Jessica Hagedorn, The Gangster of Love, and Alta’s California Book Club

In a short essay that’s both a poetic spill of memories and an artistic manifesto, “Why I Write: Blood, Exile, Longing, Obstinate Memory,” for this month’s Alta’s California Book Club, Jessica Hagedorn writes, “I write to exist: to feel everyone & everything,” and, later on, “…& everyone’s a gangster & everything’s a story / guitar & gun / lost brothers / & black pearls & black tears & blood of a poet.” I’ve been loving these California Book Club meetings, the subtle and terrific interviews with a series of extraordinary writers, mostly in conversation with John Freeman and exciting guests. You can also read a variety of short essays about each month’s book. I was excited to have the chance to write one of these pieces about The Gangster of Love (note, the book club webinar is this Thursday, free and open to everyone…registration info below!). Here’s the beginning of my piece, “‘Only Because It’s Forbidden’: Seduction and loss in Jessica Hagedorn’s The Gangster of Love”:  

Jessica Hagedorn’s fiercely exuberant 1996 novel, The Gangster of Love, hurtles through a kaleidoscope of tones, mixing eruptions of imagination with elements from her lived experience as an immigrant child and then as a punk rock musician in 1980s New York. Hagedorn—novelist, playwright, musician, and multimedia performer—is, most of all, a collagist, including in her earlier novel, the American Book Award–winning Dogeaters, a marvelous cacophony of voices and modes set in Manila. 

The Gangster of Love is also a collage, united by a panther-like omniscient narrator who roves across the book, offering knowing, witty, and sometimes mournful observations and orchestrating a variety of points of view, most often that of Rocky Rivera, the protagonist of the book. The narrator plunges us into a poetic examination of love, ghosts, betrayal, and gossip before introducing the Rivera family, who, splintered by divorce, move from Manila to San Francisco the year that Jimi Hendrix dies. “There are rumors,” the book begins. “Surrealities. Malacañang Palace slowly sinking into the fetid Pasig River, haunted by unhappy ghosts. Female ghosts. Infant ghosts. What is love? A young girl asks.”

Here's the rest of my craft analysis. It was a delight to have Anita Felicelli as an editor (so much of my life as a writer is about the great luck I’ve had with editors, often editors who are brilliant writers themselves.) And the more I read and reread The Gangster of Love, the more deeply I fell for it. 

The event is this Thursday, April 18, at 5 pm PT. Here’s the page with more information, including the link to register. 

Also, because I couldn’t resist sharing this with you, here’s Jessica Hagedorn’s TikTok tour of her writing space.  

Although it’s a webinar, the comments and Q&A are open, so if it works for your schedule, dear friends and MPP readers, it would be great to see you there.