Myriam Lacroix’s novel How It Works Out is brilliantly inventive and boldly entertaining.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“[A] mesmerizing novel-in-stories . . . No matter the scenario, Lacroix shows a gift for cutting to the heart of things: the way you inevitably open yourself up to both injury and transformation when you try to love and be loved . . . As kaleidoscopic as the queer experience, this is an introduction to a writer of great imagination.”
In her own words, here is Myriam Lacroix’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel How It Works Out:
My first novel, How It Works Out, tells the story of Myriam and Allison, a queer couple whose relationship plays out through a series of surreal hypotheticals. The following playlist compiles some of the songs I was listening around the time I started writing How It Works Out, and gives context for how the book came to be.
Always Half Strange, Angel Olsen
halfway insane / and halfway home
I break up with my girlfriend in the throes of what I haven’t yet identified as a psychosis. On the sidewalks of East Vancouver, the faces of passersby are green and melting like wax, every shrub hides a stalker following me home, and the very thought of going home, to the apartment where I live with my girlfriend, nails all of my limbs to the ground, a force so strong I strain with my whole body just to stand upright. One day, I try to go home and can’t. My girlfriend moves out of our apartment, and shortly after, I do too. Packing my things, I listen to Angel Olsen sing “Halfway insane, and halfway home, in your arms.” I hold my hands in front of my face and they are simulations. I could cut one off and leave it on the coffee table like a stuffed glove.
Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe, Kendrick Lamar
I can feel the changes
I move to Victoria, British Columbia, with my best friend, who’s going to law school there. We wait for hours for the ferry to Vancouver Island, because a storm’s coming in. The sky and ocean are the same tumultuous grey, and I don’t know why, but it’s the first thing that gives me hope in a long time. When we get to Victoria we run the U-Haul into a lamppost and it splits in half. We drive off into the rainy night and by the time we drop my soggy mattress in the middle of my new studio it’s almost morning. I wake up hours later to the sounds of a downstairs neighbor I haven’t met, and because there’s so much light pouring into the studio. I can smell the ocean through the open window, and beneath the songs of birds I hear a deep quiet. I can’t believe I left.
Une version améliorée de la tristesse, Peter Peter
an improved version of sadness
In Vancouver I couldn’t walk two blocks because the shadows of buildings closed in on me, car sounds making me feel like I was inside a bone-crushing engine. In Victoria, I get a bicycle. I pedal fast past shadows and glide through the small city. I stay awake entire nights, the crawl space of my bedroom thick with terror and the ghosts I brought with me, but in the days I fill my small bright studio with music, or doze on my best friend’s couch while she makes us rice bowls. I get Spotify, I get Tinder. I eat fried oysters at the small seafood shack at the end of my street, where I have my first date in years with someone who, bewilderingly, is not my ex.
Pretty Pimpin, Kurt Vile
‘cause it was a Monday, no Tuesday, no Wednesday, Thursday, Friday
That year I bike around with a Ziplock of clean underwear in my backpack, never certain in who’s bed I’ll sleep. There is a grace period after I leave my ex when my body comes back to life, drunk with the unknown. It feels so good to have an acceptable reason to scream.
fountain, ionnalee
surge like a fountain, like tide
One afternoon while doing the dishes with my best friend I hear myself laugh for the first time in years. From that moment on I am always waiting for the next reason to laugh, wondering when it will happen again. I banter with lovers and have mattress-bending sex. I cum and laugh and cum and laugh and in the painful knot of my body it feels like tiny, chiming miracles.
Lose It, Austra
don’t wanna lose you
MFA application deadlines are weeks away, and all I’ve written in years are pro and con lists about staying with my ex, leaving her, staying, leaving. I find a different list, one I wrote years earlier, in which I’d imagined a series of dreamy, hopeful outcomes to our relationship. I was so happy, then. I start with the first outcome on the list, the one in which my ex and I find a baby in an alley and claim it as our own. I write the story with all the power of magical thinking, as if my ex was sleeping in the next room, as if love hadn’t opened up the darkest tunnels of my mind and I hadn’t fallen in, unsuspecting. As long as I’m writing, whatever happened hasn’t happened yet. Everything is still possible.
Sila, The Halluci Nation and Tanya Tagaq
Inuit throat singing
I work so hard on “The Meaning of Life,” the first chapter of my book, that for weeks my lovers only come over after midnight, and I don’t leave my studio for anything but groceries. An hour after I submit my last MFA application I develop a fever that makes me deliriously ill for a whole week. By the fifth day I’m so desperate for sleep that I take extra-strong melatonin and barf it up. When the fever lifts, I forget about the MFA applications and, for months, go on to tell people that “at least I tried.”
Bloom, Odesza
bloom
I am at a lover’s house, getting dressed in their bedroom as their friends gather in the kitchen for brunch, when I get a phone call from Syracuse University, saying I’ve been accepted into the MFA. I fall onto the floor and start to laugh hysterically. I try to explain to everyone that “George Saunders” and “Upstate New York,” but my lover’s friends have shaved heads and tattoos, big dogs with chains around their necks, and it’s clear that in my state I won’t be able to match their stoicism. I float out of the house and wander around Victoria for hours, in a daze. For the first time since we broke up, I text the only person who I know will get it.
Speaking Terms, Snail Mail
I’ll see you around
Days before the MFA starts I am in Vancouver, visiting friends while all of my belongings are on a Greyhound bus crossing the continent. I meet up with my ex on a beach in the early afternoon. The greyness of the city presses down on my head, the fabric of the world holds together by a thread, but my ex is glowing, like she was cut out from a dream. We walk around Vancouver, talking until it’s late and the whole city has gone to sleep and the unspoken fact of her new girlfriend tells us it’s time to say goodbye. We hold each other for an eternity against the front of a convenience store, and I want to ask her how things could have gone so wrong, but I don’t. Instead, I tell her I’m writing a book about us, about all the ways things could have gone differently. I tell her I’m going to call the book How It Works Out, and she says that it’s a good title. It sort of makes her want to cry.
Myriam Lacroix was born in Montreal to a Québécois mother and a Moroccan father, and currently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. She has a BFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA from Syracuse University, where she was editor in chief of Salt Hill Journal and received the New York Public Humanities Fellowship for creating Out-Front, an LGBTQ+ writing group whose goal was to expand the possibilities of queer writing.