How to Not Be Annoying, I Guess

Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley & The Artist's Way

Last month I received a startling email from a publicist at Crown Publishing asking me if I would be interested in receiving an advance copy of “DEEP CUTS: A Novel (on sale 2/25¹) by Holly Brickley, a literary love story set in the indie music scene.” Whooo, me?! Thrilling as it was, I would have said no if it sounded bad or boring, but it didn’t.

I love music. I love love. Stace (my publicist on the inside) compared it to Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow which I loved/hated. She also compared it to Daisy Jones & The Six, which I never read at all, and made reference to the messy love stories of Sally Rooney, which I have mixed feelings about as we all know. It was enough—I was intrigued. So job well done, Stace! And many thanks for the advance copy.

In a Berkley bar in the early 2000’s, Percy Marks meets Joe Morrow. They strike up a conversation about the song coming out of the jukebox—“Sara Smile” by Hall and Oates. He calls it a perfect song, and she corrects him. It’s a perfect track, but not a perfect song. Then she has to explain what the hell that means. All of a sudden, they’ve been tucked away in a tall-backed booth all night talking music, and the closing-time lights are coming on. She writes her address on a napkin so that he can drop off a CD of his latest song—he’s got musical ambitions himself. The rest is history.

But even though it’s history, I’ll tell you a little bit about it, since that’s the whole point. Joe and his girlfriend, Zoe (Joey and Zoe who both like Bowie, as they’re colloquially known), saunter into Percy’s life and everything changes for her. Having never had close friends with the same interests (again, music), these new relationships come as a revelation. I found the chapters focused on the trio’s college-time friendship most touching. When it becomes clear that Joe and Zoe’s relationship is coming apart at the seams, Percy knows they can no longer be the trio they were, but can they be something else? Can Joe and Percy be something else?

They have by this time found out that they can be musical collaborators, but that’s a messy thing to be. If Percy helps Joe write a song, what kind of credit does she get for that? If she helps him write a song and he’s not famous, it doesn’t really matter, but what if he gets famous? Joe is the artist, so what is Percy? Percy is jealous of Joe. Joe is possessive of Percy. Percy is in love with Joe. Joe is afraid he won’t be able to write good music without Percy and therefore afraid to mess with it. If they have feelings for each other, if they kiss, if they sleep together, then what? Nothing good. Or…?? The will they won’t they of it all is so propulsive that I really couldn’t put it down.

I followed them eagerly—actually mostly followed Percy, since she’s our narrator—as they grow up and come into their own. They graduate Berkley, Percy enrolls in the nonfiction MFA program at Columbia. Joe starts playing bigger and bigger shows. They date other people, they write songs together in stolen moments on borrowed pianos, and then they don’t speak to each other for years.

Most of all, they always find a way to do the most irritating, stupid, self-sabotaging thing possible. With shocking consistency they both do the exact wrong thing at the exact wrong time. Even worse, they often know it’s the wrong thing, and they do it anyway. They are selfish, insecure, snobbish even though they insist they aren’t, and overly worried about how other people see them. They are human.

So consider this my warning, I suppose, and it’s the element of the novel that reminded me most of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (as promised). The characters are ANNOYING², especially Percy, since we’re in her head with the first-person narration. Really truly, she sucks a lot of the time. BUT, about halfway through Deep Cuts, I discovered the antidote. It’s either kind of meta or completely obvious so bear with me.

The book is written almost like Percy’s memoir. There are frequent narrative reflections, like this “felt radical to me at the time,” or that “would eventually become the title track of his band’s album.” She cuts her bangs in the bathroom mirror, and it’s “actually one of the most subtly powerful decisions of [her] life.” The magic that these interjections worked on me was that it made me very alive to the fact that an imperfect person was telling me an imperfect story.

She vacillates between being overly critical of herself—for example worrying that no one actually wants to hear her talk about music, to the point of not even wanting to hear herself—to feeling as though the decks are unfairly stacked against her. She wants people to care about what she has to say, but she can’t extend the courtesy to others—she goes to dinner with a classmate who’s a food writer and has to fight a “profound lack of interest” when he tries to tell her about what makes naan so chewy. Her level of awareness when it comes to her own flaws (as reflected in her storytelling) is similarly inconsistent. Sometimes she’s got her finger on it, but frequently she doesn’t.

When I framed the moments in the novel that I took issue with or that bothered me as manifestations of Percy’s imperfections within her storytelling, I found them tolerable. Additive in fact! It all became a part of imperfect, growing her, and I grew quite fond of her. In the way you might be fond of a friend who spends a lot of time trying to ruin her own life. It is a testament to Brickley’s writing and her character construction that everything Percy says and does feels aligned, intentional and leading towards some new, next place.

Maybe you’re thinking, that’s how fiction works, Eve, why are you making it more confusing than it needs to be. And I don’t know the answer other than to say that it felt particular to me in this case and worth calling out. My awareness of the narrative dynamic transformed my reading experience.

Now, I’ve done a lot of rambling about how Percy is annoying and how I managed not to get annoyed by her annoying behavior. But I’ve kind of buried the lede, because perhaps the most important thing about this novel is the why. WHY is Percy so annoying?

Brickley does an excellent job depicting the agony of wanting to be an artist but not knowing how. To be honest, the craziest part of this novel is the part where Percy is a ~20-year old college student who’s already decided that, because she doesn’t play an instrument, she can only love music (admire, listen, talk about, write about, etc.) and never actually create it. ALL of the boys I went to college with who picked up guitar on a whim have news for this bitch!!!

But joking aside, many of Percy’s most frustrating qualities and traits stem from the fact that she is creatively blocked. Stuck, afraid, stifled. I recognized this while I was reading: her jealousy, her bitterness, her extreme sensitivity, and the moments when she lashes out. I was able to empathize, able to watch it play out and wish that she would just believe in herself a little bit more.

Now though, I feel even more deeply for Percy. Her worst qualities make even more sense. Her self-destructive behavior too. Why? Well, as loyal readers know and astute readers may have guessed (from my casual use of the book’s vocabulary), I AM DOING THE ARTIST’S WAY.³ If only someone had gotten poor Percy a copy of this book!

For those of you who aren’t familiar (it’s not exactly niche, I know, but maybe I can introduce it to one or two of you!) The Artist’s Way is a spiritual 12 week program built on the foundation that all humans are creative beings who must create in order to be fulfilled. To create, we must nurture our inner artists—to save them from the belittlement they have likely endured throughout our lives. To nurture our inner artists, we must write three pages of anything longhand every morning first thing in the morning, and we must take ourselves out on a date once a week. It’s really so much fun.

The Basic Principles state that 1) Creativity is the natural order of life, 4) We are, ourselves, creations. And we in turn are meant to continue creativity by being creative ourselves, and 6) The refusal to create is self-will and is counter to our true nature. There are ten basic principles, but these three serve my purposes for now.

I honestly wonder if Brickley was doing The Artist’s Way when she wrote Deep Cuts because Percy is a textbook case. Refusing to create is counter to our nature! Of course Percy doesn’t consciously refuse to create, but she has convinced herself that she can’t, she has made herself afraid. And that is a kind of refusal all the same.

Most of us, like Percy, live in this middle space. We want to create, whether it’s music, painting, writing, something else entirely⁴ but we struggle to cross the rubicon. As a result we feel stuck, trapped, frightened, unfulfilled, and from there, it’s very easy to understand how we become ANNOYING people.

I don’t mean this to be an ad (unsolicited) for The Artist’s Way. By the end of Deep Cuts, Percy is figuring it out even without Julia Cameron’s help. I guess I mean for it to be an ad for being creative no matter how you do it. You can do The Artist’s Way and Julia Cameron will hold your hand. Or, you can do it like Percy, in agonizing baby steps, fight the battles, live to tell the tale, emerge bloody and victorious. Either way, my hope is that you’ll end up in the same place: creating.

Okay that’s all for now! Love you, bye <3

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1. Yes—it’s exactly what you’re thinking! That’s this coming Tuesday!

2. Trust that I say this with fondness in my heart.

3. Yes!! I’m doing The Artist’s Way. I’m on Week 2 (almost Week 3) and I’m on FIRE. Though I haven’t actually been that annoying about it yet here, I won’t shut up about it in my real life. Consider this floodgates OPENNNNNN. I also haven’t stopped trying to convince people to do it with me in my real life, so that’s happening here now too. You should join me. Join me. JOiiiin meeEEE :)

4. My friend Maggie told me that Bella Hadid did The Artist’s Way and ended up starting a perfume company, which really cracks me up for some reason.