{"id":136507,"date":"2019-05-20T09:00:12","date_gmt":"2019-05-20T13:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=136507"},"modified":"2023-09-19T14:15:38","modified_gmt":"2023-09-19T18:15:38","slug":"francesca-lia-block-and-90s-nostalgia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/05\/20\/francesca-lia-block-and-90s-nostalgia\/","title":{"rendered":"Francesca Lia Block and Nineties Nostalgia"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Has there ever been a novel with a more misleading opening sentence than Weetzie Bat<\/em>? Francesca Lia Block\u2019s 1989 debut begins:<\/p>\n

The reason Weetzie Bat hated high school was because no one understood.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the basis of that sentence alone\u2014its stale familiarity, its clunky syntax (\u201cthe reason was because\u201d), its pandering parents-just-don\u2019t-understand gloss on adolescent alienation\u2014you\u2019d expect the most formulaic of young adult fiction. On the basis of that sentence alone, you probably wouldn\u2019t keep reading. Certainly you would never guess what follows:<\/p>\n

They didn\u2019t even realize where they were living. They didn\u2019t care that Marilyn\u2019s prints were practically in their backyard at Grauman\u2019s; that you could buy tomahawks and plastic palm tree wallets at Farmer\u2019s Market, and the wildest, cheapest cheese and bean and hot dog and pastrami burritos at Oki Dogs; that the waitresses wore skates at the Jetson-style Tiny Naylor\u2019s; that there was a fountain that turned tropical soda-pop colors, and a canyon where Jim Morrison and Houdini used to live, and all-night potato knishes at Canter\u2019s, and not too far away was Venice, with columns, and canals, even, like the real Venice but maybe cooler because of the surfers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Surprise! Weetzie Bat<\/em> is not a novel of teen angst but a novel of teen delight. It\u2019s a novel whose heroine makes a wish to a magic genie to meet \u201cmy secret agent lover man\u201d and pages later meets the love of her life\u2014whose actual name, with no explanation, is My Secret Agent Lover Man. It\u2019s a novel that, halfway through, contains this sentence: \u201cAnd so Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man and Dirk and Duck and Slinkster Dog and Fifi\u2019s canaries lived happily ever after in their silly-sand-topped house in the land of skating hamburgers and flying toupees and Jah-Love blonde Indians.\u201d Weetzie isn\u2019t too cool for school, or too deep or too smart, but simply too happy. She\u2019s bursting with joy to be alive, right here, right now. Even the English language can hardly contain her exuberance.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This giddy excess, the sentences spilling over like triple-scoop ice cream cones, is the essence of the aesthetic that earned Block her rapturous cult following in the long nineties. By the year 2000, when I was thirteen and first discovering her, she had published a dozen books: Weetzie Bat<\/em> and its four sequels, five stand-alone novels, and two short story collections. All of them were set in Los Angeles, focused on teenage girls, and written in prose that caused readers like me to lose their freaking minds. There were amateur websites where her fans swapped their favorite Block passages like songs or jewelry. My favorite Block fansite had a pastel-pink background with white text so tiny you had to squint to decipher the quotes on display:<\/p>\n

A kiss about apple pie \u00e0 la mode with the vanilla creaminess melting in the pie heat. A kiss about chocolate, when you haven\u2019t 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. (Weetzie Bat<\/em>)<\/p>\n

If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model with collagen-puffed lips and silicone-inflated breasts, a woman in a magenta convertible with heart-shaped sunglasses and cotton candy hair; if Los Angeles is this woman, then the San Fernando Valley is her teenybopper sister. (I Was a Teenage Fairy<\/em>)<\/p>\n

My closet contained angora sweaters low-slung hiphuggers micro minis tummy baring midriffs fluffy chubbies platforms stilettos and sandals in black black black. Only black. Obsidian. (Violet & Claire<\/em>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s easy to compare this kind of language to poetry, but poetry is supposed to be savored slowly; Block\u2019s prose is best consumed like handfuls of Skittles. It\u2019s skimmable by design, meant to dazzle at a glance, and if her sentences don\u2019t always make sense on closer inspection, well, neither does a Monet. Block\u2019s style flattens magic into the everyday and imbues the everyday with magic, so that it can be difficult to remember which of her novels actually have magical elements in the plot. (Does Echo<\/em> have mermaids? No, its narrator just vividly fantasizes about being one\u2014with \u201ctiny shells\u201d for fingernails, and skin \u201clike jade with light shining through it.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Block\u2019s style is no less gorgeous for being so easy to imitate. You can break it down to parts: run-ons and fragments, food and flowers, fairy tale imagery and pop-cultural name-dropping, hyphenation and portmanteau, strings and strings of juxtaposed nouns. Who could resist trying to replicate it? In the summer of 2001 I went to nerd camp and read aloud an essay I\u2019d written about growing up in New York City; afterward, a girl came up to me and asked, half-admiringly and half-accusingly, \u201cDo you like Francesca Lia Block?\u201d<\/p>\n

Hell yeah! Why hide it? Block\u2019s novels found me at an age when I was at high risk of believing it was cool to be bored by everything; in the nick of time, by the grace of luck, Block made it seem cool to be swooningly, squealingly excited about everything. With her words in my head, fruit tasted sweeter; music gave me chills; the teal-green gleam of traffic lights made me weep. I had never cared for movies before, but suddenly I wanted to see every film ever made and then make my own. I began taking photographs, and my best friend, who also loved Block, agreed to pose artistically nude for me. We got into a big fight over the resulting photos, which was my fault\u2014but it was definitely Block\u2019s fault that I wrote a short story about it afterward, and that it ended like this: \u201cMy heart is a crystal. My mind is a crystal, hard and clear and sharp-edged and so, so cold. I am smoke. A firefly.\u201d<\/p>\n

I had a crush on the world. That\u2019s the Block aesthetic, really: a heart-doodling teen-girl crush on the world. It was a craving that Block\u2019s books awakened and agitated but never quite sated: like candy, they were gratifying in the moment but always left me wanting. One summer night I succumbed to an urge to reread all of them in a binge and came away so frustrated I had to lie down on the living room floor, pressing my cheek against the rug lest I careen into space with yearning.<\/p>\n

But what was it I wanted? A place, I thought, a physical place\u2014Block made me want to live \u201cwhere it was hot and cool, glam and slam, rich and trashy, devils and angels, Los Angeles\u201d (Weetzie Bat<\/em>). In a 2013 interview with The Toast<\/a>, Block claimed that fans often told her, \u201cI moved to LA because of your book,\u201d and I don\u2019t doubt it for a second. It was entirely because of Block that after high school I went to Los Angeles to study film.<\/p>\n

I rarely talk about the two and a half years I lived in Los Angeles before dropping out of college. I may never tell the full story, which is gratuitously violent and doesn\u2019t pass the Bechdel test. Sometimes I tell a self-deprecating version of it: I moved to Los Angeles because I thought it would be like a Francesca Lia Block novel, and I had a nervous breakdown because it wasn\u2019t. But that\u2019s not exactly true. In many ways my life in Los Angeles was true to Block\u2019s vision: palm and lemon and avocado trees, tacos at Lucy\u2019s, sunsets ablaze from smog, hikes to the Hollywood sign, houses smothered in bright twining blossoms. For a while I drove a lemon-yellow lemon of a car, a seventies Mercedes that ran on vegetable oil whose exhaust smelled like French fries. I had a pet cockatiel and a generic boyfriend. I felt so empty I wanted to die.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think I\u2019m just projecting that emptiness onto Block\u2019s work. There\u2019s a certain hollowness at the center of her fiction that\u2019s been observed even by her fans\u2014most memorably by the writer Bennett Madison<\/a>, who compares Weetzie Bat <\/em>(with devastating accuracy) to \u201can outfit comprised entirely of lavish accessories and no pants.\u201d Rather than hold this against Block, though, Madison blames himself for outgrowing her. The Block aesthetic, he argues, is calibrated to appeal to teenagers, and on this front it achieves \u201cperfection.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s me that changed,\u201d he insists, \u201cnot the book.\u201d<\/p>\n

But that isn\u2019t quite right. Even in the early 2000s, there were teenagers who picked up on that hollowness. I know this because I was one of them, and so was the creator of that pastel-pink fansite. At some point in my teen years I reached out to that girl, and in a long exchange of AOL emails we tried to figure out what was missing from the books we otherwise loved so much. I suggested that Weetzie Bat<\/em> didn\u2019t engage deeply enough with its genie premise, that it felt like cheating to have the heroine\u2019s three wishes come true with no dark consequences whatsoever, and also that My Secret Agent Lover Man was a ridiculous name. My correspondent disagreed. That silliness was the whole point, she said (and she was right). There was something<\/em> wrong with those books, but she couldn\u2019t put her finger on it.<\/p>\n

We were talking around it; neither of us wanted to be the one to say it. In truth, we both knew perfectly well what bothered us about Block. It was the same thing that some of her fans loved most about her. It was the thing that launched so many of her other fansites, the ones that quoted passages like these:<\/p>\n

I will be thin and pure like a glass cup. Empty. Pure as light. Music. (The Hanged Man<\/em>)<\/p>\n

Have you ever had the sensation of losing flesh? You begin to feel the bones of your skeleton under your flesh. Bones of the shoulders. Bones of the rib cage. Bones of the hips. It is like finding a new being, one free of desire, free of time, almost…I hear horror stories about girls who don\u2019t eat\u2014how their hair turns white and their gums bleed. But I feel beautiful, perfect. I am all pale bone and bone-pale flesh and pale hair and I am light. I am like some fairy thing. I dream about fairies dancing around the house with their rib cages showing like baskets under their flesh. (The Hanged Man<\/em>)<\/p>\n

Her body is very thin. She believed that being thin might get them to leave her alone, but actually the reverse was true, it made them lavish more praises upon her. (I Was a Teenage Fairy<\/em>)<\/p>\n

The therapist they sent me to once said I need to forget about the faeries and realize that I am a real live girl, that I can\u2019t live on ice and scraps; but I\u2019m afraid if I become real, I\u2019ll be like my mother\u2014bloated and sad. I\u2019d rather chew morsels and suck flowers and wear feathers. (Violet & Claire<\/em>)<\/p>\n

I will be thin, thin, pure. I will be pure and empty. Weight dropping off. Ninety-nine \u2026 ninety-five \u2026 ninety-two \u2026 ninety. Just one more to eighty-nine. (Echo<\/em>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And so forth. (Seriously, I could go on.) This aspect of Block\u2019s work flew completely under the radar of adults: though the above novels were widely reviewed at the time of their publication, I have yet to find a single review that even mentions their fetishization of anorexia. Meanwhile, in the \u201cpro-ana\u201d LiveJournal communities of the early 2000s, Block was celebrated as an icon of \u201cthinspiration.\u201d Sick girls shared their favorite Block quotes alongside supermodel photos, self-starvation tips, and instructions for sticking a roll of quarters up your vagina before the doctor weighs you. In retrospect, this must surely rank among the most successful dog whistles in literary history.<\/p>\n

I have too much faith in teenage girls, and not enough in the power of the written word, to hold Block responsible for her readers\u2019 illness. After all, if it were that simple, she would have turned me<\/em> anorexic, which I never have been. Still, when I reread her novels now, I find their obsession with thinness not just morally but aesthetically disappointing. It has a neurotic, blinkering effect\u2014you wonder what her heroines might have the freedom to think about if they weren\u2019t so fixated on their own bodies.<\/p>\n

The same goes for the boyfriends: every Block novel features a straight male love interest so dull and undercooked it feels perverse, like a desperate distraction from something. My Secret Agent Lover Man has no personality outside his name. Cherokee Bat\u2019s boyfriend, the mixed-race Raphael Chong Jah-Love (yeah, I know), has no personality outside his skin color, which is compared so frequently to various Hershey\u2019s items it borders on product placement. Echo ends up with a guy who has no name, no dialogue, no characteristics at all beyond angel wings that may or may not be taped on (it\u2019s ambiguous). Block\u2019s prose can bamboozle you into believing that Los Angeles is paradise and anorexia is bliss\u2014but when it comes to heterosexuality, it never manages to convince.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, there\u2019s Violet in Violet & Claire<\/em>, seeing Marilyn Monroe on TV for the first time: \u201cI just sat there with my hands stretched out trying to touch her. Why was she just electric static? I thought she\u2019d be as warm and silky as she looked.\u201d There\u2019s Laurel in The Hanged Man<\/em>, missing her best friend: \u201cI think about Claudia\u2019s curls\u2014how I would hide in them the way I used to bury my face in flowers.\u201d There\u2019s Echo with her friend Nina: \u201cWe laughed, sipping the rice wine that seemed to shine in our throats. Nina kept leaning up against me, giggling, her hair getting in my face. I felt her breasts pressing \u2026 When we left the bar Nina leaned on me, hot skin and cold red silk.\u201d And then, later, her friend Valentine: \u201cI imagined her lying beside me under the antique wedding dress, her hair tickling my lips, her scent like all the pink and red flowers. I wanted to beg her but I didn\u2019t say anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Violet and Claire, who obsess over each other to the point that a school bully calls them \u201cdykes,\u201d spend most of their novel fighting over a forgettable guy. Laurel and Claudia have an implied threesome with Laurel\u2019s forgettable boyfriend, then never see each other again. Nina turns out to be a vampire, either metaphorically or literally (it\u2019s ambiguous). Echo interprets her desire for Valentine as a desire to be<\/em> Valentine: \u201cDreamed of kissing her lips, as if that might let me become who she was.\u201d (We\u2019ve all been there, Echo.) Echo ends her novel in mid-intercourse with that nameless, featureless man. \u201cThis is me becoming holy human and my own self,\u201d she exults, unconvincingly.<\/p>\n

Block\u2019s fiction abounds with female beauty, with gay men and trans women and blink-and-you\u2019ll-miss-them background lesbians, with earnest calls for tolerance and love\u2014and yet the possibility of her heroine loving another girl seems never to enter her mind. Queerness comes off as a wonderful thing that has nothing to do with oneself or one\u2019s own desire to kiss girls\u2014a desire that\u2019s nowhere and everywhere in these books, constantly rationalized into nothing (it\u2019s friendship, it\u2019s jealousy, it\u2019s really about a boy) even as it keeps throbbing. It\u2019s a paradox that\u2019s distinctly of its era and painfully familiar to bisexual women of my generation, and I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a coincidence that so many of us grew up loving Block. If there\u2019s such a thing as bi culture, then Block, with her plausible-deniability high-femme eroticism, is one of its patron goddesses\u2014for better or for worse.<\/p>\n

How strange, looking back, that these books opened our hearts to joy, only to slam shut and close in on themselves just when it mattered most. How dispiriting it feels to pause on the precipice of love\u2014for women, for imperfect bodies, for oneself\u2014only to shrink away into bad boyfriends and bones. How sad, in the end, to choose prettiness over beauty.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Block continues to publish young adult fiction to this day, and a Weetzie Bat<\/em> movie is reportedly in the works<\/a>. As far as I can tell, though, the cult of Block is not self-regenerating. It\u2019s been well over a decade since I could find Weetzie Bat<\/em>\u2014let alone Violet & Claire<\/em>, my old favorite\u2014on a bookstore shelf (I always check). The well-stocked Iowa City Public Library carries almost no Block books. An informal survey of my grad school classmates suggests that even the most bookish women under the age of thirty are unfamiliar with the name Francesca Lia Block, unless they encountered it in the self-consciously nineties-nostalgic Rookie<\/em> magazine<\/a>. She remains widely beloved<\/a>, analyzed<\/a>, and interviewed<\/a>\u2014but mostly by her original generation of fans, now grown, still keeping the faith.<\/p>\n

It pains me to see Block\u2019s work reduced to a nineties fetish object along with Violet\u2019s low-slung hip-huggers; it was always so much more than that. The rose-tinted nostalgia treatment can be as demeaning, in its own way, as a vicious takedown, and Block deserves neither. Like anything associated with teenage girls\u2014like one\u2019s own former teenage-girl self\u2014she ought to be taken more seriously. She was an important author.<\/p>\n

And to me, at least, she still is. Having just reread a dozen of her books to write this essay, I\u2019m left just as ravenous and sugar-crashed as I was at age fourteen, just as ready to throw myself to the floor in frustration. I can\u2019t stop needing her to be different, wanting her to be better, even as I\u2019ll always be grateful for the beauty she showed me. I will never stop wishing for more from Francesca Lia Block. I love her, even now, the way I love the world.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read earlier installments of\u00a0<\/em>YA of Yore\u00a0here.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

James Frankie Thomas is the author of \u201cThe Showrunner,\u201d which received special mention in the <\/em>2013 Pushcart Prize Anthology. His writing has also appeared in <\/em>The Toast,<\/em>\u00a0The Hairpin, and\u00a0<\/em>Vol. 1 Brooklyn. He holds an M.F.A. in fiction from the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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