“White Flight deconstructs masculinity from within, and my aim is for it to be a lesson to the world about why we—and, although I do now hold a PhD, I include myself in this group—are the way we are.”
“These are a few songs we think evoke the timelessness of made-up places and the joy of being part of an outdoor adventure.”
“Something about having a second child really messed with my relationship to music. I’m a lot more exhausted than I was when we had just one, and whatever spare mental energy I have has gone toward reading and writing, not listening.”
“I generally don’t write to a soundtrack. I rely on rhythm in my prose, and playing music interferes with that internal metronome.”
“Much like considering the food and clothes of the time, I find that thinking about the musical world that shaped my characters is a really useful texture to help ground me in the worldbuilding of the story.”
“For the four years I worked on this book, I listened to countless hours of music by Gen-X-beloved artists to carry me back to the nineties when I was growing up in rural Louisiana, the place where my cast of women originates.”
“The minute I focus on music, I can no longer focus on anything else—including writing.”
“Fiction writers always reveal themselves in their work, whether they mean to or not. I’m obsessed with music, and it’s the main way I have shown my hand in all three of my novels…”
“You know happy-sad songs? Songs that sound happy but, if you pay attention to the lyrics at all, will completely devastate you? This is a happy-sad book. Sounds sparkly and upbeat. Is in fact a total downer.”
“I don’t listen to music while I write, but it plays a big part in my process while I’m away from my desk—both in teaching me about my characters (what they might have been listening to at the time) and in helping me sink into the mood of a scene.”