Hi, how are you

Hi, I'm starting this blog inspired by Dennis Cooper and wanting to feel justified in posting comments on his. My name is Guy, I play music, run a record label, and make a living as a journalist (in that order!).
Cooper's recent post about the author Jean Rhys got me thinking about how I first discovered her work. In the late 90s I met a girl named Fiona who was playing bass in a band recently relocated to Melbourne, my hometown. She was about 20 years old, stick thin with a button nose and played bass with her back to the audience. I'm pretty sure her band and mine at the time did a show or two together and we became friendly.
Fiona said she had a solo project and invited me to a show. In the band she just played bass, but solo she sang and played guitar. She was hurt and angry and her voice was surprisingly powerful for a girl so slight. She reminded me of PJ Harvey, who she idolised, but there was something unique about her too. Her lyrics were abstract but full of feeling, and she sometimes sang wordless sounds that gave me shivers.
Either I offered, or she asked me to play keyboards with her, and so began a stretch of weekly rehearsals at the big old weatherboard house she shared in Brunswick with her on/off girlfriend, the singer in her band. I really enjoyed these afternoons, Fiona would cook and we'd talk about her life and her musical obsessions - Patti Smith and Harvey mostly, but others I can't remember now. As I got to know her I liked her more and more. She spoke slowly in a small, trembling voice, but she was full of enthusiasm and shy humour. The music was wonderful too, hypnotic, distorted and held together by a thin, pure thread of melody. I loved being involved in it, and we talked about making a single for my label.
Fiona chose a name, we played live a couple of times, and the shows went well. Fiona also played with a drummer, two separate bands with the same name, and I think on one occasion the three of us played together unrehearsed.
Things became strange gradually. Already frail, Fiona started looking more and more unwell, her nose always red and running, her eyes bleary. It took me a while to realise that she was using heroin, but the signs eventually became too clear to miss. I already had many friends (and bandmates) who had become junkies and dealers after I moved to Melbourne from Perth in 1995, and it was impossible to be around them without getting depressed and frustrated.
My memory as usual is hazy, but I'm pretty sure Fiona moved house a few times and eventually became kind of homeless, living in a caravan park in the outer suburbs. I stopped seeing her out at gigs and after a while, without a phone number for her, we lost contact completely.
Fiona and the drummer made a CD together, which I still have and love. One of the songs on it is called Tigers Are Better Looking. One day at a book sale I found a collection of short stories by Jean Rhys with the same title, and was curious enough to buy it. The lonely, outcast women in the stories struck a chord with me and reminded me so strongly of Fiona.
By then I wasn't playing music with her anymore and hardly ever saw her, so we never got to talk about Jean Rhys. But I started to read everything by Rhys that I could find, and soon she was one of the authors I loved most in the world, each slim novel so harrowing and tormented but written so elegantly that they haunted me for months.
Now Fiona haunts me too, one member of a group of women that includes an old friend who died of a drug overdose in Cambodia, a troublemaking girl who kissed me drunkenly at a party when I was 17 (the night before moving to Sydney and disappearing) and a final friend who was so beautiful and warm and full of charisma when I was 16 years old and starting university that I still think of her often.
Those other women were strong and wild, where Fiona was insular and timid, but they all had a fiery inner core that many of Rhys' women share.