Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Thing [Paperback]

Erika Lopez (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 17, 1998

Tomato Rodriguez hops on her motorcycle and embarks on the ultimate sea-to-shining-sea all-girl adventure -- a story in that combines all the best parts of Alice in Wonderland and Easy Rider as Tomato crosses the country in search of the meaning of life, love, and the perfect post office.

Flaming Iguanas is a hilarious novel that combines text, line drawings, rubber stamp art, and a serious dose of attitude. The result is a wild and wonderful ride unlike any you you've ever taken before.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Judy McGuire Paper A potty mouth with a heart of gold.

Natasha Stovall The Village Voice Lopez catches fire to three-chord punk rock, splattering her psychic guts all over the page, leaving nothing to the imagination.

Patricia Holt San Francisco Chronicle Lopez gives Tomato an outlaw integrity that Thelma and Louise only hinted at. Tomato's quest for identity and freedom actually becomes our own.

Karen Helfrich Lambda Book Report There's a sizable, rebelliously tasteless portion of our reading public who will soon want to make Lopez their cartoonist pillow queen.

James S. Howard The Fresno Bee It's a fun, fast, and fabulous first novel.

Feminist Bookstore News Not for the faint of heart....Racy, raunchy, riotously funny, and hilariously incisive.

About the Author

Erika Lopez lives a much too happy life in San Francisco being the sidekick to her two best friends, Mark and Mary. They all live on the same block. They walk big, leaky dogs and forget to whisper when they talk about other people's butts. Previously she launched Lap Dancing for Mommy into the world and her new book is They Call Me Mad Dog!: A Story for Bitter, Lonely People, but that won't be all. She's got plans. Big plans for big girls in little clothes.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1st Scribner Paperback Fiction Ed edition (November 17, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 068485368X
• ISBN-13: 978-0684853680
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #723,691 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Erika Lopez is back, and ready to take back her place at the head of the rickety kids' table... in September 2010, she's publishing "THE GIRL MUST DIE" with a matching book of "THE GIRL MUST DIE POSTCARDS" through their new publishing company, Monster Girl Media!

To follow updates, go to her Cartoon Log, http://clog.ErikaLopez.com

----

(Biography from www.ErikaLopez.com ...)

After poor--but happy--frolicking years of art school in Philadelphia at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (and stints at Moore College of Art and The University of the Arts), Erika was surprised to find herself out on the streets with a lot of attitude and an inability to hold down a job. So after a couple of crappy jobs, bad room mates, and a couple of days in jail, Erika was losing the dream of being a rich and famous artist strung out on heroin supplied by NYC gallery dealers.

Erika quickly adjusted her ambitions and aimed to become a famous cartoonist for porn magazines. That didn't go so well either. But her cartoons kept getting published in San Francisco and so she moved there and ended up living with a Gothic meth lap dancer and a bleach-blonde Eskimo call girl from Canada.

Soon after getting her own apartment with no job in sight, Lopez got a couple of grants she'd--half-jokingly, but desperately-- applied for during one of her previous "fired" periods back in Philadelphia: She was a Pew discipline winner a couple of times, but the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts each gave her $2500 to write. Write? Write what?

So following through on her own dare and having nothing left to lose, she learned to ride a crappy motorcycle in a week, and rode cross country so she could at least write about doing something. When she made it safely home, she penned her way through her first novel, "Flaming Iguanas," sprinkling it with enough illustrations to distract the reader from the writing.

It worked. It sold. Her editor at Simon & Schuster offered her more money to write again and again, and so she wrote and wrote until she realized she was getting weird and creepy after so much time alone. The future seemed so bright for young Erika, she thought she'd have a Victorian house in San Francisco within an hour. But with a shrinking economy and "creative differences" with her publisher, the jig was up. She unwisely shot herself in the foot at the beginning of what was to become a massive economic downturn. In no time at all it seemed she was going down in flames...

Again, Erika simply went with the flow. She embraced this challenge with a pinch on the cheek and a pat on the head, by gaining weight, wearing muumuus, listening to AM talk radio too loud, and calling herself "Grandma Lopez." She was going around calling people "toots", pinching their cheeks too hard, and giving everyone unsolicited advice as she limped on over to the welfare line.

Becoming a burden to the state and calling the welfare checks her "special mini art grants," she turned those salmon-colored notes into "Nothing Left but the Smell: A Republican on Welfare." As far as anyone knows, it's the first known Food Stamp Variety Show with lots of theatrical complaining, some papery cartoon moments, and tender, bitter singing. It's a show about being a sorely-mistaken, middle class pipsqueak ... one of those totally unsympathetic characters who grows up thinking all the civil and voting fights have already been fought so now she's free to sit back and buy lots of crap from mail order catalogues. Instead, she ends up in the welfare line so she can star in her own variety show about it later.

This started a new chapter in Erika's adventure, one that embraces a multi-media approach to life. No one focus, but a broad view on that "what's next" question buried inside each and every one of us. This new and improved Erika has been travelling around the world, Oslo, Edinburg, London and Manchester, performing and inspiring other pipsqueaks all over the planet.

She has now set her sights on making movies with Monster Girl Movies, based on books published by their new publishing company, Monster Girl Media.

Watch out for "The Girl Must Die," to be published in September 2010, available with a matching set of art postcards, in the U.S., Canada, and online.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Great American Road Novel, late-90s version, December 15, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Thing (Paperback)

Recently, on my own book tour, I happened to ask a sales guy at Shaman Drum Books in Ann Arbor if he could help me. I was an English grad student, I said; I was trying to draw up a syllabus for a course I hoped to teach in a year or two, on the American Road Novel. I'd come up with a handful of obvious titles--ON THE ROAD, ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTAINANCE, LOLITA, TRAVELS WITH CHARLIE, even THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ. But all of them were by white guys, and I was looking for the rest of the picture. Was there, I asked him, a literary equivalent to "Thelma and Louise"? He handed me FLAMING IGUANAS. "Here," he said.

A woman on a motorcycle takes on America.

This is a great book. Erika, I am in love. It is an infectuous, cheerful, honest, ragingly sexy--but never prurient--book. It is very much within the tradition (Kerouac, Henry Miller, and several other sex-and-road dudes are mentioned explicitly, as sort-of precursors; Erica Jong's FEAR OF FLYING is a good point of comparison, too), but it also extends the tradition, and gloriously so. At moments Lopez makes the confessional-thing look so effortless you're tempted to try it yourself, but such ruthless self-exposure, no matter how fictionalized, is its own stringent discipline.

This is a soaring, liberating read. Week 12 on the twelve-week American Road Novel syllabus, without a doubt. Some undergrads may be scandalized; WILL be scandalized. Too bad. Erika, I love you. I tell all my friends in the Princeton English Department about you. I am a one-man word-of-mouth machine, spreading the gospel. You are too much. Exuberance is beauty. Don't stop!

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Funny, funny stuff, February 8, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Thing (Mad Dog Rodriguez Trilogy) (Hardcover)

I was sitting, well actually squatting, in the bookstore and reading the first few pages of the book when I started laughing like a nut... Well people stared, so naturally I purchased it to avoid making a scene, and what a wise purchase it was. It's crazy, it's funny, it's so much more readable than "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". I felt empowered, I feel inspired, gosh darn I want a motorcycle gang too, and maybe someday I'll cross Canada and write a novel comparable to this.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good Going..., May 16, 2002

By 

Vivek Tejuja "vivekian" (mumbai, maharashtra, india) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Thing (Paperback)

Erika Lopez...The name didn't strike a bell at all when one of my friends' bought it up at a recent off-line book club discussion. Then I was intrigued to know more about this author and her works. So I went ahead and puchased "Flaming Iguanas" and before I knew I was in for a rocking roller-coaster ride across US of A.

This book is about Tomato Rodriguez - who takes a cross-country bike trip on her own in search of may be something or maybe something not. Funny in bits and I laughed so hard that it made me cry...and then again there is a very subtle profoundity at play in this work .

On her journey to the road of revelation, Tomato has given me so many insights which are unbelievably hard to relate to but they work nevertheless. A great book - both as a comfy read and at the same time sneaking on you and scandalizing in all so many ways!!