In the”Speaking Out” section of legendary Los Angeles writer John Rechy’s website, you’ll find in an article entitled “Lying Writers” the following quote: “…it is naive to think that anything that is set down into writing–print or script–is ever, can ever, be ‘true.’ Memory is entirely unreliable; it alters ‘facts’ daily.”
So it may surprise readers that a writer who takes this view has published a memoir. Yet About My Life and The Kept Woman opens with a declaration showing Rechy’s adherence to his previous statement: “This is not what happened; it is what is remembered. Its sequence is the sequence of recollection.”
What a fascinating recollection it is. Rechy, who will be reading from and signing copies of About My Life at Skylight Books tonight at 7:30, begins the story thus:
“I was twelve, and my sister was about to marry her football-captain sweetheart. She was sixteen, he was seventeen, and the approaching union was fraught with dangers whose effects, many years later, would multiply and spread into the core of San Francisco society and would, more years later, help to define my life.”
This sweeping first paragraph implicitly promises the reader a great journey, and the book doesn’t disappoint. Rechy covers among other topics his childhood during the Depression in El Paso (where he met the kept woman in the title, a figure of lifelong fascination for the author), a stint in the U.S. Army, and his eventual settling in Los Angeles, where he has consistently tested both the literary and sexual boundaries of his times.
While much of Rechy’s fiction, including the modern classic City of Night, is known for its rich portrayal of various gay cultures, this memoir marks Rechy’s first explicit telling of how his life provided source material. Rechy details evenings spent hustling on Selma Avenue and afternoons in Griffith Park tallying sexual contacts, which inspired the story of one of Rechy’s most famous protagonists, Johnny Rio of Numbers.
The exploration of biographical events and fiction’s inevitable intersection is especially satisfying in Rechy’s hands. Full disclosure: I had the privilege of taking two classes taught by John Rechy while studying at USC, and never thought about writing quite the same way after. Week after week, Rechy challenged the long-dispensed advice given to aspiring writers of “Show, don’t tell. Write what you know,” and often returned to the concepts of truth and lies. In Rechy’s view, biographers and memoir writers were obviously liars, as were fiction writers. However, the fiction writers were the only honest ones of the bunch; when a reader opens a work of fiction, they understand that they’re being told a “lie.” The paradox of this is that the better the writing, the more true the story seems. Rechy summed it up thus: the greater the artist, the greater the lie. About My Life and The Kept Woman contains some of the best lies I’ve read in a long time – which I mean as the highest compliment to the author.
John Rechy
7:30pm
Skylight Books
1818 N. Vermont Ave. - Map
323.660.1175
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