By Cassandra Yorke
Hit play. The song’s intro splits you wide open and you’re back at the crosswalk, right in the middle of campus. It’s September of 2003 and it’s overcast. Feel the soft cotton of your long-sleeved pinstriped shirt, the way it’s baggy and it slouches on your arms. Clothes that are ten years out of style on purpose. When you stop and think about it, you’ve always been a relic of another time. You’re bad at staying current with music, clothes, a lot of things. You’re a time capsule, just like the song that brought you back here, a perfect time capsule with a bomb inside it that blew you open and left you bleeding in the past, alone with your longing and nostalgia and unfinished tasks. The other part of you, quantum-entangled and sitting at a computer in 2014, stares at a blurry screen through her tears, ice melting in a scotch glass. The only thing you have to show for the past ten years is learning that fairy tales are lies – nobody ever tells the bully to pick on someone his own size and ghosts can’t rely on the living to solve the puzzle so they can finally rest. The bully will use his fists on you and love it and nobody will ever condemn him for it and the riddles of your past will remain unsolved and leave you haunted with your wounds.
Unless you can find a way to distill that pain into ink. Write something that touches the living. Show them why you wander the earth, the same way the yearbook showed you the ancient haunted photographs that anchored another soul to the material plane. That person took you back in time with him, put the images and aching nostalgia right in your heart. They became your memories, your nostalgia, left you a ghost. All you can do is pass it to the living the same way. Start with the time capsule that brought you back here to this busy campus crosswalk. You’ll use it to reach the living.
Mary, Everything started with the music.
Two albums – So Long Astoria from The Ataris and Love from The Juliana Theory. They were perfect time capsules – albums I’d almost forgotten. But when I hit play, I was right back in those tempestuous days when the whole thing started. The music was almost untouched all this time, so all the smells and colors wafted out of it, all the worry, turned to bittersweet ache the way long years make things decay and smell just a little bit different but still just like you remember. The following summer, when I touched that yearbook that changed my life forever, music was playing in my cubicle at work. I’d found an internet radio station called GrungeFM and it was introducing me to all kinds of stuff I hadn’t heard before – especially the Afghan Whigs. I couldn’t help but feel like their music sounded oddly reminiscent of the 1920s somehow. It felt so perfect with where I was and what I was doing, and I have no way to explain why it struck me that way, or why it still does today; I’m sure I’m the only one that feels that way. But music was everywhere in those days – in my cubicle, in my headphones on campus, playing in my car when I left my body during long drives and got drawn deeper into the 1920s. And when I went back to my apartment in the evening and tried to write about what was happening to me, the music was there, too. The journey I was on had a soundtrack the same way walking to class always did, and “Turn on the Water” from the Afghan Whigs would always sound like the 1920s to me because it was the 1920s when I heard it for the first time. I was a college girl in 2004 being projected (or pulled) back in time, her awareness wandering in a bygone age with a physical body left to sit mindless in the 21st century. I was in two places at once, deep in the past but still anchored to the present with a sort of quantum entanglement and a body that couldn’t let go. The part of me that was trapped here could only ache, play songs, and try to make sense of this trip through writing.
The reason I explained all that – and probably repeated myself a bunch – is because there have been some odd criticisms leveled at Mary, Everything by people who have (ostensibly) enjoyed the novel. One chick said she didn’t understand why 2004 featured so heavily in the narrative. Others have wondered why most of the book’s musical inspiration is alternative or punk instead of 1920s jazz. So that’s why! Right there! It wasn’t a straight shot back in time like novels where they have a time machine. The story has always been about a college girl from 2004 who starts out seeing the 1920s from her own time, who processes it through her own perspective. Reaching back in time, to reach back in time, to reach back in time.
So when I sat down to distill those memories into ink, the music had to be part of it. That’s because the music was inseparable from the loneliness and regret and hopes and dreams – all the very real things at the story’s heart. I only consider Mary, Everything fiction because there’s no category for “memoirs except magic and a happy ending”.
When Jennie invited me to write a guest post, I had no idea what I could tell you about, what I was an authority on. And it’s only just now that I’m realizing what I was leading up to. I’m describing my writing process, the creative approach that brought this novel to life and that I’ll probably stick with for the rest of my career. When I was a lot younger, I could just make stuff up. I could run a D&D game totally on improv. I can’t do that anymore, especially not with a novel – there have to be chunks of truth I can wrap my story around. Emotional centers to fuel the narrative. It has to be true before it can be fiction, and that’s why when I finish a novel it’ll never be just a novel. And that’s why I’m not satisfied unless all of it – fact and fantasy – are indistinguishable from reality. I’ve spoken with people who have crossed the veil. I’ve traveled back in time. They’ve given me their memories – dropped right into my awareness to become my own. I’ll never be the same again, and I’ll never be just one of the living. You can’t come back from where I’ve been, not completely.
That’s why I linger. And I wait for you to open the book so I can give you my memories. Every time I bring you back in time with me, I rest a little easier.
Check out Mary, Everything’s mood board here.
