The Scribe of Shangri-La

( I was lonely )

They face each other from across a card table, Francesca Lia Block and a jury of her protagonist’s peers. The girls, all 12 to 15 years old, sit in folding chairs in the back room of the Midnight Special Bookstore in Santa Monica, paperbacks in hand. * Everyone looks shy. * They’ve come across town on a school night to grill Block, the author of five below-adult-radar literary hits known collectively as the “Weetzie Bat” books. Sweet, angry, cool and always a backhanded celebration of L.A., her novels make you want to throw on a taffetta dress and drive to Pink’s for a chili dog. But know this: Sex, AIDS, drugs, coming out, global warming and anorexia all figure into Weetzie Bat’s world. And so do magic lamps, Tiny Naylor’s, fairies, Burt Reynolds’ toupee and the guilty pleasure of smoggy L.A. sunsets.

*

Forty years ago, coming-of-age novels were mostly formulaic morality tales meant to dampen unruly hormones. In the ‘60s, the so-called “young adult” publishing niche took off alongside divorce, drugs and experimental sex. S.E. Hinton’s “The Outsiders” became a genre classic. Judy Blume and Richard Peck, among others, also nailed the adolescent point-of-view.

Block clearly wants to move beyond the YA label. Her last “Weetzie Bat” title was published in 1995, and she released the more grown-up “Violet & Claire” this fall. Yet she cannot shake the skinny girl with the bleach-blond flat-top and the sugar-frosted eye shadow. Weetzie Bat is a bona fide underground hero, the subject of countless zine articles, far-flung fan mail and plenty of pointed questions.

What the girls of the Mount Washington book club don’t ask this night at the bookstore is: How did this character emerge?

Block had left her native Southern California in the early ‘80s to study English literature at UC Berkeley. “I was lonely,” she says. “As I was walking home from school, I would tell myself these stories. I really thought of Weetzie Bat as a love letter to Los Angeles.”

(In the grout lines between the tiles is tiny little writing)

Weetzie Bat hangs out with her best friend, Dirk, who is gay. Together they go duck hunting--Buff Ducks, Skinny Ducks, Surf Ducks, Rasta Ducks with dreads and Ducks in Duckmobiles racing around the city. One Duck inflicts bruises on Weetzie Bat’s wrists. Another, Alcoholic Art Duck with a ponytail, talks about his dead girlfriend. Later, Dirk sees him kissing all the boys at an all-boy party.

Love and acceptance elude Weetzie and friends, but they never stop searching.

“I just want My Secret Agent Lover Man,” Weetzie says to Dirk.

Block says the name for the fantasy boyfriend who ultimately materializes was spelled out for her at Berkeley. “I’m in the library bathroom,” she recalls. “In the grout between the tiles is tiny little writing. Somebody has written, “My secret agent lover man, you will never read this.”

As for Weetzie, she says, “When I was 16, I was driving and saw this pink Pinto with the license plate WEETZIE. I think the girl driving had bleached-blond hair, but I don’t remember.”

( I followed all The Rules at first )

She used three names well before the era of Jennifer Love Hewitt. She is writing a nighttime soap for MTV. And she knows enough about operating successfully in Hollywood not to divulge her exact age.

We’re sitting in the 17th Street Cafe on Montana Avenue, a Westside bistro where, when a cell phone rings, everybody except Block grabs for a pocket.

“Do you consider yourself cool?” I ask this because others in the know have written that she is. Block laughs softly. “I would never say it if I did.”

Block grew up in the San Fernando Valley in an unstructured hippie household where her mother wrote poetry and her father painted. When Francesca was a teenager, he illustrated two volumes of her verse, published by Santa Susana Press. “It gave me confidence,” she says.

She also grew up with ties to Hollywood. Her father, Irving Block, wrote and did special effects for the film “Forbidden Planet.” Her grandmother, a screenwriter, lived for a time at the Garden of Allah, the legendary Hollywood apartment complex.

Block’s mother would tell stories of her childhood--living at the Garden of Allah, hopping up to the counter at Schwab’s for lunch.

“My dad, who was 20 years older than my mom, would go there, too,” says Block.

“They were probably sitting next to each other.”

As a teenager, Block rebelled from her free-expression parents by cutting her hair short, bleaching it white and escaping the Valley in her engineer boots for punk rock clubs on the Sunset Strip, adventures that found their way into her fiction.

While she was telling herself L.A. stories in faraway Berkeley, Block didn’t know she was writing a young adult book. “I clearly wrote for people my age,” she says. When a friend sent the story to HarperCollins, however, the manuscript got picked up as a young adult book.

“Is this right for a young adult audience?” she asked. Her editor, Charlotte Zolotow, said yes.

That was 10 years ago. Block isn’t one to snub her constituents. Her work enjoys the kind of steady buzz generated by parental disapproval, which is all the blessing kids need. Still, there’s always the oaf at the cocktail party wanting to know when she’s going to write a “real” book.

“It’s frustrating,” Block admits. “You get good reviews. But there are times when, if I tell someone I write young adult books, their face just goes blank. They’ll say, when you write a book for grown-ups, let me know. Should I go on my little soapbox and tell them how these books actually cross over?”

She glances around the room as if looking for something taller than her sparkling platform sandals on which she might stand to make her point. Clearly, she’s in a bind--a velvet one, perhaps--but a bind just the same. Block longs to count on more adult readers, but without betraying the YA audience that has afforded her a writer’s life.

“A lot of my favorite books marketed as adult fiction have young protagonists,” she adds. “It’s very arbitrary.”

Her publicist calls to remind me that adults read Block’s books too.

*

“He kissed her. A kiss about apple pie a la mode with the vanilla creaminess melting in the pie heat. A kiss about chocolate, when you haven’t eaten chocolate in a year. A kiss about palm trees speeding by, trailing pink clouds when you drive down the Strip sizzling with champagne. A kiss about spotlights fanning the sky and the swollen sea spilling like tears all over your legs.”

*

Some kiss. But for all her frank discussion about things sexual in the Weetzie Bat series and in a collection of erotic short stories due out this spring, Block jokes about her own love life. She points out that she resorted to taking her brother to a party for L.A.’s 100 coolest people, of which she was one, thrown by now-defunct Buzz magazine.

Soon after, she went on a blind date arranged by friends with the man who would become her husband, actor Chris Schuette.

“A friend had lent me that book, ‘The Rules.’ I looked through it and thought, this is horrible. But I’d had such bad luck being open and getting really close right away that I decided to try it. I followed all ‘The Rules’ at first. And he was a little bit confused. He’d say to his friend, ‘Do you think she likes me?’ ”

They were married in December 1998.

“I was raised in this free-spirit, express-yourself environment,” she says. “But I think I would raise my children more carefully in this way. I’d teach my daughters some of these things because, I don’t know, I didn’t learn any of them.”

(A cowboy riding a little plastic white horse)

Much of Block’s writing has to do with what she calls magic realism, a style embraced by Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Here Block describes Weetzie Bat’s father as he dies of a drug overdose:

*

Charlie was dreaming of a city where everyone was always young and lit up like a movie, palm trees turned into tropical birds. Marilyn-blonde angels flew through the spotlight rays, the cars were the color of candied mints and filled with lovers making love as they drove down the streets paved with stars that had fallen from the sky. Charlie was dreaming of a giant poppy like a bed. He had taken some pills, and this time he didn’t wake up from his dream.

*

Block believes in magic. Not like fairies and potions, really. But she has felt what she can only describe as magic in art. And love.

When she speaks of her own father, her face softens and her voice goes limp.

“Whatever is going on in my life usually comes out in my books,” she says. “In ‘Weetzie Bat,’ the theme is letting go of fear. In ‘Violet & Claire,’ it’s about the light and dark aspects of oneself--the ambitious part that can lead to destructive situations and the ethereal, delicate part that can be wounded so easily. In ‘Missing Angel Juan,’ it’s about letting go the one you love.”

Block was 23 when her father died after a long illness. “I’ve been so influenced by my dad,” she says, clearly wanting him here, now, at this table.

On the day he died, Block and her mother, Gilda, decide to take a walk through Laurel Canyon. Coming upon the edge of a field, the women look up. A white horse gallops toward them, nuzzling Francesca through the fence.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that this was a connection with my dad,” she says.

Block goes back to school. A few days later, as she’s walking down Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue, Block sees something on the sidewalk in front of her. She reaches down.

“Now why would you pick something off Telegraph Avenue?” says Block of the famously scruffy street. “I never do that.”

But she did. And when she opened her hand, this is what she saw: a cowboy riding a little white plastic horse.

(Canyons run through it)

In Block’s novels, Los Angeles always gets the best lines. “We live in Shangri-La,” exclaims Weetzie, standing in front of Frederick’s of Hollywood as she watches lights being strung along the street. “Shangri Los Angeles. It’s always Christmas.”

Later, it gets more complicated. Witch Baby, who tapes newspaper stories of nuclear disasters, plagues and train wrecks onto her bedroom wall, calls this place Los Diablos. Devil City. “Sometimes this city feels like an expensive tomb,” mutters My Secret Agent Lover Man. And at one point in “Violet & Claire,” Los Angeles is transformed into a welcome-to-hell party brimming with drugs, alcohol and the debilitating regret of slipped dreams.

“Other than going to Berkeley, I’ve lived here all my life,” says Block. “I have a kind of love/hate relationship with L.A., but mostly in my books, especially the early ones, it’s love. I see the negative stuff, the phoniness. But L.A. also has canyons that run through it, pink sunsets, jacaranda trees. I’m intrigued by that contrast.”

As Block’s character Claire sees it, “Everyone here is so beautiful and well-dressed and tan like TV ads and their cars are so new and lunar looking. They have mansions perched on stilts on the top of hills, in spite of earthquakes, and huge gas-slurping cars even though they have to drive an hour to get anywhere, and they wear sunglasses all year long. Many of the flowers here are beautiful but also poisonous--oleander and belladonna. The air is poisonous, too, but deceptive, because at sunset it is rose and it shines, and at night it smells of jasmine.”

Although her books have been courted as movie material, Weetzie Bat the film project has yet to get off the ground. “Amblin was going to option it, then Tim Burton did,” Block says, ticking off the list. “Then Storyopolis did and wrote a good screenplay with [the book] ‘Witch Baby,’ but when that option ran out I pulled back. I still want it to happen but would like to write it myself. I’m very protective. I don’t have that many babies and I want to keep some of them close.”

She gets letters about her literary progeny. From New York. The Midwest. Germany. Fan letters. Lonely letters. Break-your-heart letters. “I got a letter from a reader who’d been reading my books since she was very young,” says Block. “And she said that my book let her know it was OK to be gay. That was very moving to me. Another young woman who had been sexually molested read one of my books and it helped her to seek therapy. I got another letter that sounded almost suicidal. I called a suicide hotline because I wanted to do something but I didn’t want to say the wrong thing.”

And there are letters from grown-ups, both praising her work and taking issue with it. “I get fewer and fewer [critical] letters but I still hear about libraries where my books were banned. And I understand how the parent would feel. As a writer, though, it’s something I can’t think about.”

(Stories are like genies)

The girls want to know one last thing. How do the books get written? Block doesn’t begin until she fills up with the story. “I do better if I give myself some flexibility. If I don’t write for a few days, I allow that time to do reading and filling up.” When she does sit down at the keyboard, Block describes the process as “walking down a path, and whatever is happening in the book, I witness as I write.”

And when she’s not writing, she still walks. For hours, sometimes, through her Santa Monica neighborhoods. “That’s where I get a lot of my inspiration.”

These days, however, her thoughts are not on Weetzie Bat. Block has set her free.

*

“Stories are like genies, Dirk thought. They can carry us into and through our sorrows. Sometimes they burn, sometimes they dance, sometimes they weep, sometimes they sing. Like genies, everyone has one. Like genies, sometimes we forget that we do.

Our stories can set us free, Dirk thought. When we set them free.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Sarah: Do you write your books to be different? Block: If you listen to your inner voice, the work is going to be different. I had to write a pitch for a movie adaptation of one of my books. The woman said, “Oh, this is very dark. Really, we want something lighter.” (Laughter and shrugs) As my editor said, my characters go through stuff.

But I also see magic in life. I totally believe in that idea. And I see the dark stuff. Both need to be there for the story to be complete. *

Nora: How much of your books are based on personal experience? Block: Some of the experiences are from my life. Some of the very heavy experiences are not. All of my books have some qualities from my life, but I also take great liberties. I also use Tarot cards, legends and stories from other people to tell my own story.

*

Connie: I don’t have a sense of your characters’ ages. Block: I think there’s a lot of division in our society. They say when you’re one age you’re going to feel a particular way, and when you’re older, you’ll feel different. When I was a kid, I had a lot of the feelings I have now . . . both the joyous and the insecure. They don’t totally go away.

*

Ashley: Do boys like your work? Block: I do get letters from boys but way more from girls. I write a lot about gay males, so I hear from some of them. But in general, it tends to be women.

*

Ashley: Some of your characters are kind of, well, ditzy. Is that your interpretation of L.A.? Block: No, not at all. Some of my characters inhabit a kind of innocence. Witch Baby, for example, has a lot of anger and powerful energy. But I have loving feelings for all my characters. I would never write with condescending feelings toward them.

*

Hair and makeup by Karen Faye