Weetzie and Dirk grow into full-fledged adults in fewer than 100 pages and, as this happens, their surroundings change in both subtle and significant ways. I traveled some of the same streets they did, like Melrose Avenue and Ventura Boulevard, but even those had morphed by the book’s end. They frequented clubs like the Starwood and Cathay de Grande, venues that closed years earlier. With her BFF Dirk, Weetzie haunted a Los Angeles landscape that had been long altered by the early 1990s, when I first read the book.

She found beauty even in the sites that make locals roll their eyes and Block’s vivid descriptions took Los Angeles beyond the cliches that mark so much writing about the city, even when she draws from its best-known symbols. Weetzie had a litany of things her classmates took for granted, from tourist traps to souvenirs to foods both common and bizarre to the streets once roamed by long-gone celebrities. It was Weetzie’s love of Los Angeles that helped me discover my own. It’s a book about finding love, both the romantic and familial kind. Initially released in 1989, Weetzie Bat is the first of a series known as “Dangerous Angels.” In it, we meet the titular heroine, a Hollywood girl with white-blond hair, funky clothes and a penchant for punk rock and vintage movies. But, it’s not that kind of story and the second sentence of Francesca Lia Block’s debut novel let’s us know that the writer is taking us somewhere else: “They didn’t even realize where they were living.” Weetzie Bat‘s opening sentence, “The reason Weetzie Bat hated high school was because no one understood,” is a little too obvious, encapsulating every tale of teen angst from Catcher in the Rye to The Breakfast Club. I remain an Angeleno because of Weetzie Bat. And that was because of a book that I had first read a couple years earlier. Really, though, it’s because when I was a high school senior and had my first chance to split, I decided that maybe L.A. You could chalk that up to job opportunities or other life circumstances. Wherever my teenage self thought this life might take me, it would be at least hours away from Los Angeles. I had traveled there shortly before I hit my teens and had fond memories of it. New York could be wild, filled with clubs and art and fashion that, I had read, was infinitely more interesting than what we knew in Los Angeles. Manchester could be amazing (even if the descriptions were less than glamorous) since that’s where the Smiths and so many of my of other favorite bands formed.

I imagined life in places I mainly knew through books and magazine articles. Maybe that’s normal, even when your hometown is Los Angeles. I spent my early teenage years dreaming of somewhere else.

Weetzie bat