I’m in my car on my way to a coffee shop to get some writing done. I turn the corner onto Hamilton street and Aqualung’s Easier to Lie comes on and suddenly I’ve travelled back in time and back the way I’ve come, across the city again to my house. The year is 2017! Just like my house is not that far from the Warehouse District, 2017 is not that far from 2024—but still, it’s jarring to just get snapped back like that.
I’m in my reading nook in the living room; the house is quiet. Sully and Scarlett are both asleep and Barclay's working on stuff for his new business and we have a full French press and maybe two or three hours of work ahead of us. I’ve recently signed with my agent so we’re working on some final revisions on my first novel, getting ready to send it out on subs. I’m rewriting the last chapter, again, for what feels like the millionth time (that book has had so many endings. If you hated the one you read, take heart: it ended exactly how you wanted it to in another draft). I’m listening to Aqualung’s Easier to Lie on repeat, because the way this song sounds is the way I want this chapter to feel, and because the lyrics unlock the whole book, in a way (which is kind of a wondrous thing, to me, because I didn’t find the song until after I’d written the first draft).
This memory is weird, because there’s another memory nested inside it, and the other memory isn’t real—it’s not even mine. But it’s just as vivid as the one of me in my reading nook and it comes to me alongside that one.
I’m in New York, at La Guardia, eating a plate of spaghetti and watching a fireworks show off in the distance. There’s a bike helmet on the seat beside me but I’m alone. The Aqualung song is playing somewhere in the terminal, so quiet I can barely hear it, like it’s playing in a parallel universe and leaking into this one.
This is one of the strange, unexpected things that have come from being a person who writes books—this second set of memories that are just as real and vivid in my head as the ones I’ve lived myself. This airport memory, of course, belongs to Mrs. Valentine, from the final scene—the one that stuck—in Valencia and Valentine, a book I haven’t even read since the last time I edited it, back in 2018, but which lives in my head and into which I am pulled whenever a I hear a song that accompanied the writing of it.
And it gets even more complicated than that!
Sometimes, a scene from a book will draw inspiration from something that happened in real life. (See where I’m going with this?) Take the scene in V&V where Valencia travels to New York by herself and gets off the plane and onto a bus and ends up in Manhattan and has her jacket stolen. This series of events was lifted straight from my own life, right down to the word-for-word conversation she has with a New Yorker who has never heard of Saskatchewan. And in that real version of events, I had my trusty headphones on and was listening to a little soundtrack of songs I’d created for myself for that trip, including Ghosts by On An On, The Only Living Boy in New York by Simon and Garfunkel, and Ruby Sees All by Cake. I listened to the same soundtrack when writing the scenes, hoping it would help jog my memory and remind me how that place felt when I was there so I’d get it right.
So, when I hear any of these songs, I am taken back to my bedroom, where I wrote the New York scenes during a few of Sully’s nap times, but I am also transported to New York, where Valencia is hit by a bike and goes on a date at Cheesy Pizza with a self-obsessed busker, and I visit New York in another timeline, a real one, where I, personally, did not get hit by a bike but did get tackled by a dog and found myself at Cheesy Pizza with someone I met in Central Park. I’m experiencing three different memories, and two are real and one is made-up, but they all feel equally real, and maybe even if parallel universes aren’t a real thing, they are, you know?
Okay, another one:
There’s a piece of piano music threaded through V&V—Rachmaninoff’s Etude-Tableau in G Minor, Op. 33 No. 7. Mrs. Valentine plays it on repeat at full volume in her home throughout the book, and in her headphones on the plane, and Valencia hears it through the thin walls of her apartment, and in one of Mrs. Valentine’s stories, she stumbles across Rachmaninoff himself composing the piece in an old church on Fogo Island. The reason this song became such a backbone for the book, though, is because it’s a song that has threaded itself in the same way through my life. I learned to play it on the piano in high school, and I’ve blogged about this before (here), how that song was kind of my Linus blanket back then, how I’d sometimes sneak away during school hours into the unlocked church and play that song to calm myself down. So it’s connected to a lot of pivotal high school moments, because nothing cements a memory in your head like music, and nothing cements music in your head like emotion, and what's more emotional than a teenager?
I’ve also written (here) about how, when I’d first finished writing V&V, and had just begun querying it, I went on a trip to Montreal with Barclay and we walked around downtown listening to that Rachmaninoff piece through shared headphones, and it was one of those beautiful, romantic, cinematic moments that I return to a lot.
This is just getting chaotic, but you can probably see how that piece of music takes me back to so many memories, real and imagined, all at once that I kind of splinter into a million pieces—or people—when I hear it.
The same is true of the song Heart by Stars, actually. Another Linus blanket song, another reminds-me-of-many-moments song, and another song with lyrics that match the book, only this one is less of a coincidence because this time the lyrics came first. The lyrics came before anything.
Time can take its toll on the best of us
Look at you, you're growing old, so young
Traffic lights blink at you in the eveningTilt your head and turn it to the sun
Sometimes the TV is like a lover
Singing softly as you fall asleep
You wake up in the morning and it's still there
Adding up the things you'll never be
[Chorus]
Alright, I can say what you want me to
Alright, I can do all the things you do
Alright, I'll make it all up for you
I'm still in love with you
I'm still in love with you
He held the flame I wasn't born to carry
I'll leave the dying young stuff up to you
You get back on the latest flight to paradise
I found out from a note taped to the door
I think I saw your airplane in the sky tonight
Through my window, lying on the kitchen floor
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