AD: What was your inspiration behind the Narcisa part of the title then?
JS: What was my inspiration behind it? Well obviously that’s the name of the book’s main protagonist, of course. And there’s all these different levels of sub-text behind a name like Narcisa, isn’t there? Because it’s just such a perfect name when you’re talking about the psychic curses of addiction, right? In the first edition of the book, I actually pulled the dictionary definition for the word ”narcissism” and put it right on the first page… Where it says “Egoism: a doctrine that individual self-interest is the valid end of all actions.” That pretty much sums it all up in a nutshell, the ego factors in alcoholism and drug addiction. Root causes…
On the most basic level though, it’s just so appropriate to the basic personality of the book’s main character, Narcisa. This character isn’t based so much on any real people as much as being like a sort of composite character, a living, breathing, walking, talking metaphor for the damaged, overinflated human ego that leads us all into the jaws of addiction and ultimate self-destruction. Narcisa just personafies the root causes of things like addiction… Narcisa personifies the dark side of the human condition. Narcisa personifies egoism, also known as narcissism: “Excessive concern for oneself, with or without exaggerated feelings of self-importance….”
On another less metaphoric level though, I actually used to really know a real girl named Narcissa, but with two s’s… The book really has nothing to do with her, per se… but still that name was always in the back of my mind to describe a certain character that I guess was always lingering around back there nagging me to bring her to life someday… It seemed like an important omen or something when the name sort of dawned on me for this character that was emerging, because the real Narcissa, even though she was definitely not any sort of practical inspiration for the character in the book, was still a sort of very important person in my life on another level. Especially because she was a drug addict. Somebody who really had a profound effect on my own early recovery…
This Narcissa was a really beautiful little blond-haired, white-skinned sorta blue-eyed teenage surfer girl who’d caught the wrong wave and somehow ended up living on the streets of Tijuana, Mexico. When I met her she was just crawling the gutters of this third-world hell hole all strung out on heroin and turning cheap tricks for dope down on Calle Coajilla in TJ — one of the meanest low-down and dirty ho-strolls in the western hemisphere. A real colorful place, lemme tell ya.