Author Spotlight: Holly Brickley
“Tender as a ballad and pleasurable as a pop song, Deep Cuts is both a romp into the indie sleaze era of the early aughts and a timeless love story.”—Coco Mellors, New York Times bestselling author of Blue Sisters
It’s a Friday night in a campus bar in Berkeley, fall of 2000, and Percy Marks is pontificating about music again. Hall and Oates is on the jukebox, and Percy—who has no talent for music, just lots of opinions about it—can’t stop herself from overanalyzing the song, indulging what she knows to be her most annoying habit. But something is different tonight. The guy beside her at the bar, fellow student Joe Morrow, is a songwriter. And he could listen to Percy talk all night.
Joe asks Percy for feedback on one of his songs—and the results kick off a partnership that will span years, ignite new passions in them both, and crush their egos again and again. Is their collaboration worth its cost? Or is it holding Percy back from finding her own voice?
Moving from Brooklyn bars to San Francisco dance floors, Deep Cuts examines the nature of talent, obsession, belonging, and above all, our need to be heard.
Author Holly Brickley shares more!
I have always been acutely envious of musicians. A common affliction, I realise, but mine seems to hurt more than it should. Is it because I love music so much? Because I grew up in a musical family but couldn’t sing along to Debbie Gibson without making even the cat bolt from the room?
I set out to explore this envy in a novel, because this is why I write, in part: to understand the more baffling corners of my brain. I wanted to make it a love story, where I knew envy would be richly complicating.
From this seed grew the characters Percy Marks, full of fiery opinions about music but no talent, and Joe Morrow, a songwriter who thrives on Percy’s blistering critiques. Once I found Percy’s voice and felt the electricity of her dynamic with Joe, the rest of the book came quickly in an exhilarating, year-long whoosh.
In the end, envy is a pretty small part of the story. Deep Cuts is about the joy of making art with other people, and all the problems of ego and communication that go along with that.
It is also something of a personal jukebox. Each chapter highlights a song (from Joe’s originals to real-world anthems by OutKast, Pulp, Joni Mitchell, and more), weaving scraps of music journalism into the fabric of a novel. My hope is that it won’t matter whether readers know the songs; what matters is how Percy uses each one to propel her story forward, the way she takes its magic and makes it her own.
Writing this book was so consuming and cathartic and just plain fun, it made me realise that’s what I envied most about musicians: the way they play; the visceral joy and freedom they seem to find in their art, even if what they’re processing is pain. Why did it take me so long to realise we can do this with books, too?
Reading Deep Cuts, I hope you experience the joy and freedom I felt while writing it. I hope you close the book feeling more pride in your own unique talents, whatever those might be. And then I hope you blast a song you’d forgotten how much you love and dance to it, or make out to it, or just lie there feeling its magic become your own.
– Holly
Deep Cuts is out now at all good bookstores in Singapore and Malaysia!
