I almost can’t write in silence now,” says Los Angeles novelist Edan Lepucki. “Because I’ve gotten such a Pavlovian ritual of put on certain songs, start writing.”
Lepucki’s most recent novel is Time’s Mouth. Set in the woods outside Ben Lomond and in Los Angeles, the book features generations of women who can travel to the past through their memories. It’s an intensely imagined work that takes a number of risks with genre, character, and emotional tone. Lepucki wrote a lot of it to Phoebe Bridgers’s ethereal music because Bridgers’s albums are “emotive and typically kind of depressing or mellow.”
This article appears in Issue 25 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
She likes to work to lyrics that drop her into an emotional state: “I love when I’m writing and then five songs have gone by and I didn’t notice. That’s the best.” Lepucki’s use of music to set the right mood with Time’s Mouth also involved listening to Joy Division’s song “Disorder,” which shows up in two scenes in the book. The nature of each book determines the right music. With California, her first novel, she listened to an album by Fever Ray that is electronic and scary.
Lepucki adopts a more kismet-oriented outlook with the books that surround her. She and her husband are huge readers, and the books in her home office are overflow from shelves upstairs. She explains, “I always liked the idea that a book has its own life when it becomes a book.… I like to think about my own books—where they will end up. Hopefully not in the pulp machine but in a random office where unless I’m being alphabetized, I might end up next to some really bizarre book.”
The novelist keeps pictures by her kids that she particularly likes on her walls, the better to take risks with: “You want to feel like you’re in this cocoon, and it’s OK if you don’t do the thing as you want it the first time or the 12th time because you’re surrounded by this lovely, loving ‘You’re OK, it’s OK.’ ” Lepucki muses. “I don’t know why I’m so scared. But I feel that way sometimes.”•
Anita Felicelli is Alta Journal ’s books editor and the author of How We Know Our Time Travelers, Chimerica, and Love Songs for a Lost Continent.
