From breaking up to waking up: music and me

As break-up songs go, I didn’t win any points for originality.

‘Yesterday’ is on its fiftieth play and still the tears continue. It’s New Year’s day, 2006. I am 29 and in Kaikoura, New Zealand on a dream round-the-world trip with Simon*, my boyfriend of four years. I am meant to come back with my first proper tan and an engagement ring on my eager finger. Instead, we have just split up, and so in place of a ring I have a camper van with minimal suspension, a rucksack full of dirty pants and a bottle of cheap vodka that is about to run out.

And that’s when it happens. I am fumbling around for more vodka when I find it. The CD my school friends made for me before I went away, emblazoned with riotous photos of me discovering the heady world of toffee vodka, alongside squiggly doodles of my ‘hilariously’ eighties sunglasses. I give The Beatles a well-earned rest, slide the tape in and start to listen. Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’ kicks off the show, closely followed by Cher, the Penguin Café Orchestra and ‘Children’ by Robert Miles. Music I have danced to. Music I have whooped to. The soundtrack to our university lives.

As lows go, it was a humdinger. I was now single and all my friends were getting engaged. I was about to turn thirty and I had no money, nowhere to live and no job. But – for the first time in years – I also had nothing to lose. Nothing to hold me back. The tape went on, charting years of loud nights in pubs and heartbreak and adventures and as I listened I started to remember who I was and who I had once wanted to be and I knew that this was my time. The vodka mixed with the music, and as I overlooked the beautiful Kaikoura coastline I felt a surge of something like hope.

I sat there on the cliffs and there was only one thing I wanted – to write novels. I had no idea how, but Aretha was singing ‘Think’, so frankly I didn’t care. My plan was simple. Go home. Get hold of a laptop. Start writing. Start submitting. Keep pressing ‘play’.

I didn’t know then what I know now. That ten years later I would be publishing my third novel, This Beautiful Life, about a woman who – like me – uses music to get her through good times and bad. It’s the story of Abi, who learns she has cancer and makes a playlist of survival songs – ones that remind her of the people she loves and the life that she doesn’t want to leave. Vivaldi for her dad. George Michael for her best friend. Daft Punk for her son. Tracy Chapman for her husband and Lin-Manuel Miranda and Oasis for herself.

When I flew home from New Zealand I took the CD with me and I started to make some playlists of my own. My first novel was written to a soundtrack of Japanese pop and Keane. When it was rejected I screamed along to some angry Pulp and started another. My second emerged during one of my classical phases – to rousing Vivaldi choruses and the Mendelsohn Octet. It also didn’t make the grade. And then I moved on to my third novel – my first published book, My Everything, for which I made a playlist for my main character, Hannah, blending jazz-hands show tunes and uplifting pop with classics like the Wombles theme tune.

Whenever I was stuck I would listen to Hannah’s songs and the story would start again, and soon I had publishing deal and a new book to write. Now every book starts with a playlist for my main characters, and my life is full of them too. One for ‘sluggish Sunday mornings’ (Nittin Sawhney, Norah Jones, Ella Fitzgerald with a bit of the Pearl & Dean theme tune thrown in), one for ‘Sunny Saturdays’ (hello, Iggy Pop), and one for friends and family including music we listened to in the car, like Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, anything by The Beatles, or the cheery flutes of the ‘Rainbow’ theme tune.

And now, wherever I am, whatever I’m writing, I make sure music is with me. It uplifts me, it makes me laugh and feel and frequently it makes my daughter wonder what on earth I am dancing like a fool for. I hope I’m passing on my love of music to her, whatever she may choose to listen to (hello, ‘Paw Patrol’ theme tune), and above all I hope that music helps her to make the most of every moment – that it reminds her to really live rather than to survive.

*name has been changed.