How 90s music stars Jeff Buckley and Sinead O'Connor inspired Marissa Stapley's latest novel
The Toronto writer discussed her latest novel The Lightning Bottles on The Next Chapter
Long before any of her novels hit the shelves, Marissa Stapley spent her teen years rocking out to Nirvana and PJ Harvey with her friends in small town Ontario. As an adult, she decided to return to the world of grunge through her novel The Lightning Bottles, taking inspiration from musicians with complicated and often tragic stories.
Stapley is a Toronto writer, journalist and author of romance, thrillers and romantic comedies. Her books include Mating for Life, Things To Do When It's Raining, The Last Resort, Lucky and The Holiday Swap, which was co-written by Karma Brown under the pen-name Maggie Knox.
In The Lightning Bottles, an unlikely duo of fallen rock star Jane Pyre and sullen teenage superfan Hen take a road trip to find out what happened to Elijah, Jane's bandmate and soulmate.
A love letter to music and female artists who deserve the same powerful legacies as their male counterparts, Stapley wrote The Lightning Bottles to give a voice to both them and the teenagers listening to music, waiting for their lives to begin.
She spoke with The Next Chapter's Antonio Michael Downing about their shared love of music.
Let's go to teenage Marissa Stapley. How much of a music fan were you?
Teenagers are constantly seeking ways to identify themselves, but also set themselves apart. You want to be like everybody else, but you want to be different and unique.
And for me, music was a way of trying to be different. I lived in a small town, there weren't actually a lot of grunge or alternative music fans, except everyone of course knew the song Nevermind by Nirvana. I was constantly seeking out new different music and going to concerts with my two other friends who enjoyed the same type of music.
It was so formative and transformative for me that I feel like I was always meant to write something like this and my teenage self is along for the ride.
Music was a way of trying to be different.- Marissa Stapley
So who are some of your favourites?
I really loved Hole, I was really into PJ Harvey, L7, Babes in Toyland, Juliana Hatfield — I was also into Sarah McLachlan, I went all over the place. I love Nirvana, I loved Soundgarden, I loved all those guy bands but Tori Amos really spoke to me.
It felt so subversive, [like] Alanis Morissette and how angry she was. But I was like, "hey, you can be angry and people will still listen." My number one favourite was Sinead O'Connor and she really informed this character, too.
I have to ask you about Jeff Buckley because I have a feeling that his spirit kind of haunts this book.
I actually didn't discover Jeff Buckley until post-90s so he wasn't someone I was listening to as a teenager but when the first time I heard his cover of Hallelujah I was transported by his voice. When I was creating Elijah, of course I thought of Kurt, but Jeff Buckley has the voice of an angel and this tattered charm that when I was searching for a muse, he just came to me.
It does actually sometimes feel like the spirit of Jeff was with me when I was writing, which I know sounds kind of "woo woo," but it does happen sometimes. I get tingles when I think about him and what happened to him and the way he died so tragically and so accidentally.
I don't think it's fair to artists to be sort of told to just stay unwell.- Marissa Stapley
There's so many rumours, so many people think that Jeff Buckley died of a drug overdose also or that he was a drug addict. He did try drugs, he certainly wasn't a clean living individual but I think the more I read about him, I think he was mentally unwell.
I think that nobody in his orbit at the time wanted to do anything about this because they mistakenly thought this is part of the genius. Perhaps it was but I don't think it's fair to artists to be sort of told to just stay unwell.
Jane creates her own band with Elijah, The Lightning Bottles, and they have a dream to rise to the top. Can you describe that for us?
I will say that often as I was writing, my editors would say this seems kind of unrealistic. Are you sure that somebody could rise to fame like this? But it's almost modeled precisely on what happened with Nirvana and Nevermind.
They have a horrible tragic event happen and Elijah actually writes this incredible song and performs it and in Seattle at the time, if you were at an open mic or any bar their chances are they were going to be record people because there were a lot of there's a lot of sniffing around that scene.
So someone happened to be there and saw him sing and if we're talking Jeff Buckley, imagine being in a little room and Jeff Buckley in the 90s start singing to you this incredible song with this beautiful woman playing guitar so that's what happened and then it went from there.
I actually spoke with Alan Cross a lot, a Canadian radio personality and music expert and he said that the first time he played Nirvana, Smells Like Teen Spirit on the radio, by the time the song ended, the phone lines were clogged and everyone was like, "What is this?" And then when he went to DJ Club Energy that weekend everyone knew the words and it had been out for just a matter of days.
That's what I modelled it on, that groundswell. You would call it viral now, everyone is obsessed with them before their album even comes out and this rise to fame is truly stratospheric for them.
We lost a great hero, Sinead O'Connor recently, who I always loved and admired and I know you did as well. Can you tell us about the legacy of women like Sinead O'Connor? What do you see her legacy as?
Sinead O'Connor was my first concert. I was in grade seven, it was at the CNE grandstand — I'll never forget it. Sinead's legacy is that she stood up for what she believed in, she never stopped doing that. You can look at her and think it's so sad and perhaps even pathetic that her life ended, but she continued to [write music], she was making music and she was constantly writing essays.
She had just started writing a column or she had been writing some journalism plus her memoir and that documentary. So she managed to leave that legacy when for so many years she really was silenced by exactly what I'm talking about in this book. Basically as a woman standing up and doing the opposite of what was expected of her through her entire career and life.
She leaves a towering legacy and a beautiful legacy, she was also there with me in spirit.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
