RIP Kate Braverman (1949-2019)

The Los Angeles Times reports that poet, novelist, and short-story writer Kate Braverman has died at the age of 70. Although she spent the last few years of her life in Santa Fe, Los Angeles "'was always her spiritual home and North Star,'" her daughter, Gabrielle Goldstein, said in Braverman's obit. The novelist Janet Finch explains about Braverman, her mentor: "She was vivid and intense. She was uncompromising [...] a high priestess of literature." Picking up there: 

Braverman wrote about extreme female protagonists and her oscillating love and loathing for the city that raised her: Los Angeles inspired much of her writing. She published several books of poetry and countless short stories, including “Mrs. Jordan’s Summer Vacation,” which won the Editor’s Choice Raymond Carver Short-Story Award, and “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta,” which earned her an O’Henry Award in 1992.

Her book “Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir,” won the 2006 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize.

She is perhaps best known for her fever dream novel “Lithium for Medea.” The 1979 work — described by Joan Didion as “jumpy,” “powerful” and “kinetic” — is about dysfunctional families, addiction and toxic love affairs. Rose, the story’s protagonist, is drawn to a manipulative, cocaine-fueled artist. Braverman wrote it while she was addicted to cocaine, she told The Times in 2006.

In the book, Braverman describes Los Angeles as “white and half dead … a rented city … Los Angeles is the great waiting room of the world,” a hellscape with a “deformed sun” that spits “sick orange blood on the pavement.”

It’s the type of cynical review and dark tone she often used to describe the city. But her work also was poetic. Fitch called it “intensely lyrical,” and said her mentor’s personality wasn’t too different.

“She felt mediocrity was evil and should be stamped out ... it was as if she was defending the fortress from bad writing.”

Braverman believed a writer’s role is to uncover truths most people liked to ignore. “If you are a revolutionary, as I am, that’s what you want to do,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2006.

“I’ve written books as acts of discovery: things I need to know and that I need to touch. And it’s very dangerous work to deal with the most toxic internal elements. ... I feel like Madame Curie at my computer. I feel like I should be hemorrhaging from my eyes and ears.”

Continue reading at Los Angeles Times.