Chat live with Francesca Lia Block on gURL.com! Author of the critically acclaimed, award-winning Weetzie Bat books, Francesca Lia Block is renowned for groundbreaking novels and stories---postmodern, magic-realist fairy tales for all ages. Her work transports readers through the harsh landscapes of contemporary life-including prejudice, AIDS, and drug abuse-to magical realms of the senses where love is always our saving grace. Born in Los Angeles, where she still lives in a pink cottage with her springer spaniel, Vincent Van Go-Go Boots, Block writes fiction that pulsates with the language and images of the city's sprawling subculture. "Yes, I once had short bleached-blond hair," Block says, "wore engineer boots with 1950s prom dresses, drove around in a red-and-white 1955 Pontiac convertible, and slammed to bands in underground clubs like the punk pixie flower child Weetzie Bat, star of my first novel." Block found the name "Weetzie" on the license plate of a pink Pinto when she was sixteen, "My Secret Agent Lover Man" in a graffiti scrawl, and other characters' names came from what she describes as "my rampaging subconscious." Weetzie, My Secret Agent Lover Man, and other unforgettable beings, such as Witch Baby, Cherokee, and Slinkster Dog, coexist in the "jasmine-scented, jacaranda-purple, neon-sparked city" that Block likes to refer to as "Shangri-L.A." Lauds a reviewer for The New York Times Book Review: "Block writes about the real Los Angeles better than anyone since Raymond Chandler."
Though grounded in the realities of L.A. and urban life-at both its grittiest and most beautiful-Block's work is otherworldly and almost transcendent in its reach. The daughter of a poet and a painter, Block has been influenced by the visual arts, by her childhood love of Greek myths and fairy tales, as well as by music and dance. While at the University of California at Berkeley, Block's early influences expanded to include the magic-realist fiction of Gabriel Garc’a Marquez and Isabel Allende, as well as the modernist poetry of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). Block has described her work as "contemporary fairy tales with an edge," where the real world and its troubles find solace through "hope and magic…" Although she has received numerous awards, including citations from the American Library Association, School Library Journal, and The New York Times Book Review, responses from her readers are the most rewarding. "I have received letters from lovers who read my stories to each other in bed, people who have named themselves, their pets, or bands after my characters, gay kids who tell me my books let them know 'it's okay to be gay,' and wounded kids thanking me for helping them feel empowered. These are the greatest gifts I could receive."
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