In January, the New Yorker ran apersonal historyby the novelist Rachel Kushner about her teen and young adult adventures in San Francisco. Headlined “The Hard Crowd,” it conjured the sights, sounds and even a few of the smells of a city where musicians and artists lived in cheap apartments with neighbors named Noodles, smoked, went to rock shows, did drugs and tended bar in dives so dive-y, one even had an old man sleeping in a bed near the pool tables “as if it were his hospice.”
In other words, a lost world.
That essay, which shares its name with a new collection called “The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020,” sparked an intense response. “The reaction was bigger than anything I’d ever written just in terms of getting letters from people, the New Yorker getting letters, and people reaching out to me directly,” Kushner, 52, told The Chronicle by phone from her home in Los Angeles.
“The Hard Crowd”is out Tuesday, April 6, and Kushner is scheduled to talk about the book in a free virtual event hosted by City Lights Booksellers and Publishers at 6 p.m. Wednesday, April 7.
According to Kushner, the most passionate responses came from people who grew up in the Sunset, Kushner’s old neighborhood, in the 1980s. Many of them told the author that she’d captured some impossible-to-define essence of their past lives, including things they’d rarely shared with others because, she explained, “the details actually seem unbelievable to people.”
In another “Hard Crowd” piece, Kushner describes her friends as “ratty delinquents looking for beer, weed, and opportunities for theft and trespass … we partied with strangers, which is what I spent a lot of my youth doing.”
“I talk to old friends of mine about this a lot, just what that world was like, and how it’s really hard to explain to people who aren’t from it,” Kushner said. “I think that maybe that San Francisco that I hail from is a bit hard … and, you know, it’s not typical among my crowd that people became published authors.”
Kushner has written three acclaimed novels: “Telex From Cuba” (2008), “The Flamethrowers” (2013) and“The Mars Room”(2018), which was short-listed for the Man BookerPrize. (She’s also published a book of short stories, “The Strange Case of Rachel K,” from 2015.) Drawn from reported pieces and essays she wrote for the New York Times Magazine, Bookforum, Vogue and various anthologies, “The Hard Crowd” is her first nonfiction book.
In addition to the autobiographical moments found in the collection, longtime readers of Kushner’s novels will find familiar themes: motorcycle racing, vintage American cars, road tripping, prison and contemporary art, as well as appreciations of writers like Marguerite Duras and Denis Johnson.
The book also features cameos from San Francisco promoterBill Graham, who tackles a friend of Kushner’s as they attempt to sneak into a Clash show at Civic Auditorium, and Keith Richards, who co-bartends aRolling Stonescrew party beside Kushner (really) and “drank Jack and gingers all night long, personally draining probably two bottles of Jack Daniel’s.” If these stories sound almost like legends, that’s because, so many decades and so many versions of San Francisco later, that’s what they are.
Kushner’s parents still live in the Sunset. and when she comes back, she sees that many of their newer neighbors figured out something she and her hard crowd never got right back in the day.
“我注意到,那些已经存在better equipped in terms of their high-tech-fabric clothing,” she said with a laugh. “We were just always freezing and we weren’t suitably dressed. We were out at the beach in the middle of the night, drinking 40 ounces or whatever. And they’re just well dressed for it.”
“The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020”
By Rachel Kushner
(Scriber; 272 pages; $21.99)
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