I’m sure it’s allowed a certain type of creative loner to become much more creative and less alone. There’s now an immediate access to so many people who share your interests or peculiarities, an access to subcultures, blogs, conversations, diaries. It must be incredibly liberating, if you’re stranded in a small town. Perhaps five years from now, the whole notion of being an outsider will be obsolete.

“Some [of the fan letters] are a little unsettling—one girl wrote lines of the book around the walls of her detox center; another copied out the entire book into her notebook because she had to return her copy to the library.”

Read on

Author’s Picks
Some Other Heroines

Mona from the film Vagabond (1985)

This film is so unsettling, beautiful, and evocative. When I first saw it, the character of Mona was unlike any young woman I’d ever seen in cinema, and I loved the way her story unfolded, without judgment and in a jagged, restless manner. According to the director, Agnès Varda, it is “more than just Mona who always eludes us, who is too reserved, too closed; the film addresses ‘the Mona effect’ on those she came in contact with and inevitably affected. She is someone who forces others to react and adjust themselves in relation to her.”

Annie from the film Foxes (1980)

Cherie Currie, of the seventies all-girl band the Runaways, plays Annie, a doomed, bleached-blonde Los Angeles girl, and her performance is so searing that everyone else in the movie, even Jodie Foster, comes across as rather false and silly. Currie captures the authentic sadness of “bad girls” who aren’t really bad but accept their fate as if they were. I wanted to explore and capture this sadness more through the character of China.

Photographer Justine Kurland

Kurland creates images of utopian, hidden landscapes, playing with the idea of runaways in their own world. There’s often the presence of a wilderness that reminds me of Vancouver Island, even though it’s elsewhere—fog, cliffs, rough grasses, and tangled bushes. “Racing to Meet Me,” “Fu Fighters,” “Shipwrecked Car”—I’d often look at these photos when halted by writer’s block.

Girl on the album cover of Evol, by Sonic Youth

I don’t know who the girl on the cover of this album is, but when I was a teenager I was always secretly thrilled to look at her roaring upwards. I imagined Justine would look something like this, and have the same combination of playfulness and insanity. The songs on the album also inspired me—I wanted to find the equivalent sound in language. Many of these songs sound like the noise I imagine would arise from girls running around by railroad tracks, their hidden symphony.

“I don’t know who the girl on the cover of this album is, but when I was a teenager I was always secretly thrilled to look at her roaring upwards.”

Painter Karen Kilimnik