In Emily Layden’s Once More from the Top (Mariner, Sept.), Taylor Swift–esque pop star Dylan Read is blindsided by the discovery of her high school best friend’s corpse.
What inspired this book?
I am fascinated by contemporary fame, particularly the experiences of famous women and the expectation that they walk this impossible tightrope between aspirational and accessible. It’s something I think about a lot, and a book is just a writer’s excuse to make professional their obsessions.
Do you have a music background?
I’m just a fan, and I was acutely aware of that as I was conceptualizing this project. There was a lot of anxiety about whether I could pull this off. I spent a while researching, speaking to professors, music journalists, songwriters, poets, and musicians—listening to the way they talk and learning how to mimic that.
Is Dylan based on anyone specific?
Dylan is an amalgamation of artists that I admire and am fascinated by. People are going to see Taylor and Beyoncé in her, but Joni Mitchell, Dolly Parton—many women in music have found themselves confronted with the same assumptions about their experiences and the nature of their art. There’s a line in the book about Joni Mitchell’s feelings on being called a confessional artist, and that was at the core of the kinds of artists and careers I looked at and the kind of discourse I modeled this character after.
Did you always intend for Dylan’s albums to be the lens through which you structured the novel?
Yeah, that was always there. In part, this is a book about the leakiness of artistry and memory, and how much of ourselves is in our art, consciously or subconsciously. It felt like the way to show that was to tell the story through her art.
Do you write to music?
I don’t, but I listened to music constantly as I was working on this project. I listened to a lot of country, a lot of Americana, and I did try to engage more with the bedroom pop of Gen Z—artists I admire but that weren’t in my normal wheelhouse as a millennial—so that I could write convincingly about the contemporary pop landscape.
Is there a theme that unites your books?
Like Dylan, I have a desire to resist pigeonholing myself, but I find myself returning to the idea of difficult women. My favorite characters in film, in TV, in literature are women who have a rigorous attention to some achievement of the ideal. That often gets them labeled difficult, cold, or unlikable, and that is a lived experience I am really interested in and don’t see going away anytime soon.
