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 Lithium for Medea in early 2020. She’d first encountered the novel decades prior, but had not, she admitted, heard anything new about Braverman since the ‘90s. Medea, I learned from a minimally illustrative back cover description, follows the story of a cocaine-addicted twenty-seven-year-old woman in the bohemian squalor of early 1970s Venice, California. What most stunned me, upon reading the novel, wasn’t the aching malice of the characters so much as the sentences: maximal, swollen with absurdity and the possibility of bold failure, and, still, fastidiously attuned. As if an entire sensory lifetime had been distilled into 350 pages, into her sentences. “I stood on the street in front of my mother’s house for a long time,” Braverman writes.

I looked directly up at the sky, which was an undamaged blue, a plain blue, absolutely blue, blue as a piece of roof slate. I wanted some strange, parting, an inexplicable red streak, an omen, however peripheral or at the mercy of that monster, interpretation. I wanted something to shake itself loose and take a position, any position at all.

Until then, I had believed successful writing was a minimalist’s endeavor, that a writer was to say what they needed to say with as little as possible. But Braverman withheld nothing. “Undamaged blue, a plain blue, absolutely blue, blue as a piece of roof slate”: in its repetitive profuseness, it nearly resembles satire. But in the novel, it works. It works because almost every sentence in Lithium for Medea is claustrophobically annihilating. Braverman owned her bigness like no woman I’d previously encountered, and something in me sensed that she might help to carry me forward. To reveal a way of turning and facing life with immensity and honesty, and to do so without a whiff of romanticization.

Upon finishing Medea, I embarked on a search for Kate Braverman. I Googled her in the back corner of my empty student newspaper office. The first result was a Wikipedia page: “Kate Braverman (born February 5, 1949) is an American short story writer, novelist, and poet.” I was surprised to learn that her publishing career spanned nearly five decades. Her final collection of short stories, A Good Day for Seppuku, was released in early 2018, but nearly all of her recognitions and awards came from Lithium for Medea and “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta,” a short story she published in the ‘90s. Braverman was almost entirely out of print by the time I encountered her, a name caught in the cracks of the century before.

She was also dead. Her death had occurred recently, and because her Wikipedia page hadn’t been updated, I learned of it only by scrolling further down the Google search results page, where I discovered a New York Times obituary dated October 2019, three months earlier. The piece was short, elegant, polite, published a few days after the fact. Cardiac arrest. Was she sixty-nine or seventy? Nobody seemed to agree.

Kate Braverman was born in Philadelphia, raised Jewish and working-class in what she called the slums of Los Angeles. The city itself, she’d written, was “a wound in soft flesh.” In her writing, she described her mother as largely absent, disappearing for days at a time to sleep with men and work con jobs. When this wasn’t enough to cover medical expenses, she sold their brass lamps and piano. The family was poor: “proto-welfare, Sun Belt Style,” Braverman once wrote. She sensed she was supposed to feel ashamed of their poverty, which only furthered her desire to eviscerate it in her writing.

In part, she resented the Los Angeles that nobody saw: the decaying streets where she collected soda bottles in exchange for pennies, the secondhand dresses, the rats in the kitchen pantry. But she was also pleased with the outlaw status conferred by her upbringing. For much of her life, she fixated on the reality of this so-called paradise: the residents affected by addiction, the coughing smog. A “gulag with palm trees,” as she called it. The mundane apartment buildings in which she grew up, all adjacent to a roaring freeway, any means of escape a whisper from far away. Her great literary love, perhaps even more than the danger and the power, more than drugs and sex, was the LA landscape.

With a volatile temperament that would overwhelm, for the better or the worse, the entirety of her life, Braverman spent decades viscerally stoking and abandoning her love affair with the written word. She failed tenth-grade English and, rather than repeat it, dropped out of high school entirely — part of a deliberate rebellion against everything conventional, from enforced ideas of womanhood to the class confines of Los Angeles to the sentence diagramming she had to do in school, which offended her, she said, “on a molecular level.” But tenth grade was also the year her English teacher gave her a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and she caught a glimpse, for the first time, of that creative possibility, the pure blue blue. Not long after, having begun to write poems herself, she convinced an instructor at UCLA to allow her to join his workshop, already determined to see herself among the greats. She was fifteen years old.

Braverman rarely talked about the next few years, at least in detail. She ran away to Berkeley, where she re-enrolled in high school (she allegedly told the principal that her twenty-one-year-old roommate was both her cousin and legal guardian). She spent a largely useless year in Venice, got married at eighteen, and studied at a community college in Santa Monica before heading to UC Berkeley for a four-year degree. In college, she protested the Vietnam War, got hooked on cocaine, received a diagnosis for what was then called “manic depression” (for which she’d eventually abandon treatment), and studied anthropology — believing, always, that a writer must first master another subject.

Braverman was enduringly rooted in Los Angeles, even if the increasingly vanishing city of her childhood often felt more like a road to death than anything else. When she moved back to LA in her early twenties, she turned to poetry again, recording her life in verse with visceral bluntness: destructive sex, an overdose. “I ate breakfast at sunset, / drinking wine and sleep pills / laughing and crashing into doors.” The prospect of apologizing was to her, even then, abhorrent. “I’ve never been careful, / I told them,” she wrote. “I miss so much as it is. / If I were careful, God, / I would miss it all.” When she read that last stanza aloud in a poetry workshop, her teacher asked if she was quoting Anne Sexton. No, the writing was her own, she said, and the instructor, who had been standing, slumped into his chair. “It [was] a turning point in my life,” she wrote to another poet, decades later. “My first just written poems had the power to make a man sit down.”

So much of her work was born from this: her desire to make a man sit down. Across four decades, she would publish twelve books — poems and short stories, novels and a memoir — all of which are populated with unorthodox women. A revulsion toward conventional womanhood drives the rage in her writing. Womanhood should, she believed, confer outlaw status; it should encompass everything from single motherhood to murder, creation to destruction, the full alphabet of human possibility. Central to her narratives are characters with addictions or criminal records, or who court instability — people who, like herself, have a penchant for danger, a penchant for pain. Sex, pain intermingling with pleasure, were regular subjects. Intimacy and sentimentality were not: “you never understood this man / or why you need him,” she wrote. “Surely another could have tied your wrists / and made your hidden parts open, glistening.” Elsewhere, she wrote about rejecting men’s company altogether: “by choice I sleep alone.”

Braverman saw violence everywhere. She saw it in the obvious places: the men who sold cocaine on the streets, the soldiers coming home from Vietnam. But she saw it just as much in the browning leaves that people stepped on without thought, or the sunflowers left to rot on the ground in October. This wasn’t quite the same as pain; pleasure was absent from violence, although violence could be beautiful. “Naked she is a pagan princess. / Shoulders blue and green tattoos,” she wrote, describing a woman who had been beaten. Braverman spent much of her life trying to parse violence committed by women, violence inflicted upon women. She tried to understand women in pain — women who, like herself, failed to escape the body, the land on which they were raised. She never quite could. This drove her to despair.

An almost entirely autobiographical novel, Lithium for Medea is, at its core, about a woman trying to escape the confines of everything that made Braverman herself feel ensared: Los Angeles, destruction, the female body, conventional womanhood, lackluster sex, marriage, babies. She wrote the entire novel in her kitchen because she was heavily addicted to cocaine then, and the blood that accompanied drug injection was easiest to clean off of linoleum floors. Rose, the novel’s protagonist, is likewise interested in darkness, violation, and cocaine, which feels, Braverman writes, like “wearing the sky for eyes.” Even now, forty-three years after its initial publication, Medea is startling in its depictions of masochism and addiction. To torment her lover, Rose fucks women she meets on the street. She’s selfish and self-consumed. She is also the hero of the novel, and everything around her is slipping away: time, her body, her father, who, like Braverman’s own, is dying of throat cancer.

Rose is first married to an academic whose primary hobby is watching Star Trek while sitting on a straw mat. She divorces him and finds a new lover, a sadistic slumlord who paints women humping beer cans and shoots Rose up with cocaine in the bathroom. Mostly, Rose feels nothing. Sex doesn’t feel good and it doesn’t feel awful; she can’t quite hate her mother, and she can’t quite love her father. Her world is like his stuffy hospital room: “the air seemed a special glistening gray, seasonless, the color of waiting.”

Every time the phone rings, Rose thinks her father must be dead. She’s twenty-seven, and, as her mother likes to remind her, it’s too late to have a baby, too late to get clean, too late to find a man to love her throughout the coming decades. Her family lineage is poisoned with psychosis and cancer and narcissism. “It wasn’t a family tree,” she’d write, decades later. “It was a thornbush.”

Braverman’s novels and short stories are poems expanded into prose. The only difference between a poem and a story, she said, was whether or not the lines broke, whether she cut the length at two pages, or two hundred, or two thousand. Lithium for Medea was born of more than a dozen poems, many of which — “Cobalt Blues,” “Three,” “Waiting” — first appeared in Milk Run.

If traditional plot is a singular body, then Braverman’s stories are composed of a thousand bodies. Each sentence contains its own heartbeat, examined a hundred times over. Her writing, reverent and sexual, peaks and retracts:

I am released from the familiar grooves and black metal tracks of parallel worlds, insanity, desperation, numb and hot and gutted. And Jason, I tried to make myself small enough for you, kept hobbling and hacking off my limbs, but they kept growing back, growing back. And I am moving, strings cut, and winds blowing and going, going.

She strung together a litany of images — “the black metal tracks of parallel worlds” — and a litany of sounds and silences: “winds blowing and going, going.” Reading Braverman, then, demands patience and a willing ear. It requires an earnest thirst on the part of the reader that can be satisfied by language alone. The fate of the women in her stories remains secondary. When critics called Lithium for Medea a fever dream, they were, in many ways, grabbing onto something rich: Rose wants to scream at sunflowers. She strangles her lover’s cat because things die in threes, and she wants her father to survive his surgery. She writes to her cousin about their festering family lineage and watches herself go insane. But there is also a dismissal laced into the idea of the book as a fever dream; the label implies beauty, but illusory beauty. It stops short of acknowledging the inherent truth in Rose’s story.

Braverman didn’t quite fit anywhere on the literary spectrum. Critics couldn’t pin Rose down, so they psychoanalyzed her instead. “Rose is an emotional creampuff,” a Press Democrat critic wrote shortly after the novel’s publication. In the New York Times, Katha Pollitt complained that Braverman’s novel was overwritten, overwrought from passion. “I found myself skimming many histrionic tributes to the sun, ocean, trees,” Pollitt wrote, deeming Braverman’s incantatory prose as irritating, Victorian-esque bombast, and characterizing Rose’s hippie-mystic search for “blood truths” as “way off base.” It’s hard to tell if Pollitt is critiquing Braverman’s characters or Braverman herself.

What Rose actually needs, according to Politt, is more “rational intelligence,” not less. But Braverman never wrote from a rational place. Her women win sword fights with ribbons, and such illogic allows for radical hope, even within bleakness. This was the core of her brilliance.

Braverman’s father survived cancer, after having his throat blasted with cobalt in a shitty suburban hospital (so she described in “Cobalt Blues”), and she dedicated Lithium for Medea to him. But he died by suicide in early 1979, just months before the novel’s release. This hadn’t been part of her narrative. Neither was the fight her publisher, Harper & Row, put up before publishing the book. Braverman was asked to trim the last sixty pages — an elusive, protracted prose-poem — down to four. She barely managed to keep the title over their objections (despite being steeped in Greek allusion, the book only explicitly mentions Medea a few times). Inside the space made for her by the literary establishment just two years prior, she’d found hollow walls, musty air, disappointment.

The Lithium for Medea era was the very beginning for Kate Braverman, the very beginning of Kate Braverman. The beginning of her writing life, suddenly swollen with literary attention and promise: “The infinite and absolute / of pure blue, blue… / I am owed this much.” But 1979 was also the end of Braverman’s confidence that she could write, could be, whatever she wanted, and that she could concurrently publish her work as she desired. Despite the early successes of Milk Run and Lithium for Medea, Braverman would learn that publishers, the city of Los Angeles, and the literary world itself, owed a woman like her nothing. Even if her poems could make a man sit down.

II.

Time was moving too quickly. “You turn your back, / reach for a match / and you are thirty-one,” she wrote. Around 1982, in eighteen months of manic fury — sleeping only every other night, standing up from her typewriter drenched in sweat, drinking her first cup of coffee before dawn and her last after dusk — she drafted her second novel, Palm Latitudes. She was a newly single mother then (the child’s father had never been in the picture), navigating both writing and parenting alone.

The new novel was a sprawling portrait of three Mexican and Mexican American women, inspired by her time living in the majority Spanish-speaking East Los Angeles neighborhood of Echo Park. It was 2,000 pages long and would surely, she thought, be her ticket to the Pulitzer Prize. She sent the finished manuscript to her agent and moved to rural Maui with her daughter, where they lived in a shack with no electricity or indoor plumbing. Upon returning to Los Angeles in 1984, she was met with a slew of rejections for Palm Latitudes. One editor told her that the novel’s only good writing was the postscript dedication to her daughter.

Despairing, she drove upstate, north of the Bay Area, where she enrolled in a literature master’s degree program at Sonoma State University and, in 1986, produced a thesis of original poems called “Living Posthumously.” The thesis’s abstract culminates with a singular megalomaniacal sentence: “As future publication will no doubt validate, this is my most cohesive and daring of books.” But most poems in “Living Posthumously,” including the title work, never reached publication. And although she graduated and moved back to Los Angeles sober, Braverman was beginning to feel the threads of her literary trajectory loosening.

So she returned her attention to Palm Latitudes. Perhaps the problem was the length of the manuscript, she thought. She cut the novel down to 400 pages. The sweeping rejections continued. Some editors asserted that the protagonists were improbably intellectual, others felt the work was too maximalist, and a few questioned her benevolent intention to uplift Mexican and Mexican American women by writing from their perspectives. Braverman was not apologetic about the book; she saw it as a continuation of many of her lifelong projects, one of which was to look deeply at the lives of women on the margins, even those who did not share her experiences.

In the interim years, Didion published The White Album, then Salvador, and then Democracy. In between came Carver, Updike, Vidal, Mailer, and Merrill — with his hollow words — all over again. Alone with her unpublished novel, Braverman went broke and had to move back home with her mother. Only by coincidence, in 1988, did the novel go into print at all: Braverman’s hairdresser knew a guy who knew a guy. The book hardly sold. Later, a reporter asked her how she didn’t give up after facing years of rejection. “I kind of did,” she said. “I didn’t write for years.”

The loosening threads persisted throughout the ‘80s, and once Braverman recognized that her dreams were coming undone, she couldn’t let the thought go. The fear haunts her poetry: “Mother, it is all so frail,” she wrote. “Mother I am terrified.” In her poems written during these years, she raged, writing of tiredness, sex that felt like nothing — “Pass through. / I am a hotel” — and unanswerable questions. “How many women making a list / of the chances they missed. How many women / burying themselves at sea.”

The cocaine had been fun, and good for art, but not great for her health. It had also, she suspected, contributed to her dismissal within literary circles. She got clean, but she sought no absolution. Anyone who wanted her to be sorry for the years of getting high could go to hell.

Braverman published Squandering the Blue, her debut short story collection, in 1990. Her best known short story, “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta,” which appeared in this collection, begins with the line: “It was in the fifth month of her sobriety.” The her is fittingly unnamed, but has black hair and lives on the margins in West Hollywood. She’s both an outlaw and a stereotype, going to her psychiatry appointment, then an AA meeting, and getting a manicure, too. The woman acquires a stalker, a man who, for a brief time, sees everything: her fading track marks, her daughter, her pain. His eventual disappearance precipitates her relapse. On the next page, a new story opens. A creative writing professor turns forty, walks through a sculpture garden, thinks about Russian vodka.

Braverman wasn’t interested in making a statement for or against getting clean. Addiction wasn’t the most interesting thing about her women, who were interesting, instead, for their vile digressions and frustrated dreams, the way they seemed to elicit power from powerlessness. Redemption was a laughable prospect. Each of the twelve worlds in this collection of stories is saturated in shades of Braverman’s auspicious blue. Each of the women “squanders” the power of the color, whether through an appetite for drugs or booze, entanglements with useless men, meaningless careers, or a fear of poverty or single motherhood — though, as always in Braverman’s stories, they do so with declaration and power. You wonder, each time, if the women might escape their binds. And then the story ends.

Like Palm Latitudes, Squandering the Blue failed to satisfy the publishing world. Though some of Braverman’s female contemporaries, like Kathy Acker and Mary Gaitskill, were gaining momentum, the ‘80s were still largely dedicated to literary men. “If I were male,” Braverman said, “[the writing] would be normal. But good girls don’t write about drugs, single motherhood, and rage.” That she had deliberately rejected fluency in the publishing industry’s language, choosing instead to stand on her own power and intellect, was a point of pride. She’d expected some reward for it, but instead — perhaps because of some convergence of her subject matter, her womanhood, and her temperament — Braverman struggled to regain a foothold. And it made her angry. Angry that she’d been left behind by the Ackers and Gaitskills, that she’d been rejected by their publishers. Angrier still that men like Bukowski, who was then publishing about a book a year, were celebrated and revered for their writing about addiction. Bukowski also, around this time, gave an on-camera interview during which he kicked his soon-to-be wife and called her a whore.

For much of her writing life, Braverman taught poetry and fiction workshops, both privately in her Los Angeles apartment and at universities. Her students sat in circles, memorized Sylvia Plath’s poems, and read entire books aloud. For Braverman, writing was for the ear, not the eye. She taught in the definitive. Sometimes her students’ writing was excellent, but most of the time, she’d read a draft and yell that the writing was a crime against the page, or write YAWN across the paper in red pen. Students cried outside her classroom, in their cars behind her house. Yet, semester after semester, workshop after workshop, they returned. “She lived and died by the word,” a student of Braverman’s said later, when interviewed for her obituary.

In the early ‘90s she married a scientist and they moved, with Braverman’s then-teenage daughter, across the country to upstate New York. Having escaped Los Angeles at last, she had, for the first time, enough land for a big house and a beautiful garden. The kind of extravagance she’d always envied, and been shut out of, in her childhood. She would experience the romantic autumns of the East Coast, the dampening rain, the full color wheel of fall foliage. But she hadn’t remembered that the trees would eventually be bare. She quickly found the New York winters unendurable; they felt like death. The cold cut her fingers but drew no blood.

Many of the women in her stories became more desperate and violent. Now, they sold their band equipment for heroin and abandoned their babies by rivers. Addicted to heroin this time, Braverman remained unapologetic, blowing her editors off when they suggested changes. She was advised, at one point, to change her name if she had any hopes of publishing again.

She didn’t change her name. In 2005, after she’d given up on the upstate New York mountains and had resettled in San Francisco, Graywolf Press awarded her an advance on her latest work, a memoiristic mix of prose poetry, essay, and fiction, predominantly about her time in New York and her failure to truly leave Los Angeles, to find a home. She didn’t trust Graywolf, which was, of course, still part of the publishing industry, which so disgusted her by then that she had dubbed it The Corporation — a place where women like her were tied in restraints and denied the chance to inhabit the page in their purest form. The manuscript won Graywolf’s inaugural nonfiction press prize, but the publisher rejected her ending, so she commandeered a reading at the AWP conference to renounce the award. During her speech, she ranted about wanting an ending to her book with “substantial political and moral trajectory” — about her abortions, anti-war activism, and their ache and gnawing effect. Graywolf’s rejection was “a systematic attempt to downgrade the book,” she railed, adding that she was not surprised to have to prove the value of her work yet again.

The Graywolf speech didn’t tarnish Braverman’s legacy so much as seal it. She was unhinged, angry, unfathomably jealous. Someone who burned bridges compulsively and unapologetically, got high, and believed she was, as a reporter once sardonically noted, “LA’s unsung prophet.”

III.

The summer I began investigating Braverman’s life and death, I lived in a friend’s empty house in Pittsburgh while she drove west to visit her mother. The house was old, perched high on the city hillside, and had no working clocks, not a single one, besides the thermostat hanging on the kitchen wall. There, I read Kate Braverman’s last published book, A Good Day for Seppuku.

This collection of short stories, released the year before Braverman died, is different from her earlier work: more elegant and controlled, less profane. The majority of these stories’ heroes aren’t sadomasochists or alcoholics, but tired women raising children, teaching high school students, making lackluster reconnections with old friends. Searching for something, anything, in an empty room. In one story, “Feeding in a Famine,” a woman walks through a wheat field and discovers what she believes to be the source of Van Gogh’s inspiration: the sky he saw, the golden swirls of barley. She wants to tell others what she discovered — “we stand as long as we can, dreaming of yellow, our feet bleeding in the sand. Then we collapse” — but she doesn’t. Nobody asks her what she’s thinking.

Until that summer, in my writing about Braverman, I had sought to explain her, to redeem her. Maybe it was the influence of the house, built on a wide open space, with no way of marking time inside, but I started to suspect that the steadiness in Seppuku was not so at odds with the maximalism, the hyperbolism and rage, that suffused most of Braverman’s career. Perhaps what she was owed was not an apology or an explanation, but simply a recognition of her contradictions, her coexistences. Her capacity to loathe capitalism and academic structures, while longing for a place in the MFA canon and for publishers to query her manuscripts. To teach in the definitive, while living a life steeped in ambivalence. To never quite find the lines between violence and pleasure and pain. To take pride in her working-class upbringing while yearning for extravagance. To elect solitude — “by choice I sleep alone” — while being besieged by loneliness.

Even if I wanted to redeem Braverman, I don’t think I could. To do so would feel like a violation of her credo. For her, redeemability never determined whether a woman’s story was worth telling. And so what I want for her is also a contradiction: to champion a writer who likely would have chafed at my attempts to defend her. I want to hold all that she was holding.

By the time Braverman had written most of the stories in Seppuku, she was divorced and living in Santa Fe, NM, haunted by the ghosts of the writing life she’d wished for all those years ago. She’d spend the last decade of her life in that city, the first few years of it in a mansion edging the uneven desert, surrounded on all sides by endless rock and, beyond it, sky. She hosted workshop retreats there, her students reading Plath and Neruda aloud and, if the sky permitted, sitting around her stone fire pit. But even with students around, it was hollow, achingly lonely. A series of monetary misfortunes and mistakes in the subsequent years led her to sell the mansion. She spent the end of her life broke, apartment-hopping around Santa Fe.

On October 12, 2019, Braverman was found unresponsive in her bed. She was seventy. That she left little behind made sense. “I don’t keep journals,” she once told a friend. “I write poems.”

The San Francisco Chronicle didn’t run an obituary. Neither did any other newspaper in the Bay Area, even though she had lived there, written there, performed there, for nearly a decade. The New York Times dedicated half a page in the Sunday paper to Braverman’s obituary. The Los Angeles Times ran a long and beautiful tribute, attentive to her work, and her “oscillating love and loathing for the city” that raised both her and the women in her stories — those women “afflicted by isolation and displacement, experiences [Braverman] knew intimately.”

When, nearly two years ago, I decided I wanted to write about Braverman, I tried and failed, for months, to locate a copy of Milk Run. Eventually I did, but the book’s pages fell out arbitrarily, and so I found pieces of Braverman in my backpack, pressed against the back of my bookshelf, halfway beneath my radiator. The spine, still, is held together with a long strip of packaging tape. Often in the evenings, I sit at my desk and play phone tag with the people, former students and friends, who hold Braverman posthumously. They share, with an earnest generosity, the devastating and tender, sinister and beautiful stories of her life.

What remains of Kate Braverman is fragile. And yet, telling her story with excessive trepidation feels like a disservice to a woman who never, not for a weary moment, wrote to please, even if such a choice cost her Los Angeles and the literary life she’d vied for. Even if it cost her the pure blue blue.