“Music runs throughout my debut memoir, Best Copy Available, and most of it’s from the mid-’80s.”
“The biography of a song is necessarily filled with music.”
“Music is central to my writing process.”
“My work has always been influenced by music.”
“One of the best parts of writing Once More From The Top was the excuse it gave me to make myself a student of pop music…”
“Ghosts visit Frank often. Ghosts of the living and ghosts of the dead. Ghosts of the past.”
“The novel as a whole rotates around music, the way teenagers’ lives usually do.”
“One song per story, in the order they appear, mirroring the collage—or perhaps kaleidoscope—effect of the reader’s experience, with the whole, like any good mix tape, being greater than the sum of its parts.”
“While I was writing Misinterpretation I barely listened to music, but an eclectic range of tunes somehow snuck into the story.”
“Songs undergird one of novel’s themes—the solace of storytelling. In part, the novel asks: How can stories help us understand ourselves and the world? Why do we sing even in our deepest grief?”