Kate Flannery’s Letter to Librarians

Kate Flannery writes a candid account of the realities of corporate misogyny, her experience as a former clothing industry insider, and a moment in our recent past painted with nostalgia and demands in her juicy, funny, and insightful memoir STRIP TEES.

We are thrilled to have a letter to librarians from Kate, diving into the impacts that libraries have on her life and STRIP TEES.

“Flannery succeeds in illustrating the fashion industry’s blurred lines in the decade prior to #MeToo, and the tough choices women faced between professional success and personal safety. This is an authentic portrait of the battle to remain true to oneself.” Publishers Weekly

Keep scrolling to hear from Kate Flannery.

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Dear Librarians,

The summer between eighth grade and freshman year of high school, my mom thought it was a good time for me to dip my toe into the sobering realities of the working world and get my first job. Options were limited because I was 14, but I scored a gig at the local library as a page, a hallowed position both of my siblings had held before me. They had both been well-liked, industrious employees with finely honed work ethics, but I was a nepotism hire, riding their coattails. The concept of “working” sounded awful, and I wasn’t ready to give up my precious summer break watching Jerry Springer reruns just yet.

On my first day, I was placed under the charge of a librarian named Louise, a legendary figure my siblings said I could identify by her polyester pantsuit and boofy perm that rose in a salt-and-pepper parabola around her head. Louise, dubbed “Ouiser” by my sibs, was not your average librarian. She smoked on her breaks and made wry jokes about the patrons in a way I had never heard adults do in my earshot. She treated me like an adult, too—loading me up with a rolling cart of books to reshelve, sending me into the stacks, and then promptly forgetting about me. She didn’t lord over me like a teacher would, supervising. She left me alone to do my duty, but after about a half hour of shelving the behemoth Oversizeds, the urge grew to shirk it. The siren song of the books—all those books!— took over, luring me to open them up and step inside.

I had only made it to the A section in Fiction when I couldn’t resist any longer, and immediately began mining all the V.C. Andrews books for smut. Once I was satisfied I had gained a decent amount of carnal knowledge, I moved to the Bs, where I drank Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine and ate Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. In the poetry section, I found Plath, who introduced me to Sexton, who directed me towards Lowell. I was voracious – reading everything, understanding half of it— starved for glamour by the greyness of hillbilly Pennsylvania around me, my hometown an incongruous region that technically qualified as Appalachia, but was still close enough for a day trip to New York City.

I was a small town girl with big giant dreams, and now I had gotten a taste of the good stuff. I had always been a reader, but now I was a devourer. How could I not, with this utter banquet of delights all around me? I returned to Ouiser at the end of my shift with the empty cart—it had taken me the entire four hours, but she never said a stern word or chided me for laziness. It was as if she understood—how could anyone be expected to work under those conditions? There was too much reading to do.

You might be arriving at the inevitable conclusion that I was a lousy page, and that might be a reasonable one to reach. But that library job was the most important one I ever had, because in those stacks I became a writer. With all the voices and visions of the vast, sacred omnibus of American authors in between my ears, I dreamt of the day I might have lived enough to write my own book that would find a home in the library, too.

I ended up leaving Pennsylvania and moving to the big city after all, and I wrote a book about it called STRIP TEES: A Memoir of Millennial Los Angeles. It’s a coming-of-age story, set in the fashion industry, full of glamour and grit and questionable decisions, and I hope it will find its way into your library and be an escape for someone else too, even if just for the afternoon.

I end in salute to Ouiser and all the librarians who provide folks with the opportunity to find themselves by getting lost in the stacks. What an honor it would be to become a page in the library yet again (240 of ‘em in STRIP TEES, to be exact.)

Thank you for the opportunity!

Kate Flannery

STRIP TEES: A Memoir of Millennial Los Angeles by Kate Flannery; 9781250827289; 7/18/23