Francesca Lia Block

(1962 - )

Francesca Lia Block was born, and still lives, in Los Angeles with her husband, daughter and a springer spaniel named Vincent Van Go-Go Boots.

Like the star of her first novel, Weetzie Bat, Francesca once had bleached-blond hair, wore engineer boots with 1950s prom dresses, drove around in a red-and-white 1955 pontiac convertible and slammed to bands in underground clubs. She found the name 'Weetzie' on the license plate of a pink Pinto when she was sixteen, 'My Secret Agent Lover Man' in a graffiti scrawl, and other characters' names from what she describes as her 'rampaging subconscious'.

The daughter of a poet and a painter, Francesca Lia Block's work has been influenced by the visual arts, by her love of Greek myths and fairytales, as well as by music and dance. While at the University of California at Berkeley, her influences expanded to include the magic-realist fiction of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende, as well as the modernist poetry of Hilda Doolittle. She is currently developing an original series for MTV and a screenplay of Weetzie Bat for cinema.