Part of the reason she wrote the memoir was to try to marry the very mundane circumstances of her actual life with the dreamy myth-laden worlds of her beloved prose. “My friends joke that it was the last straw, like my house tipped the whole thing.”

“I moved into this house in 2007, and everything crashed right after it,” Block says of her luck. That struggle is woven throughout The Thorn Necklace, which covers not just Block’s relationship to her glamorous parents, but also a divorce from the father of her children, her frustration with earning money as a writer in the modern economy, and dating on an off the internet. Venice, with columns, and canals, even, like the real Venice but maybe cooler because of the surfers.” Like many women of my generation, I first encountered Block via the books in her Weetzie Bat series: a collection of novellas about a girl-at first teenaged, eventually a twentysomething mother of two-navigating the wilds of 1980s Los Angeles, which Block figures as a punk wonderland of kitsch and glamour, “a canyon where Jim Morrison and Houdini used to live, and all-night potato knishes at Canter’s, and.

You don’t go to Francesca Lia Block’s house in jeans and a t-shirt. It’s the wrong day, hour, and weather for a white lace minidress and a long, bone-colored shearling vest, but the memory of my 12-year-old-self, clutching a paperback and dazed with visions of girls in vintage silk kimonos, combat boots, fairy wings, and Gaultier sunglasses, is insistent. It’s 9 am on a Thursday morning when I leave my house, 50-some degrees in Los Angeles and so windy that palm trees are curved and swaying, my car trembling with exertion on the freeway. He ducks behind the curtain before introducing L.A.’s original American ska band, The Untouchables.I can’t help myself: I dress up to go see her. Through the thick crowd of 20- and 30-somethings, I glimpse Harry Perry’s turban, accessorized with a black visor. The scene is a bit worn out like a Hollywood miniature, with scant groups of aging rockers sipping craft beer near a sign that admonishes, “If you stage dive, you go home.” Photo by Cynthia Drake.įinally, I visit the Viper Room, which came after the time of Weetzie, but would have likely been part of her world. Later in my trip, I venture out alone in West Hollywood to some of the clubs that are still around from the Weetzieverse like Whiskey a Go Go (gay clubs like Rage and Revolver where Weetzie and Dirk went “duck hunting” are still there, too). For the first time, searching for the remnants of Weetzie Bat’s L.A., those shimmery, weird beacons in a city that casts away old things, I can empathize with this character’s sadness.

Weetzie bat