Dear Miss Bankhead:

I thought I was a friend of yours. That’s why there’s nothing in my book that was unfriendly to you, unkind or libelous. Because I didn’t want to drag you, I tried six times last month to talk to you on the damn phone, and tell you about the book just as a matter of courtesy. That bitch you have who impersonates you kept telling me to call back and when I did, it was the same deal until I gave up. But while I was working out of town, you didn’t mind talking to Doubleday and suggesting behind my damned back that I had flipped and/or made up those little mentions of you in my book. Baby, Cliff Allen and Billy Heywood are still around. My maid who was with me at the Strand isn’t dead either. There are plenty of others around who remember how you carried on so you almost got me fired out of the place. And if you want to get shitty, we can make it a big shitty party. We can all get funky together!

I don’t know whether you’ve got one of those damn lawyers telling you what to do or not. But I’m writing this to give you a chance to answer back quick and apologize to me and to Doubleday. Read my book over again. I understand they sent you a duplicate manuscript. There’s nothing in it to hurt you. If you think so, let’s talk about it like I wanted to last month. It’s going to press right now so there is no time for monkeying around. Straighten up and fly right, Banky. Nobody’s trying to drag you.¹

Billie Holiday

The most common question that I have gotten over the years—at readings, in classrooms, and from friends—is how I deal with the fallout of including living people in my work. I usually respond by first telling them that there are no living people in my work, only characters, which are figments animated by imagination plus a small number of qualities shared by the person on whom they are based. They are a process and a product of radical reduction. The trouble is that almost no one likes to be reduced, even to their most cherished qualities.

The touch of strangers still startles me. Unknown fingertips brushing the soft inside of my bicep, grazing the back of my shoulder, closing firmly around my forearm. I flinch, gasp, or freeze inside, pulse trilling. It happened yesterday, in a café on Christopher Street. Instead of taking the money from my outstretched hand, the young barista seized my wrist, pulling my arm toward her. I let her but blinked in surprise at the sudden warmth of her grasp, in this city where personal space is a delicately regarded boundary.

“I love that!” she exclaimed, eyeing the portrait tattooed on my bicep. “Who is it?”