The iconic L.A. writer John Rechy has just published a memoir, “About My Life and the Kept Woman,” and he wants to make clear right away that he made stuff up.
“I consider writers a hierarchy of liars,” Rechy said on a recent afternoon, “and the autobiographer is the biggest liar of all.”
He was sitting in the dining room of the Beachwood Canyon home he shares with Michael Snyder, a movie producer and his partner of more than 20 years, surrounded by luminous black-and-white portraits of Hollywood stars like Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe. Now 76, Rechy remains best known for the 1963 novel “City of Night,” a semiautobiographical window into the world of gay street hustling that has influenced artists as diverse as Jim Morrison, David Hockney and Gus Van Sant, who has long wanted to make it into a movie. (“Maybe I should talk to John about that again,” Van Sant wrote in an e-mail, calling the book “an American masterpiece.”)
more from the LA Times here.