Lamont gives me a memoir called The Basketball Diaries, published only a year ago. It’s well-worn from being passed around many times and the back cover is filled with praise from impressive literary figures like William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Patti Smith, and Rolling Stone magazine. Lamont points to Kerouac’s line: “At 13 years of age, Jim Carroll writes better prose than 89% of the novelists working today.”

Lamont says the young novelist was a heroin addict, which turns me off right away. Lita notices my expression. She knows I’m not interested in the junkie-poet mystique, and interjects, saying what matters isn’t the drugs but the clarity and detail of Carroll’s storytelling. “Study the sentences,” she says. “Not the lifestyle.”

He and Lita are encouraging me to seek out new and more contemporary writers to inspire me, rather than reaching back to the past. Then, Lamont says I should pick up a copy of A Moveable Feast, a sparse memoir written in 1964 which is set in the 1920s. He says that Hemingway’s memoir is a must-read, because it teaches a young writer what the practice is actually like: the discipline, and the stubborn belief that a sentence can always be made tighter.

“Hemingway wrote like a man trying to sand the world down to its cleanest lines,” Lamont says. “Watching him hammer away at his craft in Paris cafés might push you to take your own writing seriously. It’s not the mythology that matters, it’s the grind. The way you keep showing up at the page.”

Then Lita pulls a book out of her bag called, Rubyfruit Jungle. “Forget about Tom Sawyer and Holden Caulfield,” she says. “Molly Bolt is the real rebel outlaw.”

I’m dubious I’ll be able to relate to a coming-of-age lesbian novel, but Lita says I need a woman writer’s perspective after reading so many male science-fiction authors. I have to agree. With the exception of John Varley, most of them write women as flat, one-dimensional figures instead of real people.

~ Richard La Rosa (8/14/1979)