The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Non-Fiction

by Neil Gaiman

I named my daughter Holly after Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn, whom I’d discovered in ‘Walk on the Wild Side’. When Holly was nineteen I made her a playlist of songs she had loved as a small girl, the ones she’d remembered and the ones she’d forgotten, which led to our having the Conversation. I dragged songs from her childhood over to the playlist – ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ and ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ and ‘These Foolish Things’ and then came ‘Walk on the Wild Side’. ‘You named me from this song, didn’t you?’ said Holly as the first bass notes sang. ‘Yup,’ I said. Lou started singing. Holly listened to the first verse, and for the first time, actually heard the words. ‘“Shaved her legs and then he was a she” . . .? He?’ ‘That’s right,’ I said, and bit the bullet. We were having the Conversation. ‘You were named after a drag queen in a Lou Reed song.’ She grinned like a light going on. ‘Oh, Dad. I do love you,’ she said. Then she picked up an envelope and wrote what I’d just said down on the back, in case she forgot it. I’m not sure that I’d ever expected the Conversation to go quite like that.