I’m not sure how I first stumbled on Erika Lopez’s 1997 illustrated novel, Flaming Iguanas. What I remember better is devouring it once I got it home, immediately reading it a second time, carefully copying out pithy one-liners and whole paragraphs from what seemed like every other page, and flagging half the pages so I could photocopy their crazed, gorgeous images—mostly sourced from vintage rubber stamps, everything from mason jars and neatly folded men’s shirts to spiders and assorted adorable ladies and a cat vomiting—to use in any number of art projects and zines, as well as to tape up on my wall and adore. Every time I met someone who had read, and invariably loved, the book, I knew I’d found a friend.

On one level, Flaming Iguanas is the story of Tomato Rodriguez (Lopez’s regular protagonist and sort of alter-ego) as she drives cross-country on her motorcycle, and the people she meets and revelations she has along the way. But the book is about much more than a road trip, and is threaded through with random tangents, biting wit, and disarming earnestness. Her follow-up, They Call Me Mad Dog (1998), was a darkly funny revenge tale also starring Tomato, now a little older and more embittered. What might be called part three, Hoochie Mama: The Other White Meat (2001) marked something of a shift in tone. It’s more meditative in its mania, as Lopez parses the question: Is gentrification evil?

Soon after that book’s publication, Lopez’s relationship with her publisher, Simon & Schuster, fell apart: In her words, “I tried to bludgeon my career with a baseball bat so I could get out of my contract.” She ended up on welfare, far away from the relatively glamorous days of book deals, and floundered for a while as she tried to figure out what to do next. Whatever her problems with her publishing house, she realized, they’d always let her work the way she wanted to, and no one else was willing to give her that much freedom. And so whatever her next step was, she knew she had to make it happen herself, from scratch.

These days, when Lopez talks, even basic sentences have a way of turning into manifestoes. “I’m trying to educate. I want there to be total transparency,” the San Francisco-based author/illustrator told me on the phone recently.

“To do this as a lifestyle is incredibly terrifying, and there is no ‘follow your bliss.’ This is not about The Secret. No! You will get fat, you will get scared, you’ll want to become a drug addict, you’ll drink first thing in the morning for a week before you realize there’s no good ending to that kind of story. This is the reality. But you know what? I’m having more fucking fun than if I were at a poolside party for ten hours straight and if I had a 24-inch fucking waist. I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life.”

We’re talking about her hefty new book, The Girl Must Die, and Monster Girl Media, the fledgling DIY empire she’s building to midwife her projects and, eventually, those of other likeminded creative types. At 43, Lopez is most emphatically finished with the traditional publishing route and is determined to create something lasting on her own terms.

Whether Monster Girl will grow into the wellspring of community and innovation she imagines remains to be seen, but The Girl Must Die is a gorgeously illustrated, compulsively readable, and fiercely uncompromising start. The book has all the hallmarks of Lopez’s earlier work, but there’s a definite sense that the gloves are off. Some nine years in the making, The Girl Must Die is part memoir, part credo, part lecture, full of rambling thoughts on the state of the world and Lopez’s wonderfully bawdy accounts of everything that’s befallen her so far—as well as what she’s still got coming. Fearless and frenzied, she shifts focus often and with little warning, each page offering up nuggets of homespun, hard-won wisdom alongside drawings of knife-wielding monster girls in pigtails, paunchy kitty cats, and her favorite childhood dress.

That it all manages to be pretty coherent is thanks in part to the team that came together to aid in the book’s creation, as well as to Lopez’s conviction about the kind of work she wants to make, how she wants to make it, and who she wants to make it for.

“I want to bring back amazing mind fucks that bisect your brain like government cheese and leave semen of confusion dripping out of your ears,” she writes, midway through the new book. “I want to bring back nonconsensual passion and fuck you. I want to bring back grabbed handfuls of hair and hello I love you.” Or, as she told me on the phone, “Everything I’m trying to do is about working with love and integrity and a ferocity that takes over the existing status quo and makes a place for people like me and you, so we’re not anomalies. I want this to be normal.”

The Girl Must Die is an elegant doorstopper—nearly 500 pages—that bears more than a passing resemblance to a holy book. It kicks off with a series of annotated, semi-inspirational quotes attributed to everyone from Thich Nhat Hanh to Jack Nicholson to Erica Jong. There’s a point here: Quotes like these may be cute, Erika explains, but the truth behind them is usually “a lot more brutal.” And so while the bulk of the book is certainly quotable in its own way, its author isn’t interested in distilling complicated truths down into tidy little mottos.

Still, Lopez has a weakness for the odd, apt slogan, and she’s got a few that have served her well since her Flaming Iguanas days: “May we all grow old with most of our limbs intact,” goes the one she calls her “Motorcycle Prayer.”

The Girl Must Die proceeds in a few distinct sections. “The Monster Girl Manifesto” makes clear who Lopez is writing for and exactly what brand of feminism she believes in. “We don’t knit here, although we may use your needles to defend ourselves during a misadventure in a Greyhound bus station,” she writes. “Leave behind your girlfriends in the cubicles with the eternally exasperated ‘Cathy’ and everlastingly poignant ‘Ziggy’ cartoons pinned to the partitions. The same ones who eat sugar-free Jell-O cups… We eat sugar-free nothing, for we ARE sugar: Granular. Unrefined. Evil.”

The book also includes the full text of Lopez’s one-woman show, The Welfare Queen, which she began performing around the country after her career downturn. From there, The Girl Must Die becomes a compendium of memories and lessons, from her messy, awkward, precocious girlhood to more recent years of vulnerability and searching. And the “girl” of the title? She’s drowning in myths and delusions, bound by the limits put on her by the culture at large. “The girl must die so that thoughts can stop smelling like wild cherry bubble gum for a moment and we can have a decent conversation where all sentences don’t end in question marks.”

Sound exhausting? It absolutely, necessarily is.

“I just want reality. I just want authenticity,” Lopez says, and if this is what it comes out looking like, so be it. “I hadn’t stopped to reflect on my own life until I wrote this book, really. I had never really drawn upon my own past.” She was helped in that process by TV and movie producer Brad Wyman, whom she met while she was testing various people’s responses to the project. “My muse needs to accept me for anything I say and do. They don’t have to agree with it or approve of it, but I want them to at least tolerate it and cut me some slack,” she says of Wyman. “A muse is my imagined perfect audience personified… I’m like a guy jerking off in his eye for two years… But, in a way, it’s an investment of time that makes the project become his as well.”

Lopez has made sure she’s not the only one with stakes in her work. Alison Penton-Harper, a British writer she first connected with through an online independent filmmakers’ network, helped edit the manuscript, though she good-naturedly tries to downplay her influence. “I never saw my input as an editorial role,” Penton-Harper wrote in an email. “Only an idiot would tamper with Erika’s work, and she didn’t so much need an editor as a dive buddy to check her oxygen tanks and pull her out of the reeds now and then.”

Lopez reels off names of people she says were absolutely integral to the process, from her former publisher David Rosenthal (whom she’s reconciled with and now refers to as her “maker”), to actor/writer/director Kamala Lopez, to her partner James Swanson, whom she met when he sent her a fan letter a dozen years ago. The acknowledgements section of The Girl Must Die is a sprawling thing, more an integral part of the book than an addendum. And that speaks to the spirit of the whole enterprise, even if it does undoubtedly orbit around one larger-than-life personality.

At the end of September, Lopez sent out an ecstatic email noting that the book had hit 67,728 in Amazon’s rankings, which she called “incredibly respectable for our snot nosed, toilet-paper-in-the-seat-of-my-pants operation.” But she doesn’t want to fixate on such statistical markers of success. “I’m not a trailblazer. I am not interested in being first at anything and being famous when I’m dead,” she says. What she wants is to put together a business that can be a creative refuge and source of stability for assorted friends and kindred spirits. “I really want to build something that is economically powerful, for us to be empowered and self-sustaining. We don’t hurt or exploit anybody, we just put energy back into the world. It sounds so born-again Christian, but it is about love.”

Erika Lopez

While she’s at it, she’d like to demystify failure. No matter how they did financially or critically, she says, “I would never say any of my books are failures. I think Hoochie Mama didn’t make any money back, but to me it’s a wild success because it succeeded in answering a question that I didn’t know the answer to when I started writing.” Monster Girl Media is poised to answer similar questions: Can an artist be true to herself and still make a living? How many times can you fall flat on your face before enough is enough? Can an admittedly “unemployable” person run her own business? Are love and dedication enough? If you build it, will they really come?

Lopez is certainly building away, making plans for future books—solo productions, collaborations, books by other monster girls and boys—narrative films, a documentary, and assorted merch. She plans to release her next project, All Witnesses Eventually Die, next fall; it’s another book about a woman and her motorcycle, a woman who, like Lopez, has gotten increasingly complicated and stubborn with age. Lopez takes reassurance from the project’s matter-of-fact, if somewhat morbid, title—another catchphrase for people who hate catchphrases: Inevitably, anyone passing judgment on you will die, so why care about failure?

“When you don’t care what anyone thinks of you, the whole world opens up,” Lopez says. “I never tried to be involved in starting a cultural renaissance because I got so used to waiting for someone else to do it. Now I’m like, fuck it. Let’s make our own thing and be great to each other.”

***

Erika Lopez reads at City Lights Books in San Francisco on Wednesday, October 13, with dates in other cities to follow. Full schedule here.

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Like so many of us, I spend an unhealthy amount of time reading blogs. My fall down the rabbit hole really began, I guess, around 2004, when I first moved to New York and was working cubicle-bound at a non-profit. In that situation, Gawker was both a revelation and a lifeline, and I probably spent as much time refreshing it as I did proofreading fact sheets about sustainable coffee production. Jessica Coen was the editor back then, and I remained more or less addicted through various staffing turnovers, until that fateful week in November, 2007 when Emily Gould and Choire Sicha (then editors of the site along with Alex Balk) read an uncomfortably apt piece about their workplace in n+1 and decided to quit.

During the years when Gawker was a disturbingly vivid part of my life, I ate up posts about celebrity sightings, layoffs in the publishing industry and Gould’s personal life, as only the bored and generally aspiring can. I watched as the site got meaner and the posting rate accelerated from reassuringly regular to relentless, and as the comment system morphed into something vaguely fascist. The latter bothered me, but not as much as it might have—though scrolling through pages of comments was one of my preferred methods of procrastination, I myself didn’t comment.

To read the comments unfurling at the end of most any post on any Gawker Media blog, you’d think every reader were chiming in—but lurking is actually the default (in)action. There are thousands and thousands of readers who are, to put it a little dramatically, witnesses rather than collaborators. And there are lots of reasons for not commenting: laziness, shyness, intimidation, voyeurism, a sense of superiority; all I know is that despite my fixation on these blogs—and, by extension, the lives and personalities of their writers—something stops me from wading in.

Emily Gould

I don’t pretend, though, that this keeps my hands clean. When it comes to the saga of Emily Gould—reaching new heights this month with the publication of her memoir/essay collection And the Heart Says Whatever—I’ve been transfixed, from her tenure at Gawker to her prolific blogging elsewhere, to the 2008 New York Times Magazine story in which she recounted how her life and long-term relationship unraveled as she revealed more and more about them online. I’ve paid attention because I’m genuinely interested in Gould’s writing, and because, being in my late 20s in New York, navigating the exhausting, incestuous, barely paying world of freelance writing, I relate to her and what she writes about. We both like books! We both have cats! I don’t know, it might stop there. Whatever.

To say that Gould’s book has been highly anticipated would be true, but wouldn’t get at some of the disheartening reasons behind that anticipation: people are hungry for a newsworthy target for their snark, an excuse to revive the attacks that unfolded in the aftermath of that Times Magazine article, and, generally, a pretext to be dismissive, dickish, and haughty about our oversharing, blog-based culture. Admittedly, I came to the book expecting to like it. And I did. Actually, I loved it: I thought it was gut-wrenching and smart and naked and beautifully written. You can read it as a document of a particular techno-era in New York (and of confessional online culture in general), and as a chronicle of the fallout from a specific moment in Gawker’s reign. But the stories Gould tells here are also very personal, and very sad. The fact that she’s told parts of some of them before doesn’t change that—she captures better than almost anyone the feeling of what it’s like to be young(ish), both ambitious and aimless, more watchful and introspective than is good for her, at this particular moment in our culture.

That doesn’t mean Emily Gould is “the voice of her generation” (as certain publicity materials would have you believe), or even that she’s speaking, as Curtis Sittenfeld recently fawned, “to the truths of women’s lives.” She’s certainly speaking to the truth of her own life, as someone with experiences that are very much of a certain generation. But as we’ve seen over and over again, it’s not enough for a writer to “just” tell her own story, particularly if that writer is a woman; at the same time, if people suspect a writer is trying to speak for her gender or her generation, they’re ready to resent or ridicule her for it. As Gould told Sittenfeld, “If a woman writes about herself, she’s a narcissist. If a man does the same, he’s describing the human condition. But people seem to evaluate your work based on how much they relate to it, so it’s like, well, who’s the narcissist?”

To Gould’s credit, in And the Heart she writes about Gawker mostly with pleasing vagueness, and leaves out her Times story entirely—it would have been easy and more sensational to build a book around that central essay, but she has other stories to tell. As she recounts her experience of being knocked down in, and by, New York—having her words scrutinized in a creative writing workshop, assuming the guise of a publishing professional, getting caught up in the romance of shoddy apartments—she perhaps unavoidably perpetuates a certain New York mythos, but she builds on Joan Didion’s sense of the place rather than just imitating, or playing tribute to her. In one sense, the whole thing feels like an apology—an extended explanation of how she started out one way and grew into a different person—and a requiem for the six-year relationship that died in the process: “The whole time we were together, it turned out, I had been working on making myself into someone he wouldn’t recognize.”

She’s obsessed with the way time passes, and especially with what it means to be young—to feel your youth draining from you in a way that feels like both a punishment and a reward. Coming from someone so young (she’s 28) this inevitably reads as a little annoying, but it also feels utterly true. Gould is attuned to the way things around and inside her are shifting and changing, and she can’t stop herself from testing certain boundaries, pushing against her surroundings to see if there’s any give—even as she knows this is a cliché. “The future was still unclear, but just unclear enough to be exciting and not so unclear as to be frightening,” she writes in one meaningful distinction. She takes stock of the somehow yawning distance that exists between a man-boy of 23 and her 26-year-old self. Of that 23-year-old, she writes, “He was so young that even after smoking half a pack of cigarettes and staying up all night the inside of his mouth tasted like some mild fruit.” And, reflecting on her inexorable aging:

This is one of the most painful things about getting older, especially getting older in the same place where you were young: the constant realizations that you could have been doing everything better all along, if only you’d known how to read the map more accurately.

Ana Marie Cox

Youth and generation were a focus of Ana Marie Cox’s oddly peeved, finger-wagging early review in Bookforum , in which she scolded Gould for not understanding that actions have consequences. “Gould, in general, does not seem to think much about her future, let alone about how those choices will appear when she looks back,” Cox wrote, as if oblivious to the fact that this is in fact one of Gould’s points.

Differences of opinion aside, Cox’s scattered, strangely savage tone (Gould’s choices, she writes, “seem much less brave to me than they might have when I was her age,”) seemed disproportionate to her subject in ways I wouldn’t have expected of someone who did her own time in the Gawker Media trenches. Cox was the founding editor/blogger of Wonkette; she’s also, despite what you might infer from her review, only 37. Weirdly, Cox is just as unsparing in her assessment of Gould’s entire generation; according to her, we’ve “grown up confusing irony with tragedy, nonchalance with acceptance, a pose with poise, self-dramatization with self-awareness.” That’s painting with pretty broad strokes, and it’s hard to understand why Cox takes it so personally—or why anger and offense are so often the default reactions to Gould’s writing.

Gould’s experiences are all tangled up with looming questions about privacy and self-exposure and technology, but though these personal essays are set in that context, they are not about it. That distinction can be hard to see when our culture is still in the early stages of sorting through this stuff, and when the Internet’s influence on our thoughts and relationships and sense of self still has a whiff of novelty, or indecency. And the Heart raises plenty of interesting questions about the life of its author and her peers, but the idea that Gould represents a distasteful, altogether alien generation, or that her faults, and her honesty about them, somehow gives everyone her age a bad name, just makes her accusers sound petty and overwrought.

“There’s this weird quality of being suspicious and cynical about everything and simultaneously, unwittingly, being utterly open and receptive and gullible that is part of youth, or at least was part of my youth,” Gould writes early in the book. We’d probably all be better off if we aspired to that kind of balance regardless of age. It has certainly informed Gould’s writing here—maybe, despite her scars, she’s younger than she thinks.

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“There’s a sad business in men being left alone,” observes a minor character in After the Fire a Still Small Voice, the beautifully moody first novel by young British writer Evie Wyld. That sadness, and its attendant unease, form the pulse of this book, in which loneliness is less a state of mind than a basic fact of existence.

Neither Frank Collard nor his estranged father, Leon, can quite grasp the origins of their isolation: Did either man choose it? Was it forced upon them? Set mostly in Australia (where Wyld spent time as a child) Frank and Leon’s stories unfold in alternating chapters, the two men’s lives shadowing each other. Frank has exiled himself to his family’s modest old retreat in a small beach town, having fled the bafflingly persistent love of a longtime girlfriend—and his own violent response to it. The broken down “shack” he inhabits is a relic of happier times, a childhood when his mother was alive and his father was someone he could begin to understand. Now it offers him the chance to reinvent himself as a reassuring sort of archetype: the strong, angry, self-sufficient man living off the land. That land, of course, is full of ghosts.

Meanwhile, in the years long before Frank was born, we see a teenaged Leon working in his family’s sweet shop, where he learns to bake tarts under the tutelage of his gentle, good-natured father. He spends his days expertly twisting sugar into miniature human figures and falling in love with a feisty local girl. But when his father goes off to fight in the Korean War and returns as a man undone, Leon’s life undergoes a profound shift. In search of healing, his parents move away, sending their son occasional, cryptic postcards from an unspecified location—in their absence, Leon is drafted to serve in Vietnam. There, he faces a set of horrors that echo those that plague his father, with one crucial difference: There is no one waiting for him at home, no one left to wish him well.

Evie Wyld

With uncanny insight, Wyld burrows under the prickly skin of these two men, prodding at their longings and fears, their traumas and mistakes, calling our attention to their shifting definitions of home. She has a keen eye for little intimacies: In an indelible memory of the woman he loves, Frank “rolled her on to him like they were both great fat seals, light in the water… Her knees and arms were cool, but the sun had warmed her head and she smelt of hot hair.” Watching a woman take her husband by the hand, “Frank was winded by the ease of it,” and Leon, observing his mother, sees that “the bun of her hair meant that her head was tilted at an odd angle, that there was space underneath her neck. He wanted to fill the space with something soft.”

Every interaction is a minefield of memories. Watching an acquaintance takes a pencil stub from her pocket, Frank

recognised the pencil as one that had been kept tucked behind his father’s ear at the shop. Then he thought how ridiculous, how stupid—there must be thousands of millions of pencils the same as that one. Even so he had to fight an urge to collect it from June’s fingers and hold it gently in his palm.

Wyld’s exactitude extends to a small but striking cast of secondary characters: Bob, the neighbor who nonchalantly befriends Frank; Bob’s wounded, unpredictable wife Vicky; and their tomboyish daughter Sal, who totes around a carrot dressed in Barbie clothes. Amy Blackwell, Leon’s first love, boldly licks lemon curd off his fingers, and his mother signals her joy in her husband’s return by her wearing her hair loose for the first time in years. Love, in After the Fire, is portrayed as salvation, albeit with its own unmistakable and not entirely appealing vulnerabilities. Frank, in particular, isn’t sure it’s worth the risk, though his caginess doesn’t make thoughts of the woman he left behind tug at him with any less force.

With her close attention to gestures and dispositions, her interest in the rhythms and routines of the characters’ days, Wyld leaves it up to readers to fill in the gaps between years and to infer the triggers that sent things spinning. It’s not clear exactly where things went sour in these lives—Frank refers only to having “got bad” before he began lashing out—but there’s a great, pleasurable tension in imagining what happened to turn the young Leon who innocently baked tarts into Frank’s broken father.

After the Fire, a Still Small Voice is a portrait of two men, but it’s also about the broader idea of men, as people with a specific—and at times seemingly predestined—relationship to violence, independence, family, and one another. Wyld’s perceptiveness and emotional honesty, paired with her restraint, have yielded a book that wears its weight quietly, and shines with intelligence and verve.

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