This is a really special BOOKSPO for me, to have the opportunity to share a conversation with my friend Marissa Stapley, who has followed up her New York Times bestselling LUCKY (a Reese’s pick!) with THE LIGHTNING BOTTLES, a fiercely feminist trip back to the ‘90s music scene and Marissa’s best book yet. We talked about the magic of A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD, and how that novel comprising connected stories helped inspire Marissa’s very first book, as well as her latest, and also about the magic of connected-ness in general.
In our discussion, Marissa talks about what music meant to her as a teen in the 1990s, her awareness at the time that she was living through an important cultural moment, the way that women have been written out of the story of grunge, and how she intends this novel to be a way to finally tell the story properly. She tells me about what it took to write a story about the music industry in which real life figures make cameos, how her main characters had to come from her imagination in order to be real on the page, who exactly her novel’s villain was based on, and what she had to learn about loss before she was ready to write a book like this.
The author of New York Times bestseller and Reese’s Book Club pick Lucky returns with a spellbinding story of rock ’n’ roll and star-crossed love—about grunge-era musician Jane Pyre’s journey to find out what really happened to her husband and partner in music, who abruptly disappeared years earlier.
He was the troubled face of rock ’n’ roll…until he suddenly disappeared without a trace.
Jane Pyre was once half of the famous rock n’ roll duo, the Lightning Bottles. Years later, she’s perhaps the most hated—and least understood—woman in music. She was never as popular with fans as her bandmate (and soulmate), Elijah Hart—even if Jane was the one who wrote the songs that catapulted the Lightning Bottles to instant, dizzying fame, first in the Seattle grunge scene, then around the world.
But ever since Elijah disappeared five years earlier and the band’s meteoric rise to fame came crashing down, the public hatred of Jane has taken on new levels, and all she wants to do is retreat. What she doesn’t anticipate is the bombshell that awaits her at her new home in the German countryside: the sullen teenaged girl next door—a Lightning Bottles superfan—who claims to have proof that not only is Elijah still alive, he’s also been leaving secret messages for Jane. And they need to find them right away.
A cross-continent road trip about two misunderstood outsiders brought together by their shared love of music, The Lightning Bottles is both a love letter to the 90s and a searing portrait of the cost of fame.
MARISSA STAPLEY is the New York Times bestselling author of Lucky, a Reese’s Book Club pick, and several other internationally bestselling novels, many of which have been optioned for television and translated into several languages. She is also one half of the writing duo behind The Holiday Swap and All I Want for Christmas by Maggie Knox, and co-author of Three Holidays and a Wedding. She has worked as a journalist, magazine editor, and creative writing teacher, and currently resides in Toronto with her family.
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