Daisy Jones and the Six is coming out this week and I have been going head first into books about live music for the last month. If you are like me, look no further than Sarah Priscus’s Groupies. Submerse yourself in the “grungy yet glittery world of 1970s rock ‘n’ roll and the women – the groupies – who unapologetically love too much in a world that doesn’t love them back.” I got to chat with Sarah last September following her release of the book in July. Keep reading to find out the research she conducted to perfectly capture the LA music scene in the 70s.
Alyssa Yung: Hey! I hope you are well and thanks for taking the time to talk. I actually found out about your book from my local bookstore, Book Soup, who was doing promotion for it.
Sarah Priscus: Yeah! They hosted my online launch event for the book, which was really nice. Um, I really appreciated that. It was interesting because I had never been to the store or to Los Angeles; so it’s nice that someone in Hollywood liked the book enough to want to promote it — it kind of felt… validating?
Alyssa: That actually leads me to my next question about how you were able to capture the feeling of LA so well and live music in general.
Sarah: A lot of Google Maps? And photos are very helpful; especially from the 70s. There are a lot of videos of someone just taking their camera and walking down the street and filming the stuff they see. Which is so valuable, because it’s not filtered or curated. It’s just people hanging out; which is ideal when you’re doing research. You don’t want to just look at what’s in movies or TV shows because that’s too pristine.
Alyssa: All of LA’s too pristine until you see the real stuff. [Both laugh]. Do you ever catch yourself wanting to tell your character something when you are in similar environments to them?
Sarah: [Yes] when I was writing a bit more, because I’d be thinking about the plot all the time. Like, where’s it gonna go? What am I going to do from here? And sometimes I’d see something and I would just think of how they would react to something. I feel like some of them would be fun to have a real conversation with some of them wouldn’t be.
Alyssa: Was there any part that was really hard for you to write? And if so, how did you get over that?
Sarah: The hardest thing to write for me is anything that’s very emotionally distressing. SLIGHT SPOILER: The scene after Faun finds Josie in the bathroom and the whole chapter after that was really difficult because Faun is just so upset. It kind of takes a lot out of you emotionally to have to keep tapping into like, the most upset a person could feel. Then all the stuff with the trial was difficult, mostly because I had to do a lot of research because I did not know how courts in California in the 70s were. I read a lot of court transcripts from the time to understand how it worked. SPOILER OVER
Alyssa: Bouncing off of that, did this book come naturally to you? Did the characters feel like they were somehow a part of you just dying to get onto paper?
Sarah: I’ve been mulling over a book with a similar premise for a very long time, like, probably since I was in high school. I toyed with writing it, but hadn’t really ever finished it. By the time I started writing, what became Groupies I had the idea of Faun and Josie as characters floating around in my brain for a long time. A lot of it were the things that I was feeling or experiencing, especially going through university. There are a lot of moments where you really want attention and you really want people to like you and you really want to prove that you’re valuable and useful in some way. So that definitely was going into all of them; they all want to be important in some way.
Alyssa: How do you select the names of your characters?
Sarah: You may have guessed, from my Google Maps fascination, I’m also really into Wikipedia and historical baby name lists. So basically, I start writing something and I say, Oh, these characters are this age, so they were born in this year. And I often have ideas about the vibe that I want. When I was naming Josie I was like, it really has to end with an “i” or an “ie”; it has to be very cutesy, an apple pie kind of name. And then I would go through lists and paste some names into a sentence to see how I like it.
Alyssa: What’s been your favorite part of this whole release process?
Sarah: Honestly, every time I get a message from somebody or get tagged in an Instagram post of somebody who read the book and liked it and has very specific interesting things to say, that’s really exciting. And seeing the physical book is cool, I’m really happy with it, too.
Alyssa: Yeah, that’s totally fair. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today!
Sarah: It was really fun and it was nice to meet you!
Make sure to go pick up a copy of Sarah Priscus’s Groupies, at your local indie bookstore.
