Writer Holly Brickley talks to us about her debut novel 'Deep Cuts', about the importance of music mixed with a tender love story, and shares with us the musicians who influenced her growing up.
Holly Brickley is originally from Hope, British Columbia, and now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and two daughters. She studied English at UC Berkeley and received an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. Deep Cuts is her debut novel, published by The Borough Press on 13 March. You can also find Deep Cuts on the Suffolk Libraries catalogue.
In chronological order: Debbie Gibson, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Tori Amos, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Elvis Costello (this one lasted for many, many years; he’s still my favorite), Sam Cooke, Pulp, Neutral Milk Hotel.
I finished the book late February 2023, and immediately set about trying to get an agent. I went to AWP, a conference for writers here in America, and took notes on panels about getting published. I listened to a lot of podcasts as I was preparing my query package, working extremely hard on getting that right – I even paid a service called the Manuscript Academy to get an agent to review my query package, though they basically told me it was perfect. Then I queried for several months. I mostly heard crickets, a few full requests, a few full rejections. Finally I started getting interest and in September I was offered representation by my dream agent. After that, everything happened very quickly. We did some revisions, then my agent sent it out ahead of the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, and there was an auction. From the time I finished the first draft to the publication, it was two years.
I’m not much of a routine person, though I would like to be. When I get deep into a book, I want to do it all the time, which is difficult because I have kids and a husband and a biological need for sleep. So I end up writing wherever and whenever I can: at my desk, at cafes, at hotels (for my birthday every year I go to a hotel for three days and write: heaven). There is one key scene in Deep Cuts that I wrote standing up at the kitchen counter while waiting for the water to boil for my kids’ pasta. It’s chaotic, but it works for me!
Deep Cuts is about a young woman named Percy who has lots of opinions about music, but no real talent for it. We meet her in college as she’s befriending a musician named Joe, with whom she enters a complicated years-long collaboration/romance. Along the way, Percy uses music to make sense of her life– both popular songs as well as the music she’s creating with Joe – so there are elements of music journalism embedded in the fiction. And ultimately that becomes the other love story of the book: there’s the love Percy has with Joe, and there’s the love she has, and that a lot of us have, with music.
It really came together for me in what is now the first chapter of the book, where Percy and Joe first meet. That wasn’t always the first chapter, though. Once I had them talking about a song – the intensity of Percy; Joe’s natural, effortless charm – I could feel the crackle of electricity in my fingertips. I jettisoned everything that came before and knew that was the book’s opening.
The film rights have been optioned by A24, to be written/directed by Sean Durkin and starring Saoirse Ronan and Austin Butler. Saoirse Ronan will also be a producer. You can google it for more info. I truly can’t get my head around the level of talent involved – it’s the highest quality all around, from writing to production to stars.
I’m working on another novel, also a complicated love story about a highly opinionated, outspoken young woman – but this one will not be music related! It’s set against the backdrop of a heat wave and raging climate change, so it’s a bit heavier, but also somehow funnier…
I would describe it as a dream. Sometimes when I first wake up, as my consciousness is first coming online, I wonder if it really was a dream. I’ve been incredibly lucky, and I think that’s important to note. Whenever I say that people want to discredit it: “It’s not luck, it’s talent and hard work, don’t sell yourself short!” Fair, I did work hard, and I know I wrote a damn good book. Also, I got really lucky. Two things can be true. I’m also very aware that my luck could change at any moment, so I’m just soaking it in and trying to enjoy every minute. The best part has been meeting and hearing from readers who identify so intensely with the book, who say it feels like it was “written for them.”
Elvis Costello, for sure. He has had a major influence on my writing – specifically, I think, my desire to marry tenderness with biting wit. It would be so fun to meet him and tell him that face-to-face.
Readers might not know I was born and raised in a small, secluded town in British Columbia, Canada. Deep Cuts is a very American novel, in many ways, both in terms of its themes of individuality vs. collaboration, and its iconic settings (New York rooftops, Haight St. in SF, the UC Berkeley campus, the Troubadour in LA, etc). I think being a slight outsider to the American experience helped give me a unique lens on it, an ability to see it for both its beauty and splendor and ridiculousness.
