 I realized when I was in Los Angeles recently that most of my chosen family now lives in California so I have to really sort of think about where life is taking me and one of the ways that I get to do that is by writing. This book I didn't realize again until I was in Los Angeles, this is the first out-of-state readings I've been doing are about people that I loved in New York who no longer exist and in New York that no longer exist so it's a way of saying goodbye and also telling these people how much I loved them and how much I learned from them. I'm going to read a section that I've never read before about a woman who was very dear to me and whom I've known since we were 19 and in the book as in life I called her Mrs. Reland after Diana of Reland and she was a very, very brilliant Latvian American woman whom I adored and so I'm going to read about her this evening and about our life together in New York and thank you for indulging us. It's from the first section of the book which is called Trees Trapique but in 2007 someone did die. She was one of my first eyes an integral to all the years I've described. I've waited until now to talk about her because that's the way she would have wanted it. She was a great believer in traditional story structure and would say apropos her appearance here, what readers crave most, what fills them up is the story of love and how it ends. As a spoken word critic, one of the very best, she knew what was real when she read it because she trusted her gut. Indeed she had a great interest in her gut. She was always thin but she ate more food than any human I've ever known. Even after she got sick she longed for me to describe a dinner party I had attended. She'd lick her lips, I'm always hungry, she said. She came to the first reading I ever gave at my college and while I read she sat in the front row with her then-boyfriend eating a hoagie. After the reading she said that I needed more stuff behind me while I read to lively things up, you know, lights, a video, but I am getting ahead of my story. She was our first home, no. She was our tree and we hung in her young branches, our bodies swinging like flags in a permanent sweet chill, then a little sunshine through the branches, some bird sounds and maybe Jesus floating beyond the birds, no. She was our ground and we would die to be closer to her, no. She was a white girl, whatever that means, no. She was colored because she preferred colored men to most white people, no. She was words and they always came up short against her presence. And if you were a poet, his location it is to take the words out from in between other words and relish white space. Then you would be more suited to the task of relaying who she was, as Wallace Stevens seemed to do when he wrote in 1947, 12 years before she was born and 60 years before she died in his poem, So and So, reclining on her couch. She floats in the air at the level of the eye, completely anonymous, born as she was at 21, without lineage or language, only the curving of her hip as motionless gesture, eyes dripping blue, so much to learn. What can I tell you about her that might not sound trite by comparison? Well, there are mundane details that don't diminish her. She loved proper storytelling, the details and hidden meanings and facts and all. But let me just say that the details, how we met, how she and SL met, how she died, how SL and I died, diminished me or rather the whole storytelling enterprise does, words limit things. That's what I told her once. We were sitting in her little house near a pond on Long Island. She had said goodbye to Manhattan years before, but she was made for New York. She was beautiful and made no sense and made perfect sense, just like Greenwich Village or the Bronx. We were sitting in her little house and she was so sick, Jesus helped her and I was saying how much I loved her without telling her that because that's how we talked by not talking. We didn't want speech to limit us. Instead, we did things like making a chicken or the first time we had SL come over to her place in New York and to accommodate his vegetarianism, a gratin, gratin de Renoir's. Sitting in her house, I could not say how much I loved her even though time and her body were saying I wouldn't have many more opportunities to do so, but we never talked much and as SL said, during that time, why start now? SL understood intuitively, which is the best way to understand anything, my thoughts on that particular subject. If I said I loved her, it would limit her to my love just as a tree once described becomes just a tree or your tree. I always wanted others to know her and cherish their perspective of her. That would mean there were more of her in the world, how marvelous and other men, aside from SL and myself, who felt as one of my boyfriends felt when he said after meeting her, whatever that girl has, someone should bottle it. Let me just say, one reason I can talk about this at all is because of SL and Mrs. Rieland as I called her. They wanted my eye more than most other things and what is writing, but an eye insisting on its point of view, fuck them for making me do it, fuck them and love them for making me do it. Let me just say, I never wanted my love or language to limit her and relegate her vibrancy, but that's what time and illness did anyway, confine her body to a wheelchair, such sadness I can't even tell you. Imagine Holly Go Lightly or Sally Bowles or Maxine Faulk or Vera Cicero in the 1984 film The Cotton Club in Firm, not walking down the street or swimming with their boys in the sea, sick and feeling useless to themselves after all those years of creating such lasting vibrant images in someone else's mind, artists and writers for the most part, images that might include this one. A city girl walking somewhere, sometimes with a purse in hand, her fur wrap pulled tightly around her, a little snow falling, the memory of a lover's kiss somewhere on her person, so many opportunities, sometimes life offered a quick synthetic fix that felt like a million roses smothering them, but then nothing. And that remarkable white girl rose from that temporary death to soldier on, and then her body struck down by some uncontrollable internal malady and tell me, S.L., or someone, what's left of that body and its memories, the beautiful things artists admired her made out of her? Paula Stevens got it right when he said, in so-and-so, reclining on her couch, that his white girl was actually, quote, this mechanism, this apparition, suppose we call it Projection A. I can't write one complete sentence about her because she was her own complete sentence, and her sentence about herself was better than anyone else's because she uttered it sort of without thinking, while thinking too much. I can't tell you how unusual that is in a world where nowadays no one leaves the house without some kind of script. Still, her brilliance was in part contingent on knowing how the New York City script, a story of youth and ambition and race and blood and money, works and needs to work in order to be a story and therefore value to other people. The human mind cleaves to details and what happened next so it can imagine what happened next, and I haven't even told you enough of the story so you can imagine what she was and take it from there. She was a white girl who, while growing up in New Jersey, read Kurt Vonnegut and listened to punk music and jazz. In high school, she sported a beret à la Ricky Lee Jones. She was a newspaper freak and, as a young woman, wrote letters in support of Rajneesh Parum, despite the facts. She wanted to protect the faithful from the faithless. She regarded S.L.'s vegetarianism as a kind of faith, and she admired it, but how could she give up her belief in bacon? Her attraction to men who had language was profound. Sometimes she'd visit me at the weekly newspaper I worked at back in the day because she was also drawn to a pasty gay journalist who spread his body anywhere there was available space. She called him the answer grape because he looked like a grape and he had all the answers. She was the daughter of Europeans, immigrants who'd survived a world war to find something like stability in North America, and their survivalist instincts may have contributed to her own, which included being protective of her fun. When she was up to no good, you could see it on her face, so, to some extent, she was always an innocent, albeit one who thought you could consider doing the right thing, but you could consider doing the wrong thing, too. For as long as I knew her, she walked a moral balance beam in high heels without chalking up her hands. She was as interested in sometimes falling off that beam on a friend's bad side as well as their good. The first time I saw her, she was a waitress in a gay bar, where we even 21 years old. She was the lovely, opulent, practical mind, artists always love having around to remind them that the world exists and Con Edison would like to hear from you. All while they painted her portrait. She worked in that bar in 1980 or 1981, and she was close to Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died in 1988. The summer she went to Europe with her first husband, a beautiful Berbera boxer who was so kind to me. And when she got back from Europe, we drove out to Brooklyn in her little car to visit Jean's grave, just me and her. SL didn't even know about that pilgrimage until after 2007. And at Jean-Michel's grave in the Brooklyn cemetery, she kept saying, poor baby, poor baby, as she towed the dead leaves away from his grave's mouth. Standing there, looking down at her, looking down, I remembered that Jean-Michel was indeed a baby when I met him. He was 17 and I was 16. We were introduced by a fat and funny white girl who had an apartment in Brooklyn Heights. But is it an introduction if one of the two people won't say hello and just dared? Because that's what Jean-Michel did when he met me. We stood in that girl's attic room in Brooklyn Heights. Jean-Michel had a mohawk. I had never seen a black man with hair like that. And he was wearing a green mechanics jumper. He was so vibrant and hungry, predatory might be the word. He wanted to get somewhere. And he kept staring at me. And it wasn't until years later that I heard he liked black boys as much as he liked white girls. So I wonder what it was like for him when I showed up with Mrs. Reland. I called her Mrs. Reland from the first because she was stylish and everything she wore was unfussy and the opposite of fashion. And what did the first Mrs. Reland say about style? It helps you get down the stairs. My Mrs. Reland got down the stairs all right. But sometimes she tripped or stumbled, which is a form of being graceful too. Since what is grace but the desire to forget one's body or share it with others? She did both. I saw it all at one, at all at one, at Jean-Michel's first big exhibition. He was part of a group show called New York New Wave. And oh my god, I just looked it up. The show took place at PS1 in 1981. Like an Adrienne Kennedy heroine, I would give anything just now if I could talk to Jesus that night and just once. I would tell him what I remembered about that night. Were we even 21? Yes, we were just. And I don't think I even put the Jean who wouldn't take my hand in Mrs. Reland's presence together with the artist whose work I saw in a show I had admired tremendously sometime before, the Times Square show. A show that contributed, the refined, and that combined the refined and the desolute. How perfect was that? Since New York was a disaster area then, so why couldn't an exhibition be a disaster too? I don't think I took much notice of Jean-Michel's paintings at PS1 though. Since what was interesting to me that night was watching and not watching as the artist sometimes watched me and looked at Mrs. Reland. I'd give anything to talk to Jesus about it just once because it was one of those moments when life was changing me and she was life, a skinny white girl talking to an existentially freaked black man. And already I was in love with Mrs. Reland's bravery. How many white girls do you know, Jesus, who didn't grow up around colored people and who step outside of what life is supposed to look like for them, which is to say white, and put on a party dress to look pretty for and try to please a black man who almost never had any power at all? And those impulses are rarer than you think. I seem to remember the dress, if not the material, then the shape she wore that evening at PS1. The skirt was reinforced with a little not much crinoline. The artist and his muse talked to one another as lovers do. He was living with another woman by then, but I'm not sure if that was a heartbreak for Mrs. Reland because other people interested her as well. Besides, she liked her heart's desires being a secret, a story only she could tell when she wanted to tell it. She was so intelligent about men and had realized at an early age that despite the bluster, they were essentially passive creatures. You could get one if you wanted one, no problem. She was Fitzgerald's Jordan Baker in that she was aware that it took two to have an accident, but she was herself when she said to me once, as I tried to learn how to drive a car and was too frightened of other people, they have breaks too. As Mrs. Reland and Jean talked to each other in a conspiratorial way at that opening, I became what I always, I would always be later in her and Essel's presence, a kid loving the smell of their adhesion. How did people talk the way that Jean Michel was talking to Mrs. Reland now in the utter privacy of their souls and yet in public for all the world to see? To talk to myself even, I had to turn off the lights as in a cinema, thank you. I thought I would take some questions briefly and then the evening can end in elegance and you can all go off and have your wine and soup. And I won't bore you to death, but I'm happy to answer anything you'd like to ask. What was the nickname you gave your friend and could you explain that? Oh sure, you're young. Deanna Vreeland was a great editor of fashion magazines and at Harper's Bazaar, she started, when she was there for 20 years and she started a column called Why Don't You, which was really about the phantasmagorical aspect of fashion, like why don't you wear dyed Red Fox mittens as they do in Stockholm on opening night, that kind of thing. And she took over the editorship of Vogue in 1964, I think, and it was a great moment for her because it was the youth quake and so she made a great magazine with putting the Rolling Stones in for the first time and so on, so she was a great journalist. But she was known as a kind of paragon of style and she wasn't interested in fashion so much as she was interested in style and my friend was a very stylish woman, but incredibly lazy, which is another thing I loved about her. If she was here, she'd hold up her hand and admit it. I remember once she went to a doctor years ago and she was on the table and he said, well, she was sort of groaning and he said, well, what's wrong with you? Are you feeling ill? She's like, no, I'm just lazy. So she didn't have Mrs. Vreeland's actual spark of doing stuff, but it was all in her mind, which was very interesting. So that's why I called, from the minute I met her, I called her Mrs. Vreeland or Walter, because it was close to her Christian name and she was really both. Yes, sir. Oh, sir or lady? He really is that, which is very attractive. He's, the nickname SL is abbreviation for sir or lady and in the beginning of the book I described a sort of femme butchness that he had and so that's what I called it, which is always attractive to me anyway. Yes, not everyone at once. I was over here? Yes, ma'am, the red shirt. It sounds like you're reading poetry and I wonder if you're aware of that and if that, if poetry is informing your writing because it sounds like it, certainly when you read it. I think one of the things that happens when I'm writing anything is that I really like to read poetry before and I feel, I find that it's a much more spiritually disciplined art and the mess that I'm going to make by being discursive, I forgive myself for by saying I could never write a poem. So I guess I've learned from poetic techniques in prose and a lot of writers that I love do that, know how to sort of condense while making something more expansive, yes. The title, White Girls, Hints at Race and the excerpt that you read also, it kind of talked about race but not really directly. No. And I was wondering in your relationship with these white girls, whether you had candid discussions about race and how that played into your relationship and related to that, do you think that we have for anywhere candid conversations about race in America? Thank you. Oh, it's good. I liked it. It, with this particular person, we could make jokes every once in a while about cultural things that she would never say herself. She would never do that. She never crossed that line. She would never presume and she actually was so sort of colorblind that if I brought something up, I remember she would just blush. Like it just hadn't occurred to her. And that's one reason that I loved her dearly. The candid conversations that I'm able to have almost always are with friends. When I have a question or they have a question, I don't like using race as a trope to define everything. I like it to be part of the everythingness that I'm writing about because it's there and we're in America like anything else. But it doesn't do us, it's not really the biggest or the bigger metaphor about existence and that's really what I was trying to describe in the book was that these elements about New York and various characters were just elemental. The title is intentional. There were any number of self-defining black books like James Walden Johnson's autobiography on X colored man. There's Black Boy by Richard Wright. There's Tar Baby by Toni Morrison, all books I love. But I always felt that I knew what was going to happen before I opened the book. So if I took a sort of relatively marginal aspect of society that was visible but still marginalized, what would that make us think about the characters in the book? So thank you, but she was a very dear person. She truly had been raised by a European mother who did not understand racism in America at all. So, hi. You can just say it. I always look forward to your hand reviews and especially because I don't get to New York that much so I feel like sometimes I get to understand a play because you've written about it. But one of the reviews, which was of a Langston Hughes play which I actually went to New York just to see. Oh, that was a long time ago. It was about six or seven years ago. I think it was the first thing I did. Oh, no, no, it was, was it the one done at the Apollo Theater? Yes. Oh, yeah, yeah, George Wolfe directed that. And you just did. And I wondered if, you seem to imply that it was too dated. Yes. And I wonder if you feel that about Langston Hughes plays or that they shouldn't be performed anymore or can't be well performed anymore or just that particular play or production. That was called Harlem Something. Yeah, Harlem Song. No, Harlem Song, I think. Harlem Song, Harlem Song. And he had also done another play that I saw called Little Ham and I had loved him so much like everybody else as a kid. But then I think he wrote too quickly and too much. He, Mary and Moore wrote these great letters to him and she talked about his desire to be loved. And you can sort of feel that in his work. I thought that that play just wasn't very good and he's done a lot of not very good plays but I do love his energy. And he was really good looking too. That always helps. I don't think they should revive that. No. No. Hi. Hi, I just had a quick question about one of those quick questions, not at all actually, but about genre. What I find so interesting is the ways in which you're pushing and shifting between genres from an essay like you read this evening which is somewhat, which is more memoir to then journalistic pieces like the Potie piece to then stepping into the first person in like the Lulu piece. And I don't know, I was just curious about your thinking process there. I don't, yeah, if you'd comment on that at all. You're just basically asking why am I insane? I can't explain that because I'm crazy. But I think what I do is I try to inhabit the writing according to what the writing is. We have a great Deanne Arbus expert here and one of my favorite quotes of her is that she works from awkwardness and she arranges herself, not the subject, but she arranges herself around the subject. So I think as a writer I arrange myself around the subject. And one of the things that I love about writing is that it's not really myself. It's the shape of the story or the person. So to become Louise Brooks reviewing a biography about herself is something that Louise Brooks would probably like to do. So why don't we just do it? That's the feeling. But thank you for asking. Thank you for coming. There are books for sale in the back. So before you leave, be sure to purchase one. Thank you all for coming. Have a good night off. Thank you.