When Darkness Loves Us

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A twelve year old girl in a one-piece swimsuit lies on her bed in a suburban bedroom. She’s reading Robert Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, and Tanar of Pellucidar by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Tarzan and the Ant Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and everything by Shirley Jackson, and Edgar Allan Poe, and Octavia Butler, and Ray Bradbury, and Alfred Hitchcock’s horror anthologies, and romance novels, and all of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, and anything she can get her hands on, she’s shoving them all into her eyes, one after the other, all summer long.

“The only time I put on clothes,” Elizabeth Engstrom says, “was to ride my bike to the library to get more books.”

After that summer, “My head was bulging with fiction, and my soul and my heart were aching to spit out my own fiction, but I was too young. I didn’t have anything to say.”

Splitting her time between her divorced parents’ homes in Chicago and Utah, the minute she turned 18, Engstrom, then named Betsy Lynn Gutzmer, ditched the mainland and moved to Honolulu, “searching for better weather.” After eight years on Oahu, she moved to Maui, working for a radio station, and then for the only advertising agency on the island until she and the art director decided they could do it better on their own. The two of them teamed up and founded Baney, Gutzmer Inc. where they had their own clients and eventually did well enough to open a branch on the Big Island. Gutzmer wrote advertising copy, and pitched jobs, and she drank.

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