Kate Braverman Is Dead

I.

In the photo I find, taken around 1977, Kate Braverman’s Los Angeles is painted in opaque shades of blue, her color of possibility. Not quite sapphire — a particularly powerful hue — but the color wheel is spinning in that direction. Sylvia Plath has been dead for nearly fifteen years, though Braverman has only just discovered her poems. Joan Didion’s second novel is in print and James Merill is about to win the Pulitzer Prize for Divine Comedies. Braverman feels Merrill’s work, absent sprawling language and dully non-confessional, lacks risk — that his words are just another bland entry into the male dominion that is literature.

In the photo, she stands in front of a shop window, naturally disinterested. “Beverly Hills,” the sign reads. It’s one of the only shots I’ve ever seen where she looks relaxed, her hands in her pockets. She wears a skirt long over her knees, pulled up to her waist, fastened with a belt. She’s thin, but her cheeks are full. She’s just published her first book of poetry, Milk Run, and her debut was a success: her friends at Momentum Press had underestimated the print demand. Open, all open the places. Never mind that she’s going to walk home through a dark and filthy LA alleyway. Never mind that afterward, she’ll heat speed over an open flame, because the world, for the first time, has made space for her. Los Angeles’s streets overflow with art and literature, and her mind, full of sex and rage and sprawling sentences, is not only tolerated, but, at last, celebrated. “She has,” a critic wrote, “come to a place on the narrow landscape of American poetry where her art and talents cannot be denied.”

For the next forty years, she’ll struggle to fit more than an arm and the backside of her torso into this space. She’ll try everything: Prozac, Lithium, hiding her breasts, pulling her shirt over her head on the Venice boardwalk. Her future efforts will be deemed too desperate, too ambitious, her fiction’s protagonists — double-fisting a syringe and a pen, leaving men behind, gasping for air — too intense and severe. Her rage and her obstinacy, which will drive her work, will trap her, too. “Girl child of the already decomposing streets of Los Angeles,” she’ll later call this 1977 self, with all her bursting naiveté.

But that’s an entire decade away. How marvelous it seems, now, that the world, that LA, has space enough for her. That she might be able to live and write exactly as she is forever. To keep her vision, her body, entirely intact.

So much happened between 1977 and the very end. Between 1977 and when I learned Kate Braverman was dead. She published her debut novel, Lithium for Medea, in 1979, garnering praise from most major newspapers, as well as from both Joan Didion and Greil Marcus. “A deeply felt piece of work by a very gifted young writer,” Didion wrote.

A teacher gave me in early 2020. She’d first encountered the novel decades prior, but had not, she admitted, heard anything new about Braverman since the ‘90s. , I learned from a minimally illustrative back cover description, follows the story of a