Books·Q&AThe Portland author discussed Deep Cuts on Bookends with Mattea Roach.The Portland author discussed Deep Cuts on Bookends with Mattea RoachCBC Books · Posted: Sep 10, 2025 1:17 PM EDT | Last Updated: 9 hours agoHolly Brickley is the writer of Deep Cuts. (Submitted by Penguin Random House Canada)Bookends with Mattea RoachReliving the soundtrack of the 2000sIn her busy daily life as an author and a mother, B.C.-born Holly Brickley finds herself returning to the sounds of her youth.”Now it’s just very hard to kind of create that emotional space to just be completely bowled over by a song,” said Brickley on Bookends with Mattea Roach.”Whereas when you’re young, you wake up every day waiting to be bowled over by something.”That’s why 2000s music is the soundtrack to her debut novel, Deep Cuts. From LCD Soundsystem to OutKast, it features the songs that impacted Brickley’s own life during that time. Deep Cuts follows a music-obsessed writer named Percy coming of age in the early 2000s. When Percy befriends a young musician, Joe, in college, they start to collaborate and their connection deepens. But their relationship, though passionate, also brings ego-crushing challenges, leaving Percy to wonder if Joe is worth holding onto. Deep Cuts also already has a film adaptation in the works with Saoirse Ronan and Austin Butler as the leads.On Bookends, Brickley joined Roach to talk about their shared love of music and why music and human connection often go hand-in-hand.Mattea Roach: Music is essential to your main character Percy’s story, but she isn’t yet a musician. She pretty clearly says she doesn’t feel she has any musical talent. She is a writer, but she seems to only really want to write about music. Why did you want to give her that specific lens to view the world through?Holly Brickley: I wanted to write about music. I had that lens for certain periods of my life. I wouldn’t say I’m as obsessed with music as Percy is. My first love has always been fiction so that was what I wanted to do was write a novel. But I love reading books about people’s obsessions and I know what it’s like to be a little too obsessed with music.For all of the great rock novels, I hadn’t read one that actually really wrote about the music itself to use that lens of obsession, not just to explore the culture of fandom or the culture of fame and rockstar lifestyle, but the actual emotional impact of a song.To do that, I wanted to really analyze the music within the framework of fiction.How do you get into that understanding of what it means to be truly obsessed with music?I’m from a musical family. My dad is a songwriter. I grew up in a small town in British Columbia and he was driving to Vancouver all the time to record his songs. And so I grew up around it. I never had the talent, though, and I was always so envious of it. But what I could do was appreciate it. I felt like I was good at listening to music, and I had a sense that this was something you could be good at from a very young age, I could feel it. When everyone else was obsessed with grunge in the early 90s, for me, it was all about the Beach Boys. For some reason I was just completely obsessed with Brian Wilson. Then in high school, when everyone was into Alanis [Morisette], I was into Elvis Costello. My brain just had this way of picking whatever would be least beneficial to me socially and getting so into it that I couldn’t think about or talk about anything else.- Holly BrickleyMy brain just had this way of picking whatever would be least beneficial to me socially and getting so into it that I couldn’t think about or talk about anything else.LISTEN | Holly Brickley’s playlist for Deep Cuts: Do you think that the tendency to get into music that’s not going to make you necessarily seem cool to people that you’re in high school with, but that really moves you in some way, was something that you picked up from having a musical family? There was an emphasis on just listening to whatever turned you on. I wasn’t introduced to music as a way of connecting to people or as a way of signposting your identity, which I think is how a lot of kids get into it. For me, it was purely music first and that is something I gave to my character Percy. It’s one of the reasons that she really connects with Joe, the male lead, because they both feel this way. Especially when you’re young, in college, everyone’s music is just all about that signposting, and it can be very frustrating, for Percy and Joe who aren’t interested in that. They’re interested in what makes this song good, what makes this song make me feel so much? What is it doing?Because they are ultimately writing music and so they want to learn how to do it right.You’re a novelist and you’ve said that fiction was your first love. But do you feel that there’s something that music offers that other art forms can’t offer? What makes it unique is that it is the only art form that we experience while living our lives. So you can’t look at an abstract art painting or read a book while you’re going for a run or having sex or dancing, meeting people. Music kind of infiltrates our lives in a way that nothing else can. That’s just one way that it has such a magnificent power.I think there’s also this sort of alchemy that I don’t even have the vocabulary to explain, like why melody and rhythm affects us the way that it does. It’s just magic. Music is magic to me. Music is magic to me.- Holly BrickleyBut I think that is one way that is like a concrete thing that I could hang my hat on in this book that Percy turns to music or music will just reach out of the speaker and grab her in the moment of her life, sometimes randomly and tell her something, maybe just something about herself that she really needed to know.This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Lisa Mathews.
B.C.-born author Holly Brickley’s debut novel explores a strong obsession with 2000s music
