Welcome

I have recently completed my debut novel. The Women Drink Perfume is a 70,000-word literary fiction novel that explores a complex mother/son relationship where the mother is a stroke patient. The story is set along the San Diego and Tijuana border in 1982, a time when tens of thousands of newly built homes overtook native chaparral to create today’s California.

With impossible choices and imperfect decisions, The Women Drink Perfume explores themes of youthful desire, self-discovery, and unexpected loss. Much like in Tell It to Me Singing by Tita Ramírez, young Alex is also living with a mother whose hallucinations blur the line between fact and fiction, between a real or imagined past. And like the main characters in Deborah Levy’s novel, Hot Milk, this story shows us that patients and caregivers can be of any age, and love is not always what we expect it to be.

Alex Luna, a quirky and anxious 22-year-old university student and part-time supermarket checker, yearns for a normal life and is desperately looking for love. At the supermarket he has fallen for Cleo, a smart and worldly fellow checker. His voiceless mother Ana Luna is frozen in time from a stroke she suffered ten years ago. His father is dead. His sister is missing. And a secret his grandmother shared with him threatens to destroy his dreams of love with Cleo. How can he find normal when everything around him is chaos?

Weeks from graduating, Alex pleads with the doctors to move her up the waiting list and get her into the psychiatric unit. She has stopped eating and is hallucinating from imbalanced meds. His older sister JoJo has vanished, and Alex finds out she is working at a night club across the border in Tijuana.

While checking on his mother, Alex discovers a stenographer’s notebook she wrote in ten years ago, only weeks before her stroke, when she was taking a night class. A wrinkled flyer falls out, revealing that his mother Ana Luna led a mysterious past life across the border in Tijuana, under the stage name Ana Blue. Alex must cross the border to search for evidence of his mother’s life before he was born. In Tijuana he meets Vivian, a club girl who is going to law school. Her parents own several night clubs, and Alex is drawn to her charms. As he falls deeper into his dissonant world, overwhelmed by school and the burden of caring for his mother, he must choose between his life as a caregiver and a normal life. Will his efforts prove useless? Is he strong enough to overcome the weight of his grandmother’s secret that foretells a disastrously failed love?

Author Bio

Frank studied English and Latin American Literature at UC San Diego. While there, he contributed to a special collection of literary works at UC San Diego with his Spanish to English translation of Juan Carlos Onetti’s novel, Los Adioses (The Goodbyes). His short story, Cuaderno de Mellito, was published in Spanish in Cuentos Chicanos II (Dos Passos Editores, 1987).

Frank started his career as an English/Spanish conference interpreter and translator, then spent many years in International Business, traveling extensively to Chile, Peru, Mexico, Venezuela, Bolivia, and India. He worked for global technology companies, including Microsoft, RSM, and Algonomy, and built an extensive network from which to springboard his literary pursuits.

Today, Frank writes full-time and is working on his second novel, The World Is Too Big. He lives in the Washington D.C. area.

His favorite writers are Ali Smith, Denis Johnson, Elizabeth Strout, Juan Carlos Onetti, Deborah Levy, Joseph Conrad, Gabriel García Márquez, Kazuo Ishiguro, Emily Bronte, Jane Austen, Juan Rulfo, Flannery O’Connor.

The Women Drink Perfume

ANA’S STENO BOOK

I can’t escape this opposite of normal situation with my mother Ana, since she’s voiceless and has all her truth locked up so deep that I can never fully access it. The newest thing is that her meds are out of balance, and she’s been hallucinating for a week. She’s having conversations with the air and with things that simply aren’t there, and it has me searching for normal. Not the person, but the life. A normal life.

To many people those three simple words mean nothing, but to me— strung together in this precise order— to live them would mean everything. A normal life without Ana’s dissonance. Not like today where it looks scrambled like this. Life normal a. Normal a life. A life normal. They don’t come out right, and I keep changing their order to make them acceptable, but no other combination works. I’ve tried.

VIVIAN AT THE CLUB

Finally, Vivian grabbed a sunburst yellow sundress and held the hanger to her chin, placing the dress against her body to admire herself in the mirror. I stared at her back, at her shoulders and her hair, at her black underwear and the back of her black bra. I saw her face reflecting in the mirror, now clearer and more defined, prettier than out at the bar; the dress draped over the front of her body.

“Maybe your girlfriend doesn’t like dresses, but I do.” She pulled the sundress off the hanger and slid it over her head and then her shoulders. Straightening it out, she carefully walked next to where I lay and stepped over me. “Is this what you want to see, Alex? Are you seeing and feeling the dress shop now?” I couldn’t see her face.

The angles of her legs, and more arresting, her skin with several prominent freckles, reminded me of a girl from long, long ago. They were perfect and exciting, and while her dress was a thin yellow fabric, in my mind I drifted into a sapphire-blue velvet tunnel. With Vivian’s velvet tunnel high up above, it hit me. Holy shit, this is what heaven looks like, even if I haven’t ever touched her, or felt her more than the soft tops of her fingers lightly brushing my arm for less than a second as we sat at at the bar. This has more love in it than every planned and chance encounter I’ve had, since I’ll never know what I’m doing anyway, and the nakedness of other times can’t compare to this, to Vivian untouched. I felt more alive than every single moment I had lived or had yet to live on this arid patch of earth where I had sprouted. The air under her dress smelled like musty caramel.

Next Novel:

The World Is Too Big

What if the world you inhabit becomes too big to manage? What if the career you choose turns out to be an empty shell of what could have been?

53 year-old Alex Luna is President at a global software company, in charge of North and South America. He and his attorney wife Vivian have two children and live in Atlanta.

During one of his frequent trips to Santiago, Chile, Alex sees a woman who looks exactly like Jen Chernov, a long lost love from his first year after college. She was a writer, and he remembers writing every day when they were together. He misses his writing life and upon his return to Atlanta he searches for boxes containing old journals and manuscripts.

At work, management is pushing Alex to drive more revenue by quarter’s end, and he has to help his sales team win the business by visiting a prospect in Venezuela, one of the world’s most dangerous countries, during authoritarian leader Hugo Chavez’s dying days. While there, he suffers multiple life-threatening situations that bring on an existential crisis. He questions the choices he has made during the last 30 years, and goes on a journey to rediscover the writer within.

Quotes & Poetry I Like

… his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry

he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good

if you have to be sure don't write

W.S. Merwin - “Berryman”