FOX, Laurie (Anne)

PERSONAL: Married D. Patrick Miller (an author).

ADDRESSES: Home—Berkeley, CA. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Simon & Schuster Publicity, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

CAREER: Literary agent in San Diego and San Francisco; writer-in-residence, Los Angeles schools.

WRITINGS:

Sweeping Beauty, Illuminati (Los Angeles, CA), 1985.

Sexy Hieroglyphics: 3,375 Do-It-Yourself Haiku, Chronicle (San Francisco, CA),

My Sister from the Black Lagoon: A Novel of My Life, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1998.

SIDELIGHTS: In her semiautobiographical novel, My Sister from the Black Lagoon, Laurie Fox portrays the lives of Lorna and her mentally disturbed sister, Lonnie, as they grow up in California during the 1960s. While Lonnie threw temper tantrums, howled like an animal, and shaved her head, Lorna tried to find her way through high school and college unscathed by this family tragedy. She turned to poetry and acting, which helped her develop independently of her sister.

My Sister from the Black Lagoon caught the attention of critics. Although Susan Hall-Balduf described Fox in the Detroit Free Press as a writer of "vivid" prose, she also asserted that Lorna's contention that Lonnie resembled the movie creature from the Black Lagoon and "that she just wants, needs, deserves a life free of analysis and drugs and other people's control," "insults" families in which a member suffers from a mental illness. Myah Evers, writing in Library Journal, judged the pace to be too slow in the early chapters, though she found the characters to be "outrageous" yet plausible. Booklist reviewer Toni Hyde, however, commented that Fox's clear writing and "conversational tone" make the novel readable. And a Publishers Weekly critic praised the novel as a "triumph of storytelling verve, dark humor and unabashed candor."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, July, 1998, Toni Hyde, review of My Sister from the Black Lagoon: A Novel of My Life, p. 1856.

Detroit Free Press, August 30, 1998, Susan Hall-Balduf, "A Troubled Sister Uses up All the Love Her Family Has to Give," p. 7H.

Library Journal, June 15, 1998, Myah Evers, review of My Sister from the Black Lagoon, p. 105.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 7, 1985, Jonathan Kirsch, "Paper Weight," p. 9.

Publishers Weekly, June 8, 1998, review of My Sister from the Black Lagoon, p. 45.*