“Everything I’m trying to do is about working with love and integrity and a ferocity that takes over the existing status quo. I want this to be normal.”
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.”
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.”
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Erika Lopez reads at City Lights Books in San Francisco on Wednesday, October 13, with dates in other cities to follow. Full schedule here.
