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A review by katrinky
The Thorn Necklace: Healing Through Writing and the Creative Process by Francesca Lia Block
3.0
Like every west coast girl I know of a certain age, I rolled DEEP in FLB's punk Los Angeles fairy tales. Her books influenced my decision to move there.
I've grown out of her actual stories, which have plots so simple as to now seem trivial, but I could still read her descriptions of clothing and food all day. And that's when this book is best - the memoir parts. The writing coaching parts fell totally flat for me. The chapter where she gets rid of seemingly more than half of her belongings was like a drug to me. (I live with a collector who comes from a line of Stage 1 hoarders.)
The pseudonyms she chooses for the people in her life are very silly. Hearing a grownup refer to her partner exclusively as My Secret Man, or Secret Man, made me cringe.
Oh! And!! The verrry brief paragraph about David Bowie's sex with underage girls (FLB is obsessed with Bowie), is enraging. Fully enraging. It amounts to "I guess I wouldn't want my teenage daughter to have sex with a 30-year-old, but it was a different time and I would prob have done it, and I bet he smelled amazing, can you imagine how he must have looked while committing statutory rape, yum."
And yet, I stayed up past my bedtime two nights in a row to finish it. So clearly at least some of the old magic(k) still works on me. Except for the Bowie parts. If you love him, say you know he fucked up and you have made peace with it and love him still. Don't write off what he did as unimportant just because it didn't change your mind.
I've grown out of her actual stories, which have plots so simple as to now seem trivial, but I could still read her descriptions of clothing and food all day. And that's when this book is best - the memoir parts. The writing coaching parts fell totally flat for me. The chapter where she gets rid of seemingly more than half of her belongings was like a drug to me. (I live with a collector who comes from a line of Stage 1 hoarders.)
The pseudonyms she chooses for the people in her life are very silly. Hearing a grownup refer to her partner exclusively as My Secret Man, or Secret Man, made me cringe.
Oh! And!! The verrry brief paragraph about David Bowie's sex with underage girls (FLB is obsessed with Bowie), is enraging. Fully enraging. It amounts to "I guess I wouldn't want my teenage daughter to have sex with a 30-year-old, but it was a different time and I would prob have done it, and I bet he smelled amazing, can you imagine how he must have looked while committing statutory rape, yum."
And yet, I stayed up past my bedtime two nights in a row to finish it. So clearly at least some of the old magic(k) still works on me. Except for the Bowie parts. If you love him, say you know he fucked up and you have made peace with it and love him still. Don't write off what he did as unimportant just because it didn't change your mind.