Guest Author: Valerie Frankel

Valerie Frankel goes way back with Beatrice, so when she told me her most recent novel, The Girlfriend Curse, was heading out to the bookstores, I asked if she was interested in writing something for the site. In all honesty, I was expecting something more chick-litty, so this tribute to Hunter S. Thompson surprised me, but in the right kind of way, telling me something I didn't know about Val before I read it--although I'm bracing myself for some reader somewhere to take offense with the final paragraph...

One Less Crazy Bastard In The World: That Can’t Be Good
by Valerie Frankel

Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels was originally published in 1967, two years after I was born. I read it in one bloody swallow in the spring of 1985 when I was a student at Dartmouth. Full of sex, drugs and violence, his filthy slog through an outlaw culture astonished me. At the end, when the Angels stomped the shit out of Thompson, I felt his terror and disgust viscerally. I shook with the Angels' betrayal for days.

This was a sublime reading experience, and I decided that Thompson was one of my favorite writers. My second novel, Murder on Wheels, a 1992 mystery about a fictional biker gang in the East Village, was my tribute to Thompson. Sex, drugs and violence continue to be themes in my novels (although, I admit, soft-core versions: sex to be sexy, drugs for fun, and violence as slapstick).

When I heard that Thompson shot himself in the head last month, I was sad that one my early idols was gone, but secretly glad he died vividly and violently. It made sense. What might not: that a chick-lit writer like me is a big fan of the balls-to-the-wall writing of Hunter S. Thompson. Which goes to show you: Pigeons should live in holes--not authors. Nor readers. I love Fight Club and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, too, but I'm not an alienated young man or a melodramatic teen. Hungry readers go wherever we can for a satisfying meal. And we crave variety.

Not to say that marketers, publicists and editors shouldn't do their jobs and try to sell books to likely buyers. I'm often asked by interviewers who I think my target audience is. I give a predictable answer, but the truth is, no author can know for sure who will appreciate her or his stuff. We have to write as if no one will ever see the pages. Second guessing and catering to a niche compromises the work, and probably repulses the very readers the author has targeted.

Myopic gun-lover Thompson must have had a different notion of a target. He didn't shoot for one; he shot at it. And he hit the bull's eye, too, even if (because?) he was too drunk and stoned to see. He couldn't have imagined (and didn't) that, in 1985, one of his biggest fans was a 20-year-old doctor's daughter from suburban New Jersey who blew off her 19th-century English novel class because she could not stop reading Hell's Angels. Or that, twenty years later, she'd call him a lingering inspiration in spirit.

And now, a fantasy scene: A 67-year old sickly recluse sits in his house in Wood Creek, Colorado. A copy of The Girlfriend Curse lands in his lap. He starts to read. He likes it, keeps going, his plans for the day postponed. He waits until he's read the last word on the last page to pull the trigger.