“I grew up around musicians, with music and the like being as important as making your bed,” says 29-year-old Nashville writer Sarahbeth Purcell, whose second novel, This Is Not a Love Song, came out last week. “I wrote lyrics for the first song I wrote when I was 5…and I guess I wrote lyrics first, before I evolved into a writer. Songs are so easy to write. They’re like a fast food version of a story.” But Purcell has a longer story to tell—a gourmet meal, if you will. Though her love of (and immersion in) popular music permeates both novels she’s published to date, Purcell finds a deeper, more profound gratification in writing fiction than in writing music. “I’m sure it’s a lot more glamorous to be a singer than a writer these days,” she says. “But especially growing up in the music business around musicians—I think this is really true—a lot of songwriters want to tell larger stories, and on rare occasions they really succeed in a song. But I’m always left wanting more than that. So I became a writer instead.” Told that way, the transition seems painless and simple. Purcell’s journey, however, was both more complicated and more challenging than she immediately lets on. Her childhood was immersed in music—Purcell’s father, Denny Purcell, worked as a sound engineer for Wings and The Allman Brothers, among others, before opening a studio in Nashville and working with “everyone from Neil Young to Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits to Cibo Matto to Garth Brooks.” But Purcell dropped out of high school on her 17th birthday, and it wasn’t to go on tour. By 19, she’d written her first novel, and sent the manuscript and query letters to over a hundred publishers. “Some wrote back with praise…but no one published me,” Purcell says. “It was maddening. And then I realized you need a literary agent. No one told me this.” By then she’d finished a second book, so Purcell began the whole process again, sending her work around to agent after agent until she finally found one in England who “really loved what he read…but I don’t think he knew how to present me.” In the end, their professional relationship didn’t pan out, which left Purcell—who’d now almost finished her third book, eventually titled Love Is the Drug—exactly where she’d started. Nowhere. The week she finished the book, Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler, whom Purcell describes as “a longtime friend in the music business,” happened to be visiting Nashville. For years he’d been asking to read her stuff, and when she finally handed over the newest manuscript, “he flipped out,” says Purcell. “Loved it.” Knopfler’s wife Kitty Aldridge had just published a book of her own and offered to pass Purcell’s manuscript along to her agent. This time, Purcell was resigned to disappointment. Instead, she got the pot of gold she’d been seeking for seven years: a two-book deal with Atria, an imprint of Simon and Schuster. In the great American tradition of self-discovery on the open road, Love Is the Drug tells the story of Tyler Tracer, a young woman who sets out for Los Angeles in an effort to come to terms with a doomed love affair and the death of her father. Tyler’s transcontinental odyssey has a noble literary pedigree stretching through Kerouac at least back to Mark Twain, but her frequent allusions to popular music, along with the lists which pepper the narrative at regular intervals (“Top Ten Best Things About Driving Fast”; “Top Ten Best Movies to Watch When You Are Miserable and Lonely and Bored”; “Top Ten Reasons Why I Cannot Be With David”), inevitably recall Nick Hornby, whose 1995 novel High Fidelity put listmaking and music at the top of every hipster novelist’s, um, list. Tyler also resembles Sarahbeth just enough to infuriate her creator, who vehemently insists she doesn’t pillage her own life, or her friends’ lives, when she writes her fiction. “A lot of people, once they read the book, even people who know me very well, thought it was completely autobiographical. And that’s so unfair, and truly it’s cheating me as an artist to assume that.” So never mind that Purcell, like Tyler, lost a beloved father or that her own musical (and cinematic) tastes inform the lists that bracket nearly every chapter. “I think an artist’s job is to tell a story that comes from within. Not to get back at people who have hurt you…not even to communicate personally with someone by using a different medium. Yes, everyday events affect your art. Details sneak in. But if you live your life as if every person you meet could be a song or a chapter, every failure or success is a great line or another advance check and a good review, you’re a vampire, not an artist.” So don’t ask her whether This Is Not a Love Song tells the real story of two best friends, one tormented, alcoholic and brave, the other destroyed by the recent departure of the man she perceived as her soul mate. Instead, jump right into the irresistible novel itself, which grants each friend (and the departed soul mate) equal time as it swings between journal entries, letters, verbatim transcripts of conversations, postcards and—just when the reader starts to feel dizzy—a bit of good old-fashioned first person omniscient narrative to anchor things a bit. Though it’s not technically her second novel—Purcell wrote This Is Not a Love Song before Love Is The Drug, though she “updated it and dissected it and put it back together to make it the book it is now”—early response to her latest effort hardly foretells a sophomore slump. “I just got back from the Southern Kentucky Bookfest in Bowling Green where I sold tons of copies—and the book’s not even out yet!” Purcell crowed in an email last week. Excitement over book festivals notwithstanding, Purcell seems determined to pursue her own vision no matter what the critical response to her art turns out to be: “I want to be a successful human being above being a successful author,” Purcell says. “I want to be happy whether I sell a thousand books or a million. And so that’s what I work on day to day.”
