Andrea Lambert (writer)

Andrea Lambert is a queer writer and artist creating with Schizoaffective Disorder.

Background

Lambert was born in in Los Angeles . Her parent’s bloodlines held both mental illness and privilege. Her paternal grandfather was Schizophrenic. Paternal grandmother a direct descendant of Myles Standish, first Plymouth Colony Governor. Great aunt died in The Salem witch trials. Her maternal grandmother was a Mexican painter with a Schizophrenic sister. Lambert was DNA born and bound with Schizoaffective Disorder and an anxiety disorder. Her subsequent adult life gave her post traumatic stress disorder.

Lambert attended Reed College from 1996-1998 where she was involved in zines and the riot grrrl movement. After graduation, she interned at Anodyne Magazine in Portland, OR. Moved to San Francisco at the millennium. Dived into electroclash slashed with office work. Started writing for the Internet with literary pornography. Experienced the cocaine, meth, alcohol and herpes downward spiral delineated in her first novel . After recieving an MFA at California institute of the Arts , her debut novel was published in 2009. Her North Hollywood poetry collaboration with a Swedish writer followed the same year.

In Los Angeles, Lambert met Katie Jacobson, a young CalArts MFA. They fell desperately in love. Ran Featherless: a Reading Series from 2010-2012. Days after same-sex marriage was first legalized in their state, Jacobson proposed to Lambert. Three months later, California Proposition 8 (2008) put a stay on same sex marriages. The two writers held their elaborate lesbian wedding in protest in 2011. Lambert gave readings of her work for the next few years at REDCAT, Los Angeles Road Concerts and elsewhere. She still struggled with alcoholism. The night of October 15, 2012, Jacobson died by prescription pill suicide while Lambert drunkenly slept. She woke up next to her domestic partner’s corpse. Jacobson’s head surrounded by empty bottles of Lambert’s psychiatric medication. Andrea was never the same again. This tragedy defined her future life and creative work.

Lambert spent 2013 in detox, rehab, AA and inpatient psych wards. The stay on same-sex marriage in California was lifted on June 28, 2013. It was too late for her and Katie. She felt acute grief and blame for her alcoholism and mental illness rendering her incapable of preventing her true love’s suicide. She reached lasting sobriety from alcohol and illegal drugs via harm reduction medical cannabis. Studied solitary eclectic Wicca as one of the “Grand daughters of the witches you could not burn.” In 2016, Lambert was evicted from her cockroach-infested Hollywood apartment. She left Los Angeles for Reno. Took care of her nearly one hundred year old grandma for four months until her paternal grandparents’ old house was vacated by her father’s tenants. "The House of the Rising Sun," as she calls it has been in her family since it was built. Lambert is currently a sober, celibate recluse in Nevada.

She writes in "Dinner Whore Celibate," “Now like Marlene Dietrich in her later years I hole up in glamorous seclusion to write. Paint. Wait however many years I have left until my death.”

Works

Lambert’s writes in autobiographical fantasy and creative nonfiction from the perspective of a mentally ill unreliable narrator. In her novel, poetry, essays and anthology pieces she explores themes of abjection, addiction, the transgressive and the occult from a queer femme perspective. Of her debut Jet Set Desolate, 3:AM magazine reports:

“Lambert writes this like a death queen, perfect timing, perfect detail, perfect style, not blinking as the scenes shoot back with a fierce and savage illness. It’s hell but the scooped out perfection works like the spaced out uber cool of porn imagery or the quality of ice stocking the veins that you get when reading stories from the debauched countercultures of yore.” – Richard Marshall, contributing editor, in 3:AM Magazine

Of Lambert's second book, Lorazepam and the Valley of Skin: Extrapolations on Los Angeles / 7309102155, Vanessa Place writes:

Every place has its arenas where what is simply nature in another place is the breathtakingly artificial in another. And we love these moments of great artificiality because they serve as false and reassuring desublimation: in other words, California’s burnt (sun-and-out) laconicism is happiest when hysterical, just as Sweden wishes it were not so very Swedish … In the pale and patterned IKEA-land, one wants burnt oranges and marine blues, and Cali bodies that know no boundaries: 730910-2155 and Lambert were made to mirror one another insofar as mirrors both reflect and project whatever light is cast upon them. – Vanessa Place, Les Figues co-founder and literary provacateur

Lambert began distributing her writing with zine Bedtime Stories with Trivial teens in the nineties. Her writing is in three chapbook anthologies. Of her 2011 chapbook, G(U)ILT, Internet fan Lizzie commented:

"Your Guilt zine is one of my favorite things I’ve read since I can remember. It’s something I’ve been waiting for, you know? It has all the things I want in a read: lesbians, drugs, references to LA and/or SF, glitter. Okay that sounds superficial, but. You’re amazing and I love your writing. I keep Guilt in my purse just to reread it."

Lambert uses the experimental technique of writing through to explore Valley of the Dolls in her early work. She repeat marathoned the FX anthology show American Horror Story as DIY exposure therapy for her PTSD. In later work she writes through this horror show. From 2015-2018 Lambert was published in an anthology a year. Trauma porn personal essays, seances and poetry were widely published online in Medium, Luna Luna, Grimoire and elsewhere. Lambert’s 2018 Entropy Magazine monthly series, “Dining with a Cursed Bloodline” explores surviving stigmatized genetic identities in the Wild West through food and family. Lambert's 2018 online chapbook "Lexapro Diary: Events of January 22, 2007" was celebrated by publisher Moonchaps for it's brutal account of being diagnosed "hysteric" in a psych ward.

Art

Lambert painted in figurative mixed media oils since her teens. Exhibited in small DIY spaces in Portland, Oregon. In an Anodyne Magazine review, Tina Satter calls her work "kitchy maximalism." She painted and exhibited sporadically in later cities as complicated by addiction and mental health issues.

Once sober, Lambert began to paint a series of paintings a year featured in multiple online magazines. Her NSFW Series presents old masters style oil paintings of sexual acts from pornography. A painting from the NSFW series depicting her topless was the Cover Artist of "Deluge Magazine" in 2017 .

In 2014 Lambert did an occult performance art piece at Human Resources Los Angeles opening The Adonis Project celebrating a long-closed gay porn theatre. In 2015 Lambert did a performance art piece at Los Angeles Pride narrating her and her Jacobson’s roles as casualties of the same sex marriage struggle. She is now part of LGBT history.

Lambert began producing a large body of YouTube videos in 2014. Her documentary, “A Schizoaffective in her Natural Habitat,” went viral and achieved twenty nine thousand views. Using her body as lure, she gave YouTube poetry readings in lingerie. In 2018 she was an unpaid Brand Ambassador for Bright Swimwear, who deemed her an influencer due to her 65K Twitter followers and large social media presence. On YouTube in a Bright swimsuit, Lambert satirically read flash fiction called, “Bikini Modeling, Really?”

In her creative isolation, Lambert uses Twitter as performance art, writing exercise and social outlet. In the 2018 eohippus labs anthology "What Do We Do Together, she writes:

"What do people do together? I cocoon alone, yet Twitter provides togetherness. On Twitter individuals create communities based on similar identities. Or political affiliations. Form friendships with people that they have never met. Will probably never meet. Join together in DM rooms to chat with total strangers. As anonymous as a bathhouse. A strange intimacy of the lost. Twitter can be a short form writing exercise. I use it as such. For to a publication starved writer? Having a paragraph at a time, instantaneously published to tens of thousands of people is an intoxicating rush. Spontaneous publication, indeed. Sometimes the wise words of a stranger. In 280 characters. Strike my soul so deeply. Together. We the people. Mourn for our nation lost. A country that once was. Under Barack Obama. Alone and together. We are within the virtual. Political. Impossible now."

References

https://andreaklambert.com

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