Book Soundtrack: Sorry I Missed You

Shortly after Sorry I Missed You came out, I began to get emails and texts and passing comments from various people asserting that they knew—they knew—exactly who I had used as inspiration for the character of Larry, the slightly embarrassing, badly-aging ex-punk. And their confidence was so funny, because no two people guessed the same person, and no one guessed the person who had really inspired him. 

Partly because no single person had inspired him—he was an amalgamation of people I’ve seen in coffee shops and people I’ve met once or twice and now follow on instagram and people I knew in high school and people I know now and…well, me. 

Actually, mostly me. 

I get why people didn’t guess that one—Larry is a man, first of all, and I’m not a man. Larry is a solid decade or so older than me. Larry listens to old punk at the exclusion of all else while my taste in music spans a lot of genres and decades. Larry is a whole bunch of other things that I’m not.

Besides all of that, a lot of people just plain didn’t like Larry, and thought I had written him in an unlikeable way because I didn’t like him either. So how could he be me? If I were basing a character on myself, wouldn’t I cast them in a more agreeable light? 

But this is true for pretty much every unlikeable character I’ve ever written: I think they come across as unlikeable or unliked because they’re based on me—because when I’m writing looking inward, I’m not afraid to be mean the way I would be if I’d been inspired by someone who could conceivably read the book and recognize themselves. Aren’t we all our own worst critic? And isn’t that, kind of, an asset in this case?

So what of mine did I give to Larry? A deep love for music—live music, especially—and an instinct to be a little gatekeepy about it, borne mostly out of sadness for the way the world is changing, sadness for the way that he himself is changing, sadness that things can’t just stay the way they were (because how they were, in that little pocket of time, in those venues, with those people, was just so fun. And maybe Larry, like myself, suffers from a lack of self-awareness about this. He has a hard time recognizing that things are fun for the next generations too, even if it looks different now). 

But, as characters often do, Larry also gave some things to me!

Like I said: he was more than a decade older than I was when I wrote that book, so the music scene of his youth was pretty different from the one I’d experienced. I grew up in Frontier, a tiny village far, far away from…well, anything. We did not have a thriving punk scene. We did not have an indie record store. We didn’t even have high speed internet; if I wanted to download a single song it required four hours of internet connection, usually thwarted by a family member innocently picking up the phone somewhere in the house. So my exposure to punk music in my teen years was limited to a couple of local bands (“local” meaning within a two hour radius of me) and a CD binder I borrowed from a friend for the better part of a year that contained a lot of burned CDs and every single Fat Wreck Chords compilation album ever made. There was also one Very Exciting Road Trip to Calgary for the Warped Tour at the end of my grade 12 year. After that, I moved to Saskatoon and started going to punk and hardcore shows at the Bassment all the time, but that scene was, by then, fairly far removed from the DIY punk scene of the 90s. 

So I had to do a little research, is what I’m saying, which was very fun. I read Razorcake and a lot of very pretentious but wonderful blogs and I scoured Reddit and followed several musical rabbit holes all over the place on Spotify. I found, expectedly, that people who are really intense about music are intense about it in very similar ways across genres and generations—and maybe that’s why so many people read Sorry I Missed You and thought, “HEY, that’s meant to be so-and-so!” or “Hey, I think that’s me!” or whatever.

Annnnyway. 

Here’s the playlist I made when I was writing that book. It has a few songs from my “research,” as well as a lot of songs about ghosting and being ghosted, songs about aging, and songs about getting over people who feel impossible to get over. Because those are the things that book is about. :)