Every book represents some writer’s temporary obsession.
I am at the age now where I regularly look back at things I believe I did recently only to discover it was a decade ago. If you look up you will see that the banner on this blog features an image of what appears to be an 80s pop star. It is part of the cover art for the novel Identity Theft. Both it and the title “Story & Self” date back to the period when I was promoting that book. It was published in 2015.
Identity Theft is now available in audio format. In order to prepare the audio version I had to listen to the whole thing. So I thought I would talk a bit about my thoughts having just listened to nine hours of my work being read back to me. Thanks to the advancements of technology, it has become a story set in a particular period– the 2010s. But the tale and its themes are as relevant as they were then.
People sometimes ask me how long it took to write a particular novel. Having done a few now (I have a novel being shopped now, which I hope to be able to tell you about soon) I understand my process a bit. It starts with me working on some idea that I do not realize is a bit half baked. I take a few stabs at scenes, dialog, story lines. Then at some point I hit a wall and abandon the project. Bits and pieces of it end up evolving into other projects. Then, usually a decade or two later, something sparks my imagination and I remember the old book idea and suddenly I see it full formed in my mind and I write without stopping for a month or two until it is done. It seems I need immediacy and also time for my subconscious to do its thing. It takes twenty years or it takes a month, depending on how you view it.
I can pinpoint the exact moment Identity Theft came roaring back to life. It happened when I saw Adam Ant in concert in 2013. I wrote about the experience here. According to my logs it is actually my most popular post at the moment. I think this has more to do with Adam Ant being back on the road than anything about the piece itself.
“Somewhere out there– in the fake world that others called real– was a musician who had been born Stuart Goddard,” I wrote. “He looked very much like the man in my posters, but this Adam Ant was no more real to me than a unicorn in Brigadoon. The real Adam Ant was the one I imagined– the one my true self lived with inside MTV. So I waited, planned my escape, and kept my secret.”
As I sat with the memory of a time that I had believed there might be a way to vanish into an alternative world defined my music and sex and youthful energy an abandoned manuscript came back to my consciousness.
Years after my crush on one rock star I ended up, briefly, working for another. In the early internet days, when online life consisted of bulletin boards and e-mail, I had a part time job at Arlo Guthrie’s Arlozone shop in Pittsfield, MA. The building consisted of a coffee and merch shop in the front and the folksinger’s offices in back and, I assume, storage on the floors above. (I don’t think I ever went up there.) There were a few little elements of that setting that found their way into Identity Theft. (The framed gold record with a spider caught under the glass was something I looked at each day. The album was Alice’s Restaurant.) The coffee shop was not busy and occasionally I was given an administrative task to help the office staff and to pass the time. One of the tasks I was given one day was responding to fan mail. I wrote handwritten responses. “Arlo does not have time to respond to each letter personally but he appreciates…” That was when the idea of a story of someone who used a low level position at the office of a celebrity to steal his identity came to me.
What if someone posing as a rock star managed to connect with someone who was feeling the way I described feeling about Adam Ant? How would it have felt for the girl who wanted to escape into MTV if that rock star reached out to her, flirted with her? What if that dream of leaving mundane reality behind seemed to be on the verge of coming true? What would happen when it all came crashing down? I took a few stabs at fleshing out a book’s worth of story but I had no success. I was working four jobs at the time and I don’t know if I would have been able to complete any novel even if the idea had been workable.
But I had the core of an idea: An office worker who goes beyond responding to fan mail and instead plays at being the rock star and the fan who he seduces under false pretenses. I could imagine the boredom and desire to be someone else that would motivate the office worker, and I could feel what the young woman might feel. What was missing was the third character in this triangle–the rock star– the man who was out on the road doing the mundane, every day tasks of a working musician completely unaware of the fraud going on in his name.
Something happened a couple of decades ago that made it easier for me to imagine that perspective. I started touring. First, I toured with a large troupe of 50 dancers in a big tour bus. Then, for the past 18 years, I have been on the road with my partner, a ballet dancer, teaching master classes. We’re on the road about six months a year and have been to 47 states. It’s not rock n roll and, from the inside, it is not particularly glamorous. But it is a particular kind of life with its own ups and downs. I knew the little details of a life on the road that could make a “rock star” character grounded and real.
When I was reunited with my junior high school rock star crush in 2013, I had just finished my own tour. “The band is on stage, the music is swelling in preparation for Adam Ant’s grand entrance,” I wrote. “Everyone is standing. I am hoping they will not stand through the whole show, because I just got back from tour and I am tired.”
At the concert, the old emotions came back. And in the days following the event it clicked in my mind. All of the pieces were suddenly there and I had the momentum to see it through. It begins with three characters who are all at low points in their lives and all wrestling with aspects of their identities. The musician, Ollie, is in the middle of a divorce. Ethan, his employee, has dropped out of college and doesn’t know what to do with his life. Candi, the fan, is in debt and stuck in an uninspiring job that she is about to lose to restructuring and layoffs. Their worlds are set on a collision course by Ethan’s decision to go beyond answering e-mail on behalf of the rock star and answer instead in the guise of the rock star.
The book has been called “genre defying.” This is because the set up is similar to a lot of romantic comedies where someone takes on a false identity and romances another character. In a traditional rom com, what begins as a game turns into real love. The trope is that the disguise allows the seduced character to see someone she would not otherwise have seen and the couple lives happily ever after. I had an agent, who read the first few chapters of Identity Theft, tell me that this was how the book has to end because that is what is set up in the beginning and what the audience expects.
So if you read Identity Theft, don’t expect that. The novel doesn’t treat the fraud as cute or harmless. “I was surprised by how dark it got,” is a common reaction. Someone called it a “somewhat dark, intellectual, comedy.” I guess that’s as good a way to describe it. If I had any musical talent, maybe I could give it my own made up genre name in the spirit of AntMusic.
Anyway, the book and the new audio version are out there and if any of this makes you curious I hope you will give it a try.
Story and Self 