Novel Spotlight: Deep Cuts
What are you even doing with your life? Go find this book right now!!
I interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to gush about a book I finished today, after a fever dream of a reading process. Literally, fever, because I’m sick again and feel not dissimilar to a heaping pile of trash.
I read about Deep Cuts earlier this year when it was published in February. Then I read a Substack entry lamenting it’s ridiculously low score on Goodreads. Shout out to this writer and her hilarious subtitle! Made me lol. But there are spoilers, sort of, so read the book before you read her piece in it’s entirety. Not mine, though. Mine has no spoilers.
Holly Brickley, will you come to my birthday party, if I ever have one again? Will you text me late at night with your epiphanies, your grandest ideas? Will you be my friend? I love you. I’m really fan-girling here, and it’s slightly uncomfortable, but also I never do this, so it feels justified.
Our protagonist, Percy aka Eileen aka Eileen Percy Marks, loves pop music and has LOTS of opinions… about music and life in general. Gosh I love an overtly opinionated, borderline self-sabotaging, endearingly jealous female narrator. Ultimately, this is a love story. But it’s also a friendship story. And it’s also a story about young women claiming their power in a male dominated, dog-eat-dog world.
Why, though, was this particular book so unputdownable? It did read a little like a diatribe. Like every character shared one hive mind. That might sound like a bad thing, and maybe it should have bothered me. It didn’t, though. The opposite, obviously. You know those times in life, and relationships, when you’re just totally synched up with someone? Almost like, you can read their mind; you do read their mind. It’s magic! And so is this book.
I’ve heard people say before, I don’t want the book I’m reading to end. I never understood that idea, not really. Because the ending is typically the point. We all want to get there - to say we finished. To check it off our list of “books read.” But I think I get it now. With this book, I still wanted it to end, so I could know what happened… while also not wanting it to end, because the experience of reading it was so cathartic and reassuring. The closest I’ve come to actual therapy in a long time.
Brickley got to the heart of what it is to be a young woman hustling during the aughts. She dug the knife into that feeling and spun it around a few times.
And the music references. The music! I created a little playlist as I went through the novel. Then eventually I gave up because I was too hooked on the story. Then I logged back into Spotify and saw that someone had already created this mix. But then realized it was missing songs. So, a project for the summer I hope.
Below is an excerpt I cannot stop thinking about:
I read the above passage three times while sitting in my bed. I’ve had this feeling before, too. This wish that I’d written something that someone else wrote. I had it while reading this book, if I’m being 100% honest with you folks.
“…what inspires this particular compliment, this feeling of not just loving a song, or any work of art, but longing to have created it yourself? It happens when you identify so intensely with the work it feels somehow wrong—sad, almost—that it didn’t come from your own brain.”
And there it is. My sentiments, exactly, Ms. Brinkley.
Warning: this book is being turned into a movie right now, probably. So quick, go find a paper copy, or kindle, or audio, whatever, before Hollywood does Hollywood things and casts a WAY TOO PRETTY female lead to play Percy. Obviously I’ll be watching the movie too. Theater viewing party? Anybody?
Also, now that I’ve been writing my newsletter for a good amount of time, I’m seeing some patterns emerge. Look!!! Look at this!
Around the same time two years ago, I wrote another novel spotlight about a book I loved… that also got turned into a movie…
Has everyone seen Hamnet? Don’t wear eye makeup to the theater, gals. Trust.
Anyway, hope you’re all enjoying the start to 2026. Fingers crossed!