Los Angeles is steeped in prostitution. I used to live in a loft in pre-gentrified Hollywood. Just outside my desk window was the section of Santa Monica Boulevard where the transsexual hookers plied their trade. A pack of homeless street kids came to my neighbors' rave party and never left, squatting in an empty loft. They preferred petty theft, but dabbled in prostitution to support their meth and heroin habits. I upgraded to a slightly better apartment and down the hall lived a slightly better working girl, a middle aged woman with a steady clientele who had to come to her because her car had been impounded after too many DUIs. She was a quiet neighbor except when her married trucker boyfriend rolled into town. He was at peace with her profession. Their knock-down, drag-out fights were over who should pay for that night's six-pack, who was hogging the brew.
I always thought I would write about these characters, but ultimately found that I didn't have much to add to the frequent depictions of their dire lives. People go into low-end prostitution because whatever they came from was even worse, or they are in the grips of an addiction that overrides their dignity. These extreme examples of prostitution are colorful and dramatic, but the majority of the sex industry workers in L.A. are not out strutting the streets, have not been coerced, and did not come from abusive backgrounds. There is a blasé attitude toward the sex-for-money exchange here, part of the pervasive boomtown mentality, and I have known an alarming number of "unlikely" people who have chosen to trade on their physical assets for material gain.
The people who do go into it share the ability to keep everything present tense. They refuse to examine past or future. One thinks of these people as hardened and worldly-wise, but in reality, their articulation of the future is childish. They all believe that they will soon retire rich and lead a life of leisure, or become models/actors. They do not allow present setbacks to dent these beliefs.
Los Angeles has little tolerance for aging females. I wanted to explore what it must be like for an L.A. call girl to suddenly be confronted with the end of the road, after she has spent years stubbornly overlooking the consequences of her choices. I thought the noir, mystery style fit well with a person who exists on a nocturnal schedule and imposes a rather simplistic, almost comic-book worldview on a lifestyle that is fraught with danger and humiliation. The narrator thinks of herself as a cunning Hollywood femme fatale, and we can detect the gap between her self-perception and the sad reality. The mystery construct forced me to be disciplined in terms of reader accessibility. I allowed myself to create an experimental chronology, but the story had to be clear so the reader can gather clues and draw conclusions.
The main challenge was creating a narrator who insists on present tense and is only starting to reluctantly consider the past and contemplate the future, mental activities at which she is inexperienced and unskilled. The fragmented, non-linear structure is meant to relay the narrator's struggle to grasp a past-present-future relationship in order to solve the dual mysteries of her partner's disappearance and the disappearance of a lifestyle/livelihood that she expected to pursue forever.
I write about provocative subjects, and decry the readers who automatically tune out due to their discomfort with the issues examined. Nic Kelman's debut novel, girls, gave me a dose of my own medicine. It's a hard novel for anyone with feminist leanings to swallow. Like all great writing, it is unflinchingly honest and rewards those who are willing to surrender to the pleasures of a well-told tale. girls reminds me of Lolita with its stunning command of language and horrifyingly entertaining portrayal of a predatory psyche. It's a powerful, disorienting novel that will shake up prejudices you probably didn't admit you had.
I find the novels of Sarah Waters enthralling. My favorite is Affinity. She integrates historical settings with complex structures and her books are populated by refreshingly vital female characters. Check out David Mitchell's Ghostwritten for a masterfully detailed trip around the globe. He writes with a knowing ease that will transport you everywhere from Mongolia to Ireland and thrust you into darkly suspenseful episodes organic to the settings. Both of these writers create involving stories with realistic characters, yet transcend linear narrative. I'm frankly rather tired of strict linear narrative as the default for fiction. It can be rendered well, but often seems cowardly and non-reflective of modern life. I am heartened by the proliferation of writers who invent new structures and young readers who have grown up clicking their way through cyberspace and are utterly accepting of alternative modes of storytelling.
I feel a spiritual kinship with Nathanael West. He went to Brown then moved to Los Angeles to seek his fortune as a writer. He has a brooding, merciless style, but it is so obviously rooted in a deep love of humanity and torment over his basic sense of alienation from it. His short novellas are epic struggles of reconciliation. He died quite young, and his books were unsuccessful during his lifetime. This means that he exercised the discipline and belief in himself to continue to write illuminating, meaningful, linguistically precise work in the face of cold disinterest. Ultimately, this is what all literary writers in America must do. I see him as our patron saint, a source of inspiration. Rush out and read Miss Lonelyhearts.
Stacia Saint Owens grew up in Leavenworth, Kansas, and now resides in Los Angeles. She is a graduate of Brown University's MFA program and a former Lecturer in English Literature at Harrow College in London. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Southern California Review, Wisconsin Review, Dos Passos Review, Quarterly West, and The Massachusetts Review. Her short story collection, Auto-Erotica (Livingston Press), is the winner of the Tartt First Fiction Award and was released on June 30.
