If you are meeting Weetzie for the first time, you will fall in love with her and want to read the rest of her story. It will allow you to see-and even taste and smell-Los Angeles the way that Weetzie does, all glittery and “lush-plush-peony-rose” despite the deadly smog. Pink Smog has that magical blend of fantasy and very real issues that Francesca Lia Block does so well. Weetzie’s mom is still calling Weetzie by her given name, Louise, and the woman that may have destroyed Weetzie’s family lives in Unit 13 along with her son, who might be Weetzie’s guardian angel, and her daughter, who might be casting voodoo spells.

It introduces us to a 13-year-old girl who is friendless in junior high and has just lost the person she loves most: her dad, Charlie Bat, who after many drunken fights with Weetzie’s mom has fled L.A. Either way, you can read (more like devour in one sitting) and enjoy Pink Smog. Perhaps, like me, you read the entire Dangerous Angels series about Weetzie and her friends that came out in the late ’80s and early ’90s about a billion times because Weetzie, with her bleach-blonde flat-top and clothes that she makes out of vintage fabrics, sheets, and feathers, was like your best friend or soul mate or spirit animal. Perhaps you don’t know who Weetzie Bat is. I would say, now that I wear shiny jumpsuits myself, that this is the book you get if you love glam rock, because you realize looking at it that basically every photo you’ve ever seen and liked of David Bowie (or Iggy Pop or Lou Reed, etc.) was by Mick Rock, and here they all are together! It is a necessity. Onstage, backstage, with creepy fans, hanging out casually and blithely ignoring the fact that the whole world would implode if that many cool people were around one another all at once for too long. It was weird and new and scary but it was also WEIRD and NEW and SCARY and that was, well, kind of exciting! Patron Rookie Saint Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Debbie Harry, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, Lindsay Kemp, Queen. Then, of course, I found myself coming back to it again and again and again. I felt corrupted by these images of performers sticking microphones in their mouths, sitting on top of each other, and wearing shiny jumpsuits.

Glam! scared me when I first looked at it at the age of 11. Mick Rock (with a foreword by David Bowie)

Pink Smog by Francesca Lia Block