Allie LaRue (allie__larue) is a Los Angeles-based illustrator and writer who draws inspiration from Latin classics, imbuing them with childlike themes. Her artistic presence blends romantic naïveté, intellectualism, and raw emotion within a cinematic and literary aesthetic. Merging classic film, literature, and personal narrative, she creates a world that is both nostalgic and avant-garde—intimate, rebellious, and poetic—where high art meets subversive femininity and vulnerability.
The last thing you finished reading
This question >.^ but actually, He by Robert A. Johnson.
The last thing you abandoned reading
An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector. I wanted to, but I couldn't get past the first page. The elliptical sentence structures and lack of coherence made for an incredibly unpleasurable read. However, I do hope to one day allay my qualms and fully immerse myself.
Next on your list:
I need to read She by Robert A. Johnson for a project I’m working on. But I have an extensive, ever expanding TBR pile beside my bed. I would also like to finish Nancy Tuana’s Woman and the History of Philosophy, Lacan and the Destiny of Literature, and Eros in Mourning. But also after reading those of you who came before me, I need to read Bachmann’s Malina because I never have! If it’s anything like the love triangle in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, I’ll have an instant affinity.
In bed with Bataille Something on your list but you never begin
Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future by Fr. Seraphim Rose
The Origin of German Tragic Drama by Walter Benjamin
Looking Glasses and Neverlands by Karen Coats
Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche or, The Realm of Shadows by Henri Lefebvre
The Secret Self by Theodor Reik
Something in which you have no interest
Joan Didion and Eve Babitz… I’m not a contrarian, I’m just in my 30s and have yet to have the universe compel me. Obviously love an anorexic, alcoholic, horny icon though…
Worst thing you’ve read cover to cover
I wish I could ask google this, I really don’t remember… there are titles I’ve started and don’t enjoy but I keep going because I think it will get better, but it doesn’t… I just can’t recall what.
Effective advertising Something you reread
A lot of horny poems by depressed, forlorn people.
Something you never forget
Anything Louis Althusser. His Lessons on Rousseau reconstructed the entirety of my plane of consciousness. I walked around Hancock Park with only that book in hand and read it cover to cover repeatedly over the course of three weeks.
Conditions in which you read best
Well, as I stated above… walking—especially while listening to Coil. Or sitting on the floor with an ashtray full of dark green Export-As, bottle of Pernod, and my cat, Sabine (named after Nin’s A Spy in the House of Love), nearby.
Sabine with her namesake Conditions in which you read most often
When I have the downtime to walk or really just whenever I’m feeling excessively manic. Reading is like polyphagia for me—a feverish, unrelenting hunger that devours before it nourishes. I tend to think of most books as a labyrinth that I willingly lose myself within. I cannot merely read; I must document, dissect, and consume. Every resonant line is trapped in ink, immortalized in my journal, a testament to the way words shape me. My voracity is philosophical, a craving for meaning that leaves me paradoxically full yet unsatisfied. And yet, in this obsessive devotion, there is a quiet destruction—nights sacrificed to the controlled glow of a booklight, ice cold martinis gone lukewarm beside an open book, social interactions dulled by the weight of unspoken theories. I do not read; I surrender.
Conditions in which you cannot read
Honestly, I find it so difficult to read at a park, etc., when I’m feeling excessively “bored” via dissatisfaction with my current circumstances or surroundings.
A favourite author
George Sand :)
A favourite genre, form, theme
Diaries, philosophy, poetry. Anything that lacerates. All of Coil and Legendary Pink Dots lyrics.
A favourite title
Indiana by George Sand has been my immediate answer since I found it in a bookshop in Manzanita when I was 15. It’s been a work of fiction I return to quite often, though I’ve come to feel that I’ve outgrown fiction in general. If I were to choose a more mature favorite, it would be The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes, a work of non-fiction that I find increasingly resonant.
Walking with Barthes A favourite book cover
Idk! But perhaps, Sailor Moon 7 Naoko Takeuchi Collection… both characters on the cover are isolated, stoic, misunderstood, and yearning for true companionship and reality in all of its forms.
A favourite recent read
Baudelaire and Freud by Leo Bersani.
A favourite nostalgia read
Comet’s Nine Lives by Jan Brett, I found it at a Scholastic book fair early on in my childhood and it’s been a favorite since
Cat and Alex and the Magic Flying Carpet by Robin Ballard
Eloise by Kay Thompson
Little Coquette by Renee de Fontarce
A favourite greatest of all time, personal canon read
I’m not entirely sure how to answer this, but I suppose I could describe returning to these as a form of intellectual yearning. I really am just a horny bookworm at my core but intensely sequestered and shy. So it's not the physical desire that drives me, but rather the mental stimulation that certain authors provide—an intellectual satisfaction that, in its own way, mirrors the intensity of carnal desire. In these moments, I find myself returning to works like Blue Eyes, Black Hair by Marguerite Duras, Priestess of Morphine: The Lost Writings of Marie-Madeleine, Nin’s diaries, and any Henry Rollins poetry. These texts offer a form of gratification that is both cerebral and deeply immersive.
Do you annotate
Oh yes… I like using sparkly pastel gel pens and these translucent sticky tabs from Daiso. If it’s a book I feel more precious about, then I use the normal sticky post-it notes but they’re translucent. I also like to add drawings over text with those
Annotation garden Do your books tend toward any condition
My books bear the unmistakable imprint of my devotion—spines softened from repeated readings, pages traced with the faintest smudges of ink and thought. Margins hold the wraiths of my reflections and illustrations, underlines mapping the trajectory of my obsessions. Some covers are worn at the edges, not from neglect, but from the intimacy of constant handling. each book is a fragment of me, a vessel of memory and meaning, never meant to be parted from my hands. To lose one would be to lose a piece of myself, truly!
Do you have any books that are prized possessions
Medieval English Nunneries by Eileen Power. Anne Sexton once said, “I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.” In that sense, all of my books are my most prized possessions. When the recent LA fires happened, I was in a level 2 zone and all I could think to grab were my books, journals, cat, and beloved teddy bear, Suetonius.
A text that surprised you
The Genshin video game dialogues.
A very Pathological Research NPC A text that disappointed you
When Oscar Wilde said, “Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.” [Editor’s note: Lady Windermere’s Fan, Act III]
A text that altered you somehow
This is so embarrassing and unassuming, but the first time I ever read Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence was on 04/18/18 at 11:28 pm and it ROCKED MY WORLD.
Open up a text and copy a line at random:
“She spake, and loosed from her bosom the broidered zone, curiously-wrought, wherein are fashioned all manner of allurements; therein is love, therein desire, therein dalliance–beguilement that steals the wits even of the wise. This she laid in her hands, and spake, and addressed her: ‘take now and lay in thy bosom this zone, curiously-wrought, wherein all things are fashioned; I tell thee thou shalt not return with that unaccomplished, whatsoever in thy heart thou desirest.’” [Editor’s note: Homer’s Iliad, book 14].
Allie can also be found at the following:
http://pastisagoraphobicgirlofyourdreams.blogspot.com/
Thanks for playing:
PR