Sudden Strangers Book

Beautifully written memoir about writer Terry Wolverton's relationship with the legendary L.A. Women's Building. I appreciated her honesty and ability to examine the greater picture of how the staff and mission changed over time from the founding of the building in the 1970s through its transformation and eventual closer in the late 1980s. This kind of memoir is still relatively rare so if you're looking for memoirs about feminist institutions from this time period or art and cultural memoirs from a Queer perspective, this is definitely the book for you. That said, Wolverton is from a generation of lesbian-feminists for whom everybody was straight or lesbian/gay and she sticks to that perspective through the more recent sections of the book. It brought back a few less than pleasant memories for me (nothing huge, just annoying), so I mention it by way of preparing readers new to the queer politics of the era. Still very worth tracking down, despite that caveat.