The Roxy Letters

by Mary Pauline Lowry

I was wavering on my commitment to this wild thatch of hair until I recently read Mario Vargas Llosa’s “In Praise of the Stepmother.” In the novel, Rigoberto is always delighting at having his wife’s full pubis up his nose.

“Henry Darger was a hospital custodian. When he was alive no one knew he was writing ‘The Story of the Vivian Girls.’ It was fifteen thousand pages long, with an additional several hundred painted illustrations. Or take James Hampton, another janitor.