![]() ![]() Like so many writers, Rechy discovered himself through books and film. Rechy grew up impoverished, with a furiously abusive father born in Mexico who claimed multiple European heritages and pasts and a beautiful mother who loved her children but couldn’t protect them from that violence. He went then into the military, serving in the 101st Airborne Division, and did not want to stay in the place where he was born. He rewrote it, sent it again, and was rejected. “Pablo!” he called it, “probably the bleakest book I ever wrote, and I wrote it when I was 18.” He sent it to Grove - a New York publishing house he admired - cold, not admitting his age, and it was rejected. ![]() Rechy had actually written his first novel before “City of Night,” and last year the Los Angeles Review of Books published a piece of it. ![]() (The other two, Wanda Coleman and Carolyn See, we lost last year, and their books I turn to as well.) I was only 18 when I read “City of Night,” and Rechy’s fictional view of Los Angeles was one of three that made me believe I too might write about the places in Southern California I hadn’t seen in print. John Rechy, his skin still beautifully burnished and brown when I saw him last year, his forearms still powerful, his words unfurling with precise irony and humor, is a writer I’ve been thinking about in the evening while looking at the horizon just after the sun has hesitated in the western sky. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |