story is based on things that had happened to me, mixed with fairy tales, mixed with my fantasy.

How did Weetzie Bat get published?

I had sent my manuscript to a friend who was an illustrator and who also showed her art in this art gallery where I worked after Berkeley. I didn't even really know who she was sending it to. Then she called me and said they wanted to publish it. I was just so excited that it was going to be published—I didn't even know who was publishing it. I was just crying with joy—sitting in this little, empty art gallery that used to be a hot scene of art in L.A., but was now always empty and echoing, and where my dad's paintings were. Then I met Charlotte [Zolotow] and Joanna [Cotler], and I realized who Charlotte was and that I had read all of her books as a little girl. She was just this fairy godmother. And Joanna was immediately just like my sister.

What's it like working with them?

Oh, my God, the way we work. It's like Joanna's my best friend, my sister, my therapist. It's so intimate and it's so fun and it's so exciting and it's so not work. It's about growing and about this journey. She's saying, "Keep going, keep going." And with Charlotte, she was a visionary person. And the best thing about them is that they let me grow at my own pace. Whatever I need to explore, there's this person saying, "I support you." Not only in this emotional way, but in a financial way. I wish everyone could have that—it's like having a patron saint.

Your latest novel is about Weetzie as a grown-up. How has she changed?

In Necklace of Kisses, Weetzie is much more active. I really consciously wanted that, for her to really grow up for the first time in that book, and not lose sight that the world is magical. That's what I hadn't discovered before, and that's why I was really unable to write older characters. I wanted to stay in touch with that sense of wonder and to stay in that adolescent mindset, which, of course, is negative in the sense that then you also have to stay in touch with the part of yourself that doesn't feel good enough, or feels less than that. So my attempt now is to move into my adulthood and still maintain that wonder.

What has winning the Edwards Award meant to you?

Getting the Edwards Award—I think we were all shocked. And especially now, in this conservative political climate. I'm sure part of what happened is that the Edwards committee said, "In defiance of what's happening now, we're going to do this." Winning this award is just so, so amazing.