John Rogers of the Associated Press
interviews Francesca Lia Block, author of the popular Weetzie Bat series, which was set in the magical world of Los Angeles. Semi-autobiographical, the Weetzie Bat series chronicled life in L.A. of a high school girl and her friends. Now Weetzie Bat is 40 and she's having a bit of crisis.
....Weetzie, who made her first appearance in Block's breakthrough 1989 young adult novel, "Weetzie Bat," as the anguished teenage girl no one understood, is 40 now. With two girls of her own in college, and her longtime relationship with Max, her "secret agent lover man," seemingly about to crumble, she sets out to find herself among the mystical characters and magical happenings that make up life in Block's Los Angeles.
The author, who is 42 and has a 3-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter, doesn't go so far as to say she's having her own midlife crisis. But Block, who has described Weetzie as her alter-ego, acknowledges the similarities between her current life and the one on which Weetzie embarks in the author's latest novel Necklace of Kisses.
"Things started happening in my own life that reminded me of the world that Weetzie lives in," the trim, dark-haired Block says as she sits at her kitchen table, nervously fumbling with a heart-shaped stone. "And she just decided to come back," she adds with a giggle.
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"I think the perfect metaphor for L.A., and for my writing, would be sort of smog sunsets," Block says with a chuckle. "They are pink and insanely beautiful. But they're there because of the smog, which is this combination of extraordinary beauty mixed with dark and even deadly elements."
