Self Indulgent Hogwash

Weird Monologues for a Rainy Life (irreverent ramblings from the end of the world)
Lorette C. Luzajic’s new book launches this month

Do-it-yourself diva Lorette C. Luzajic launches her second book, Weird Monologues for a Rainy Life (irreverent ramblings from the end of the world.)  It’s a book about everything- a compendium of 390 pages of reviews, manifestos, requiems, opinion columns, tributes, gossip, and even some academia. And this is part one- the sequel, Dendrite Pandemonium: Hits, Misses, and Random B-Sides will follow later this year.

Lorette’s a journalism graduate who found more success being herself as a freelancer, and she writes seven columns and various news stories or profile pieces through her market base, www.thegirlcanwrite.net. A quick google will get you enough reading for the rest of your life, and some artwork, too.

Lorette’s fans are as diverse as her work. “Think Courtney Love meets Margaret Atwood,” says Toronto’s premier female impersonator Donnarama. Meanwhile, bestselling author of Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore, finds her “imaginative, witty, blessedly free of normal logic, surprising, profound.” Then again, she’s got plenty of detractors, like financial consultant Clarens M, who called her work “self indulgent hogwash.”

Lorette joined forces with designer Gonzalo de Cardenas to create an unusual book, illustrated by Caroline Bacher with cover art by Iaian Greenson. The result is a stand-out product that looks pretty cool on your coffee table- or, as Lorette suggests, the back of your loo.  “The whole idea of this book was to combine a range of my stories, blogs, musings, reviews, and so on, from all over the map, in a way that spanned my wild mood swings, the ups and downs, the embarrassing and the brilliant.” she says. “The extremes of the things I’ve been through touch chords with the life experiences of my readers- I tend to laugh and cry a lot. That I often feel vulnerable, naked, over-revealed kept me from writing down the bones for too long- there’s always an element of self-censorship and it just doesn’t get to the heart. The minute I stopped fearing this exposure was the moment I started to grow as a writer. Symbolically, this is me naked, messy, crazy, everybody’s sister.”

Indeed, Lorette writes candidly about the stuff we all wrestle with but don’t want to admit- grief, addiction, madness, spiritual uncertainty, the creative struggle, self doubt, health. Titles include Headbanging on Ketamine, The Perpetuation of Human Sacrifice Traditions in Popular Culture, For Women Who Love Men Who Love Men and the Women Who Love Them, and The Million Dollar Maybe. With trademark twisted humour and an insistence on reading signs into every possible aspect of human life, Lorette C. Luzajic pulls some skeletons out of the closet and polishes them up for public display.

Handymaiden Editions, 2009
http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=Lorette%20C.%20Luzajic&page=1