lkh_lashouts | Vintage LKH

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media: interviews

Vintage LKH

For all I know, this has been discussed here before, so forgive me if I'm being redundant, but I recently came across this:

VAMPIRES AND WEREWOLVES AND WITCHES- OH MY! How a nice Midwestern girl got caught up in the macabre and developed a cult following

It's an LKH interview that appeared in the Chicago Tribune in mid-October of 1996. It is also kind of hilarious.

Laurell Hamilton was watching Walt Disney's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" at home with Trinity, her 2-year-old daughter. The horror writer panicked: Was Hunchback going to die? "I was thinking, 'Please don't let me have to explain permanent night-night,' " Hamilton groaned.

First off: wow, Trin really is a big girl now. I actually didn't know her exact age, just estimations based on things I read here, but this puts her at at least fourteen. Still, I'm not sure how good a grasp a two-year-old is going to have on life and death. And as a Victor Hugo geek, I'd like to point out that the hunchback actually does die in the book...

If she finds it tough to explain death to the toddler set, it is clear that she is having no trouble explaining the facts of life- and death- to grownups.

Heh. No, she certainly doesn't. Cross-referenced with: multiple baby-daddies, psychological castration, penis envy, blonde-hating, and all that "only as graphic as it needs to be" sex.

Laurell Hamilton has made herself quite a comfortable niche. Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore in Minneapolis put "Bloody Bones" on his 'recommended' shelf. Last month it was the top seller at the mega-store.

Remember this, guys? Back when the series was struggling and starting out and still kind of, dare I say, quaint? Before LKH got too big for her superhigh britches and became a totally batshit bat-shitting tower of megalomania and gawthik-lite?

Dear sweet Jesus, how times have changed. It's interesting to look back this far and try to pick out the warning signs, though. For example:

"You can't arm yourself against a quirk of fate," she said. "We are a dice roll away from disaster for no reason. I find that very hard to accept. The world is so harsh that I prefer to see it through a patina of fantasy and horror, where the monsters are not as savage or grim as the monsters in real life."

Okay. She sounds a little like an emo fortune cookie, but I think I get it. The whole mentality of nothing ever being as terrible as reality, blahblahblah. She actually sounds like she knows what the hell she's saying, which is refreshing, but at the same time it's hard to look at this and not think of the high-and-mighty infodumps of advice she dispenses on her blog these days.

After the family was notified [of her mother's death], Hamilton remembers walking to an uncle's house through tiny Sims [Indiana] with her grandmother hysterically "wailing and keening."

Sucky as this particular situation is, has anyone ever seen LKH say anything positive about the woman who raised her? All I can recall are put-downs and, at best, backhanded remarks.

"When the neighbors asked what had happened, I was the one who said, 'My mommy died on the way home from work.' "

Hamilton's uncle subsequently took the 6-year-old to see the wrecked car. She remembers crawling inside, "touching the bloodstains. No one protected me from that. I did not flinch. I remember all the details."

...come to that, has anyone seen this mentioned anywhere else either? It sounds like the kind of "woe, my bloody childhood made me old and wise before my time!" anecdote that she'd slip into conversation as often as possible.

TRAUMA SHAPED HER

Um. Capslock and bold not mine. The enthusiasm is alllll the interviewer's.

And...well, not to belittle the strain an event like that must have been on such a young child, she's really not the only person who faced tragedy as a kid, and I really wish she'd talk more about working past said tragedy instead of reveling in it like it gives her street cred or something.

The trauma taught her immediately that adults could not protect her from disaster, Hamilton said.

"It made me who I am today. The false sense of safety that all children have, the idea that their parents can protect them from everything, was taken away from me at such a young age. It leaves a hole that is never filled."

Oy vey, this poor-me schtick is older than dirt.

I've worked with foster kids whose relatives would beat them, neglect them, accuse them of causing cancer, and make them shit on the lawn. At least Laurell had what sounds like a loving relationship with her mother and, what's more, also had family members who took her in and brought her up. But that isn't the kind of story LKH likes to glorify.

ETA: The character she created at least in part on her own self-image, is an resilent as Raymond Chandler character and as much of a feminist as Sara Parentsky's V.I. Warshawski- albeit more chaste. Both Hamilton and her character believe sex is best after marriage.

Gah, how could I leave this out? Again, look back and weep. Or laugh hysterically.

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Really?

Who would actually take a child to see the mangled car their mother died in? Wouldn't you want to protect them from something so graphic?

I'm flabbergasted and more than a little disturbed by that.

Seriously.

"touching the bloodstains. No one protected me from that. I did not flinch. I remember all the details."

Now I feel rather sad.

I bet she made that up. It sounds terribly dramatic, and as she's often said, she doesn't have any family now that her grandmother is dead. So who's going to call her on the fact that she's a big fat liar?

As cold and mean as this sounds, I honestly don't think this happened. It sounds dramatic and traumatic and oh-so-dark-and-comfy-with-death, which is how LKH wants us to think of her life.

It sounds like a made up memory to me as well. So does the wailing and keening bit. You see some woman walking around a small town WAILING AND KEENING and the cops would be called and the kid taken away. LKH just pouring on the dramatics - she has no shame.

Exactly! You see someone doing that in general, you're going to try to calm them down and call in the men in white coats if they won't.

I could imagine some keening and crying in private, but I doubt her grandmother was such a basket case that she was running around throwing dirt on her head like that.

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I'm surprised that LKH didn't tack on a "he took me out to see the mangled car & then he sexually abused me" story

I don't know. LKH strikes me as someone who thinks that sexual abuse happens to other people.

I've said it before, but I don't think LKH is actually crazy. I think she has a serious lack of maturity, and I think she needs a reality check in terms of how famous and important she actually is. However, I don't think she's delusional outside of where her fame and the calibre of her writing are concerned.

Granted, the way some of the people in this comm alone talk sometimes, I can see where she and those who love her would think there are people who are so angry about the books that they may resort to violence. If she's gotten wind of some of the more angry, violently-suggestive commets here, her inflated sense of ego likely would turn them from innocent, if innapropriate rantings to honest-to-Diety threats. However I don't think she's in any actual danger. I don't actually believe that anyone's going to assassinate her or break into her house and boil her dogs. I think she should open her eyes and really notice that it's just talk- she doesn't NEED a bodyguard or a gun.

I do, however, believe she really strongly plays to her less mature audience members' expectations, and I think she has an undeserved sense of importance and influence. I will not argue against the suggestion that she believes the nuggets of wisdom she drops in her blog are all-important and highly intelligent. I sincerely believe she believes that people look up to her and want to see her lifestyle mirroring Anita's. I also think she talks about her "imaginary friends" and "muses" like she does because she thinks it makes her look deep and connected to her books. I don't believe that she thinks Nathanial is going to show up in her kitchen and make breakfast one day, but I think she likes to say that she's so deeply involved in her stories that she sometimes "forgets" they're not real, because she thinks this makes her audience take her created world more seriously.

Plus, it's an excuse to write herself into her own fantasy world without putting any real effort into it, but still making money from it. ;)

*nods* You make some really good points. As a fandom, we risk viewing her as a pantomime villainness and therefore extrapolating every small thing she does/says as signs of deep insanity.

Also, I don't find the idea of her being taken to see the wrecked car so unlikely as most people here seem to. You're a grieving family member, in shock... this death has been an accident nobody could predict, everyone is having to cope as best they can... and in the middle of it you have a six-year-old kid to whom you have to somehow get across the idea that her mum is gone, that death is permanent; that it's different from going to work and then coming back later.

I can well imagine that in that situation some adults would show the child the site of the accident because they're at a loss to explain in any other way. It must be indescribably painful to have a young child at your elboy asking, "But why?" every time you try to explain the death. At that age it's a very hard concept for them to grasp. That's why I suspect that, while it may seem bizarre and therefore unbelievable, the story is probably true.

I also don't see the various descriptions she's given of her family's grief as being about deflecting attention onto her... it was a hugely influential thing and it's bound to keep coming up. If any other writer were saying these things people would nod and say, "Ah, yes," but because it's LKH, it gets used to rip her a new one. Not saying we should treat her like a super-speshul snowflake just because her mum died, but the inverse of that is also rather unattractive behaviour.

I often wonder to myself if we're being too harsh with LKH and she's in a position where she can do no right. Then she usually says something totally offensive, bizarre or out of contact with reality -- like the recent "bad guys" post which is really quite alarming.

Re the car thing, I can easily imagine a relative taking a kid to see the car. But I don't believe any sane relative would let the kid crawl inside (extremely not safe!) and fondle the bloodstains.

The inside of the car would have been full of glass shards! I once worked for a personal injury lawyer and saw my share of wrecked cars in scrap yards. If it was more than a fender bender, there was almost always shattered glass.

I can't imagine how she could even crawl around in there without getting cut to pieces.

In the course of my work, I've been to oodles of accidents, and while I can see perhaps an adult trying to use the car as a way of symbolizing the death of someone in a concrete way, there's no way that the cops (on the scene) would allow it, and I can't imagine the operator of a junkyard would be all that crazy about it either.

Did she see the car? Maybe.

Did she crawl over the bloodstains? Hell no.

"I also don't see the various descriptions she's given of her family's grief as being about deflecting attention onto her... it was a hugely influential thing and it's bound to keep coming up. If any other writer were saying these things people would nod and say, "Ah, yes," but because it's LKH, it gets used to rip her a new one. Not saying we should treat her like a super-speshul snowflake just because her mum died, but the inverse of that is also rather unattractive behaviour."

I think she deserves every bit of critcism since she goes on and on about how her mother's death made her a darkity dark soul, while showing absolutely no compassion for her grandmother's grief.

Everyone should be so impressed with Laurita's pain, while the grief of the woman who raised her (over the very same person!) is treated as an embarrassment and a burden.

Treating everyone else's grief as though it should have no validity while she practically brags about weeping over imaginary characters, certainly sounds like she's using the stories as a way of getting attention, as well as being completely incapable of empathy.

Your first line is dead on. I often seen the people in this community picking every small thing up as an excuse to bitch or to bash. I think it's almost a mob mentality, or at least the "popular kids clique" mentality that drives a lot of the community.

I'm not saying I approve of how selfish and immature Hamilton is, of course. I see a lot of flaws in how she sees the world and how she handles things. I just don't think she's deserving the viciousness that many people here spew.

Originally the community had a purpose that was not to tear the author to shreds (I believe the rules actually state it's not allowed!), but to talk more about how the series was in steep decline. Back when it started, the only place to talk Hamilton was the Anita_Blake_Fan community, and many of us were sick of getting jumped on and attacked for daring to say that we didn't like the newer books. People would say that Anita's characterisation was perfect and we would deny that, only to be met with mountains of people telling us that we didn't really have a right to be in a fan community if we weren't fans. Obviously we're still dealing with that mentality from outside the group, but the atmosphere here as changed rather graphically since it all began.

*shrug* I still hang out and watch because I like some of the more intelligent discussion and laughing at some of Hamilton's antics and phrasings are definitely worth the price of admission :)

It's similar in the Anne Rice fandom; I actually think that author is sounding a lot saner despite the fact I don't agree with her on everything. But a lot of the time people are criticising her viciously for everything from showing signs of age to being Christian, and I just think the baby got thrown out with the bathwater.

The irony is that in terms of actual, documented author-to-fan bad behaviour, Hamilton is worse than Rice these days.

I often wonder to myself if we're being too harsh with LKH and she's in a position where she can do no right.

Your first line is dead on. I often seen the people in this community picking every small thing up as an excuse to bitch or to bash. I think it's almost a mob mentality, or at least the "popular kids clique" mentality that drives a lot of the community.

It's probably the "Tigerwolf Effect"--once a person has acquired a reputation for saying remarkably stupid shit, their every utterance gets to be treated as if it were automatically stupid and mockworthy, even when it isn't.

I've never heard of that! Thanks for pointing it out. I'm going to have to google and read up on it :)

I don't want to not believe it, but on the other hand my entire family stopped me from touching my dad's face at the funeral home, and that was fairly innocuous, so...

Who would let her do that? Either she's a completely liar or the adults in her life were nuts. Any way you slice it, it explains a lot.

After reading this, I'm coming across harsher than I mean to. Let me explain:

When my Grandmother died, I didn't go to the funeral. I think my mother made a good decision because the only memories I have of her are of her being alive. To me, especially when with kids so young, sometimes not seeing a corpse is the best thing a person could do. So when I hear of people taking a child to the scene of thier parents death, anything short of not getting the chance to drop the kid off makes no sence to me; a mangled, blood splattered car is the stuff of nightmares. For LKH to be taken to the scene and allowed to touch the blood inside the car, either the adults around her weren't thinking, or they thought the experience would help with the greiving process. The latter I think is nuts because it ignores the fact that a person is dealing with someone at an age were fact and fiction are relative terms.

Well this tags Trin as at around 14ish. I know there have been some comments in the past as to how old the kid was. I would be embarrassed that my mom was screening pg-13 movies for me at that age.

The main reason my mom was screening R-rated movies (on video, of course) for me at that age was because my asking if she would check them out first seemed like the most likely way to avoid a flat-out "No."

R is not the same as PG-13, though.

With her surge in popularity, Hamilton has a chance at science fiction conventions and book signings to find out just how real readers believe her characters are. Fans have been asking whether she is armed.
"I don't like to answer," Hamilton said. "Why would they want to know? But then I realized, they just want me to play Anita. They want to know how much like her I am. So I've had to flash open my coat and say, 'No, I'm not carrying.' And then I say, 'But you didn't see the small of my back. There are lots of places to hide guns.' "

This basically confirms my theory that she's not a crazy, she just plays one on TV the blog. Because she wrote Anita so close to herself, fans expected her to be Anita. So, she started acting like Anita and it just snowballed into what she is now- a melodramatic and cheesily cliche version of herself who's lost control of the books to the characters that "really" write them.

The part that dropped my jaws, however, was the bit that stated she was an editor at one point.

REALLY?!

As much as I'd like to go through this some more and mock, I should have been in bed four hours ago @_@

Yeah, I called it quits after the first page, but the other two are ripe for the flogging as well. You know, if she were really averse to being conflated with her character, she wouldn't coyly "prove" she's unarmed--she would just laugh it off and remind everyone that she only writes the books, she doesn't live them.

Except, of course, we know she aspires to.

LKH's endless "waaaaaah my mommy died and I've never gotten over it and it ruined my life and it turned me into the hardened superspeshul person I am today!" always reminds me of Madonna's similarly tired attempts to add humanity and tragedy to her life. Ain't workin'.

"Sucky as this particular situation is, has anyone ever seen LKH say anything positive about the woman who raised her? All I can recall are put-downs and, at best, backhanded remarks."

Nope, can't remember. And I doubt it's for any legit reason because she would never hesitate to howl about how this person treated her badly, or that person was pure evil because they said this to her. So I suspect she disliked her grandmother for the same reason Whorenita hates her stepmother -- because no matter how kind she would try to be, she was considered evil because she wasn't Laurita's instantly-canonized mommy.

Either that, or her grandmother didn't prance around paying endless attention to Laurita's particularly deep grief and shit, rather than grieving herself.

"...come to that, has anyone seen this mentioned anywhere else either? It sounds like the kind of "woe, my bloody childhood made me old and wise before my time!" anecdote that she'd slip into conversation as often as possible."

Again, I remember it not. I wouldn't be surprised if she got carried away and put this crap into the interview, then forgot about it for different woe-inspiring exaggerations and imaginations.

"And...well, not to belittle the strain an event like that must have been on such a young child, she's really not the only person who faced tragedy as a kid, and I really wish she'd talk more about working past said tragedy instead of reveling in it like it gives her street cred or something."

But it IS her street cred. As with Madonna, without her Past Of Woe And Tragedy That No One Else Can Possibly Understand, without it she'd be another middle-aged woman from a stable middle-class household.

" is an resilent as Raymond Chandler character"

Waaaaahahhhh, the big mean vampire knocked me on my ample butt again! Waaaaaaahhhh, the big mean vampire knocked the gun outta my hand again!

"and as much of a feminist as Sara Parentsky's V.I. Warshawski- albeit more chaste."

Pause for hysterical laughter here.

I was going to try to read the rest of it, but I don't think I can take it combined with the red-on-yellow.

But it just occurred to me, Frollo still dies in the Disney Hunchback. In fact, Quasimodo's mother is killed right at the very beginning of it. So if she were watching the movie with Trinity, she would have known almost instantly that there was death in it. Why she'd be worrying about explaining "permanent night-night" only if Quasimodo died, when she already knew one person had died and when approximately 95% of the characters die in the original, I can't begin to understand.

To say nothing about the fact that somebody dies in every Disney cartoon I can think of, so if you aren't up for explaining "permanent night-night," Hunchback isn't any more dangerous than the others. A better question would be "is this going to be as inappropriate for a two-year-old as the novel would be?" (a question to which one could probably answer "No" as soon as one sees the talking gargoyles), or "Am I going to have to explain what Frollo wants to do with Esmerelda?"

I highlighted the text in order to get through it. That layout is just horrid.

Good point--it's a pretty hardcore movie, for Disney, what with all the murder and lusting and swearing and setting innocent people on fire. Maybe she was concerned because Quasimodo's a main character, whereas his mother has about five minutes of screen time and Frollo clearly has the Bad Guy sign on his chest?

Although Disney villains seem to die by falling off ledges an awful lot, so if nothing else that makes for an easy explanation. "Oh, he fell a very long way and won't ever come back," etc.

Seriously. I was about twelve when the Disney Hunchback came out, and mainly I remember "Hellfire" and thinking "This is a Disney movie?" ~~Which is probably why I still watch it now and then.~~

"Hellfire" is possibly the only sign in the film that they even bothered to read the bits in the book about Frollo. It's a kickass song. =D

The character she created at least in part on her own self-image, is an resilent as Raymond Chandler character and as much of a feminist as Sara Parentsky's V.I. Warshawski- albeit more chaste

Aaah! No! Do not sully my Vic, bish!

And Vic would kick Anita's ass.

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<b.After the family was notified [of her mother's death], Hamilton remembers walking to an uncle's house through tiny Sims [Indiana] with her grandmother hysterically "wailing and keening."

"When the neighbors asked what had happened, I was the one who said, 'My mommy died on the way home from work.' "

Hamilton's uncle subsequently took the 6-year-old to see the wrecked car. She remembers crawling inside, "touching the bloodstains. No one protected me from that. I did not flinch. I remember all the details." </b>

Seriously, I've read this whole passage in one of the Anita books. Almost exactly. I think it was Bloody Bones.

I remember reading, back when I was a real die-hard drooling fan, about her mother's death. Even without really knowing what a Mary Sue was, I was like, "Gee, that's her character's story too."

The only difference is that it was Anita's father who wailed all the way down the street, not the grandmother. Not that Anita's grandmother is made to be a wonderful person either.

I thought I had read it in a book, too! But no one else was mentioning it, so I figured maybe I'd read the interview before. If you remember it too, though, it must be in there.

I mean there's nothing wrong with working through your issues on paper (last I checked Stephen King still isn't over the whole I-got-hit-by-a-car theme) but that's just kind of shameless, don't you think?

Seriously, I've read this whole passage in one of the Anita books. Almost exactly. I think it was Bloody Bones.

It's Obsidian Butterfly, when she's lecturing Donna about how she has to be tough for her kids.

I knew it was in one of them. Lord knows that Anita mentions her mother dying (and her father marrying a blond nordic goddess) enough times per book, it's hard to keep track of them all.

I guess I thought it was Bloody Bones because of the whole Serphina (that was awesome bad vampire in that book right?) had the whole "pretending to be her mom" bit.

"I remembered my mother's face the last time I'd seen her. The coffin had been dark wood covered in a blanket of pink roses. I knew Mommy was in there, but they wouldn't let me see. No one could see. Closed coffin, they said, closed coffin. Every adult in my life was having hysterics. The room was full of screams, sobbing. My father collapsed to the floor. He was useless to me. I wanted my mother. The latches on the coffin were silver. I opened them, and I heard a cry behind me. I didn't have much time."

Note that she doesn't give a damn about how anybody feels at all, and how she only thinks of her father as "useless" because he dares to be grief-stricken.

How sudden was this funeral -- or is her family just extremely expressive? I've been to funerals, and while there was crying and moping, it wasn't this screaming in the aisles, falling over in a mess of why-God-why. Not to say that it's not true, but it just seems so over-the-top.

Actually, that quote was from one of the books. Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if this was her perception.

Not that LKH is necessarily privy to such things, but some people do allow very OTT flailing at funerals. I went to a tangi once (Maori funeral) of a person who had died from cancer in late middle age - his death was very expected - and there was a great deal of hysteria at the funeral even *after* the whole two days of sitting with him, people coming in and crying deal. In truth, I think it's probably very good for people to be culturally allowed to go crazy-mad. Gets it all out.

She's mentioned getting in the car when she was a kid before, and that there was broken glass everywhere.

It's all very Dramatic! isn't it?

Hi, all:

let's see, she was watching THE HUNCHBACK with her 2 year old in 1996. That makes Trinity 14 as of right now. Since lkh ret-con's EVERYTHING in her life, guess that Trinity is STILL 2 years old at this point.

lkh goes into GREAT detail in her earlier books about how traumatic her childhood was, although she doesn't let her daddy DESERT them - he just gets remarried, which, in lkh's book, is even WORSE than her real father's alleged desertion of her before her mother died. You're also right in saying that lkh hasn't EVER had a kind word to say about anyone from her early years, most especially her father and her grandmother. Isn't it WONDERFUL that she can get rid of a lot of her demons and traumas by flogging the people in her life that hurt, desert or disappoint her? SURE wish I had her problems!

As for referring to her as a feminist in the style of Sara Paretskey: pfui (to quite Nero Wolffe). Neither one of these two fictional characters (V. I. Warshawksy OR WhoreNita Blake) are feminists. I WILL say that Mrs. Paretsky DOES avoid the Mary-Sueisms but her Warshawski character is a whiney crybaby in an AWFUL lot of ways. I LOVED the first four books in the series, and completely lost interest when Mrs. Paretsky started writing about ever more IMPROBABLE cases that her PI needed to get involved with and solve, out of some sense of "civic duty" (shuddering). I personally know at least a dozen PI's, and even THEY say that Ms. Warshawsky has gotten less and less believeable as the series has gone on. I'll add at this point that ALSO saying that she's created a character as strong as the ones in the Raymond Chandler series of books, well, that just PROVES the point that she hates being a woman, wants a REAL penis, and hates the world around her to a great extent. "Hard-boiled" detectives are ALWAYS male, and the females around them are ALWAYS either Madonnas or whores, sometimes both at the same time.

Blessings,

-,'-,'-,'--@

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Vintage LKH

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u g h - and THEN some!