
BACKSTORY.
I remember the night Joey Ramone died. I remember getting the news, I remember the first email hitting my inbox with a ding and then the ding ding ding continuing, building, as I sat there reading that first email with that first news story, not believing what I was reading, and then reading it again and again as though rereading it I would find something different, that he would somehow not be dead. I remember listening to the U2 show from Irving Plaza and thinking that things sounded good, as they covered “I Remember You,” not knowing that they had just seen Joey in his hospital room and things were not good, at all. I remember sitting there feeling alone, 3,000 miles away from New York City, wanting to go into a bodega, buy a 7 day votive candle, walk down Bowery and stand in front of CBGBs and light that candle and stand there and cry for a good long while. But I couldn’t do that, because I wasn’t there.
A few months later, I started a novel about how someone’s life changed the night Joey Ramone died. It was originally titled JOEY RAMONE IS DEAD, and is now called B-SIDES AND BROKEN HEARTS.
The first time I met Nick Hornby, I took a deep breath and blurted out that my goal was to write the woman’s version of High Fidelity. I wanted to read a book where a woman could like music as much as a guy and not be called a groupie or be told that she sure knew a lot about music for a girl.
So I wrote the book I had always wanted to read.