Holly woodlawn autobiography in five shorts

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She said to me, “Darling, I’m going to be your Auntie Mame.” It was the power of her celebrity. You don’t have to get a job.” That filled Holly’s head, and she was very easily misguided.

What makes Love You Madly so compelling is its raw honesty. When I first started hanging out with Holly, it was challenging for me to wrap my head around her gender fluidity.

Holly really got upset with people because of the way they tried to pinpoint her. We’d be driving down the street and Holly would break into song, and I’d nearly run off the road because the note she hit was just so ear-piercing. I love the idea of her as your sort of fairy godmother or Auntie Mame figure.

Copeland is much younger and trying to find his footing in a very unsteady industry. But if you don’t have someone who can support you—and Holly didn’t—that’s kind of a train wreck. Once the celebrated star of Andy Warhol’s films, Holly now lives in quiet obscurity, her life a poignant mix of fading glamour and hardship.

I wanted to fulfill Holly’s unfulfilled wishes from the previous book with this new one.

That’s a message that’s as relevant today as it was 35 years ago. She was hustling and scraping and appearing in student films, for example. Holly was genuinely a hilarious person, and I wanted to capture her essence on the page. By the late ‘80s, she was living on the West Coast and not exactly in the best place in her life.

But she was also a standout because Holly had a very endearing personality and a great sense of humor. And she was the first person in Los Angeles to go to bat for me.

RUSSELL: I love how you paint such a vivid picture of what L.A. was like in the 1980s. You didn’t know about the sex work and the extent of the drug and alcohol abuse.

COPELAND: I didn’t know.

I thought it would be a good networking opportunity, and I got transfixed with this androgynous being. My anger over their occurrence kept me from facing them head-on. Did you ever feel exposed by revealing so much of yourself?

JC: I felt it was essential to reveal certain things about myself because I thought it was important for readers to understand why I got involved with Holly in the first place.