In my first novel Emily Black composes her latest songs in the backstage area of her favorite venue River's Edge. In the Backstage Pass section of my site, you get an advance peek of my work-in-progress!

Ballads of Suburbia


BALLADS OF SUBURBIA is my second novel. It *just* sold to MTV Books and will be out sometime in Summer 2009. You can get a sneak peek at it below and also in the first issue of the literary magazine 10,000 Tons of Black Ink, a beautifully designed 'zine, which contains an excerpt from the book called "Ballad of a Throw Away." You can order it at: mailto:info@literarywritersnetwork.org. The mag costs $5.

BALLADS OF SUBURBIA was a little bit of a scary book to write for me because I decided that I wanted to write a book set in the place I know best, the western suburbs of Chicago, primarily Oak Park, the town I'm from. I also set it during the time I grew up, the early nineties. I worry, of course that people will think that the main character Kara is me or that other characters are based on real people, but it isn't autobiographical. I'm working on a memoir and saving all the crazy stories from my youth for that. Kara might share some of the feelings and confusion I had when I was in high school, but not so much the experiences.

I wanted to write about the place of my youth because there were a bunch of places I loved like Ambrosia's dinner and Fireside Bowl (which I am pictured in front of below, photographed by Jessie Tierney) that I wanted to capture. And I had some insights I wanted to share about the mentality of kids growing up in the suburbs and I wanted to write about it during the 90s because that was the time I know, but I think it still rings true today.


Anyway I haven't concocted a neat little summary of the book yet, but I have some lists that are fun. Some that I wrote in my journal while writing the book and then most importantly a playlist. Here is a list of inspirations for the book:

  • Greek myths (the epic fall and rise out of the ashes that makes you a person)
  • Suburbia (the place and the 80s movie)
  • Punk Rock
  • Family (the one you are born into and the one you chose, which often mirrors the problems of the original family but also fills the void)
  • "Fitting in"/Jenga/house of cards

    • The main characters and the influences for them are:

  • Adrian is imagery of the worn cuff of your jeans slowly being worn away as you walk without you even knowing it.
  • Maya is scarlet lipstick stains on a cigarette butt.
  • Liam sang Johnny Cash as a little kid not the Beatles like everyone else.
  • Kara is the bastard child of a PJ Harvey song and a Screaming Trees/Mark Lanegan song.

    • Here is the playlist for Ballads. These are the songs I listened to while writing, the songs that inspired some part of the book, or the favorite songs of some of the characters.




    Of course playlist.com is imperfect, so some songs are missing or I've given alternative versions. For example, I've used the original versions of "Little Boxes" and "Is That All There Is" here, which are great, but I listen to the Rise Against and PJ Harvey versions respectively. This is also missing a great PJ Harvey song called "A Place Called Home" which is pretty much the theme of the book. And an absolutely gorgeous song called "Suburban Perfume" by the band Office. Also missing "Had a Dad" by Jane's Addiction, which I know is about god being dead, but to me is about delinquent dads, too. Then I had to substitute "Walk the Line" for "What is Truth" by Johnny Cash though that's a pretty good substitution, "Troubled Times" for "Dying Days" by the Screaming Trees, and "Second Skin" for "Cut My Skin, It Makes Me Human" by the Gits. All and all this is pretty much my soundtrack though!

    Now without further adieu, here is the first chapter. We begin at the end.

    Epilogue: The Ballad of a Homecoming

    "And the embers never fade in your city by the lake
    The place where you were born."
    -Smashing Pumpkins

    December 1999


    Sirens and lights welcomed me back to the suburbs of Chicago. It seemed fitting. Symbolic, considering they'd also heralded my exit. And it couldn't have happened anywhere else: only a Berwyn cop would pull Stacey over for rolling a stop sign, cash in on her total lack of insurance, but not notice the underlying stench of pot smoke on us. It clung to Stacey's auburn ponytail, my freshly-dyed black hair, and the clothing beneath both of our winter coats. I'll never know how he missed it. A rare stroke of good luck? The karma I was owed for agreeing to come home in the first place?

    I'd been gone for over four years. Around the holidays Stacey always tried to guilt me into visiting. She'd remind me that my mom missed me or point out that there was no chance for a white Christmas in Los Angeles. She knew I never intended to set foot in the Chicago area again after everything that had happened at the end of junior year of high school, but the girl wouldn't give it up. Finally, she resorted to playing dirty, namedropping her daughter.

    "Lina wants you to be there for her fourth birthday. She wants to know why she's never met Mama's best friend."

    It was an underhanded tactic, but it worked.

    "I don't know why I didn't think of it earlier," Stacey congratulated herself again right before we got pulled over.

    "Because using your kid to get what you want is low even for you," I joked.

    "No, it's not!" Stacey said with a nicotine-tinged laugh. She gestured to the car seat in the back, bragging, "Do you know how many times I've used that thing to get out of a ticket?"

    On cue the whoop of a siren rang out behind us.

    "Shit!" Stacey slapped the steering wheel hard with the heel of her hand. "Don't the goddamn Berwyn cops have anything else to do?"

    I turned my head to gaze at the flashing red and blue behind us. I couldn't take my eyes off of the colors, watching the way they lit up the beige seats of the Cavalier and remembering how they looked reflected in my friend Ava's wide, brown eyes and splashing across my mother's ashen face the night I came to surrounded by paramedics in Scoville Park. I'd said, "Adrian," and when Ava heard me over the commotion, her jaw clenched. "He left you. He left you here to die and saved his own ass," she growled.

    "Good," I cackled. "Good for him."

    The tears streaking down Ava's full cheeks turned to rainbows in the red and blue light. I closed my eyes, silently begging the heroin to drag me all the way under. That was one of my last memories of home.

    Stacey eased the car to the side of the road and turned down the radio. Old reflexes kicking in, I lit up a cigarette in what I felt certain would be a failed attempt to cover the pot stink. Back in high school, it was the method everyone used when getting pulled over, but cops rarely fell for it.

    Stacey's litany of excuses began the moment she rolled down her window and smiled flirtatiously at the frowning officer. "I was at Midway picking her up--my best friend who I haven't seen in over four years--and my husband paged me. Our daughter's sick." She indicated the empty car seat. "So, you see..."

    Great, I thought, tuning out her diatribe, I'm in town for an hour and I'm already in trouble. I did not want to spend my first night back home at the Berwyn police station. Why had I agreed to Stacey's suggestion of taking "the long route" from the airport? I'd known it was code for stopping by her mother's basement apartment and getting stoned. Stacey's mom, Beth, had been smoking us up since freshman year of high school.

    And sure enough, Beth had answered the door with a bong in her hand, screeching, "Kara-leeeena! Kara-leeeena! You're finally home!" Both she and Stacey called me that even though I wasn't a Carolyn or a Caroline, just Kara. In naming her daughter Lina, Stacey had effectively named her after me.

    Beth's place was the same as it had been the last time I'd been there, the mild June night the summer after junior year when Stacey told me that she was pregnant and planned to keep the baby. So Stacey moved out of her mom's place and into prematurely married life. I OD'd in Scoville Park, and my parents and I collectively decided that it would be best for me to go live with my dad in Wisconsin until I finished high school. I hadn't come back for Christmas or birthdays or Stacey's wedding or Lina's birth. I stayed in Madison and held my breath that my really poor grades from junior year wouldn't keep me out of USC's film program. When my acceptance letter came, I went straight to L.A. and hadn't touched down on Midwestern soil since.

    After a long, bone-crushing hug, we followed Beth and her hennaed curls through the kitchen--the sink filled with dirty dishes as usual--down the short hallway--the floor strewn with clothes and junk mail--to the living room which she clearly still used as her bedroom even though she could have moved into Stace's old room and had a real bed instead of a futon.

    We sat on the futon mattress--pulled off of its frame and laying on the floor in center of the room like always--and passed around the bong. Beth asked incessant questions about "LA-LA land." How many famous people did I see on a weekly basis? What was the hot guy quotient at USC? Had I really given up writing screenplays to work on movie soundtracks? Was there money in that? Didn't I know I was supposed to be writing a big blockbuster so I could move her, Stacey, and Lina out to my mansion in the hills? Beth only breathed when she inhaled pot smoke and hardly gave me time to respond to her question before throwing another one at me.

    And this had gone on until Stacey declared, "We gotta get home before Jason gets pissed." She grabbed her coat and I followed, waving to Beth. "Now we can finally talk," Stacey said, swinging her long legs into the car and slamming the door.

    Since freshman year, conversations with Stacey had always come in spurts. At first, days went by, and then, by the middle of high school, I didn't see her for months at a time. In grade school, it had only been the two of us, we could chatter all afternoon until her mother came home, but after Stacey had discovered boys and weed, she was always headed somewhere or had someone coming to her, so I had to catch her in the moments in between.

    I listened to her talk about her latest argument with Jason as she wove through Berwyn, past the greasy spoons that lit up Ogden with their neon signs, and then down the quieter East Avenue, peppered with brick bungalows and tall apartment buildings. Stacey's fights with Jason were generally minor--considering the odds against their teenage marriage of convenience and Stacey's feisty nature, they were doing quite well--but Stacey liked to dramatize things as much as possible. Since both of us were absorbed in her tale, neither of us paid attention to her poor driving. Then, of course, that stupid cop pulled us over.

    I smoked two cigarettes while Stacey turned on the charm. But the worried mother routine failed to impress.

    "Do you have proof of insurance?" The cop asked, steely gray eyes unwavering.

    "No..." Stacey replied meekly.

    And he went off to his car to do his cop thing. Stacey was so irritated, she didn't even talk. We just sat there chain-smoking in silence for ten minutes until he came back. She fished for compassion one more time. "I don't know how we're going to afford this and my daughter's prescriptions. We don't have health insurance either, you know."

    The cop shrugged unsympathetically.

    Stacey managed to contain her rage until he slammed his car door. "Jason is going to be so pissed!" she moaned, staring at the five hundred dollar ticket for driving uninsured.

    "At least he didn't smell the pot on us." I rolled down my window to toss out my cigarette butt. A cold wind grazed my cheeks. I shivered, but enjoyed the novelty of it since I hadn't experienced real winter for years.

    "True." Stacey wrinkled her nose and asked, "Do you have some gum?" as if that would make her smell any less like a stoner.

    I fumbled through the pockets of my hoodie and offered her my last piece. After she took it, she just stared at me, her aqua eyes burning into mine.

    "What?" I said, self-consciously tonguing my lip ring to make sure it wasn't turned some weird way. My eyes darted from her finely plucked eyebrows to the freckled bridge of her nose and down to the familiar scar indented on her chin--from a bike accident when she was six, a year before we met.

    She shook her head soberly. "I fucking missed you."

    I smiled. "I missed you, too."

    Then, she changed the topic. "Soundtracks? What exactly is it that you do again?" she asked.

    "I'm interning with a music supervisor that works for Warner Brothers. It's nothing glamorous. I don't get to hang out with rock stars. I just do the grunt work, but that's most internships after all."

    She studied me quizzically. "And you like this?"

    I nodded.

    "And now you want to be a music supervisor even though you've been going to school for screenwriting?"

    I shrugged.

    "I don't understand how you even got this internship."

    I shrugged again. "Hollywood is just weird that way."

    "I guess." Stacey was far less impressed by Hollywood than her mother. Her indifferent expression was quickly replaced with a look of concern, though. "Why aren't you writing?" she implored. "You loved writing. You wrote scripts in high school all the time."

    I grimaced because it wasn't true. I worked on scripts junior year. With Adrian. And I talked about it once with Stacey at a party; her memory was a steel trap. Sure, I'd fallen in love with screenwriting that year and that spawned the idea to go to USC, but it wasn't like I'd been aspiring to it for years. "I've always loved music, though. Besides, I realized I don't have any stories to tell."

    Stacey's facial expression changed paths like a hurricane. "You?" She choked back laughter, holding her gut. "You don't have any stories? Growing up here? Hanging out with the people you hung out with? You don't have any stories?"

    "I don't have any stories." I gritted my jaw hard and watched the cop finally pull out from behind us. He turned right onto Fourteenth Street without signaling.

    Stacey got back on the road. "Okay, fine. Here's a song for your soundtrack then." She flashed me a grin and reached for the volume knob, turning up "Back in Black" by AC/DC. She rolled another stop sign and we both laughed.

    We cruised across Roosevelt Road into our hometown, Oak Park. Stacey meandered this way and that toward her apartment, narrating the changes that had occurred in the past few years. There weren't many. Remodeled Walgreens. Condo conversion. Condo conversion. Condo conversion. The tour quickly became nostalgic. We passed houses we'd gone to parties in--both the innocent kind with birthday cake and parentally-supervised games, and the kind where parents were nowhere in sight and I left blasted with my underwear on inside out. We reminisced about getting high on that playground or making out with What's His Name in front of that 7-11.

    These were all memories that felt good. Stacey swerved away from the ones that wouldn't like my ex-boyfriend Christian's house and Scoville Park. If I even looked in the direction of those places, she would distract me with, "Remember that time when we were eight..." to the point that I felt shocked to see her driving when I glanced over. Her legs were supposed to be too short to reach the pedals. I expected her hair to be in that awful bowl cut instead of hanging halfway down her back. She was supposed to flash me a gap-toothed smile, her plump cheeks rising, but of course, she had all her teeth and her face had thinned. But she still laughed the same, so hard it sounded like she was about to start coughing.

    Before the last chorus of "Back in Black" ended, Stacey punched buttons on the radio in search of another good song to keep the buzz going. She practically blew out the speakers when she found Social Distortion. Our gazes collided as we shouted, "Well, high school seemed like such a blur..."

    Yeah, "Story of My Life," Stacey knew it was my type of song. It's the ballads I like best and I'm not talking about the cliched ones where a diva hits her highest note or a rock band tones it down a couple of notches for the ladies. I mean a true ballad. Dictionary definition: a song that tells a story in short stanzas and simple words, with repetition, refrain, etc. My definition: the punk rocker or the country crooner telling the story of their life in three minutes, reminding us of the numerous ways to mess up.

    And as we zigzagged around Oak Park to Social D, memories of the wild times seduced me. I wanted to spend the whole week stoned. I wanted to call old boyfriends. I wanted to head out to a punk show at Fireside Bowl to meet new boys who would have me pressed against a wall with their hands up my skirt while I drunkenly giggled. I wanted to ride in Adrian's car, him taking the curves of Lake Shore Drive way too fast. I wanted to drink coffee with the old gang at the Punk Rock Denny's until just before dawn. I wanted to snort a line in Scoville Park as the sun rose.

    It would be so easy to be the person I used to be. My life was like a song. L.A., working my ass off to do well in college and be a "healthy person," just a verse, and the chorus was coming up again, the part where I fucked up the same way I always did.

    When Stacy screeched to a stop behind her apartment building, the radio cutting out abruptly as she killed the engine, the spell was broken. "I can't stay," I reminded myself curtly.

    "What?" Stacey's brow knit in confusion. Apparently I said that aloud.

    "I mean, after New Year's. I'm going back to school, back to L.A."

    "I know that." She shook her head, shooting me a "you're insane" look. Then she popped the trunk and got out to grab my bags.

    "I can't stay," I repeated again before opening my door.

    Feeling slightly dazed, I stopped in the kitchen for a glass of water while Stacey dragged my suitcase into the living room. I heard her greet Jason, but before "Hi" made it all the way out of her mouth, she asked sharply, "What the hell is he still doing here? I told you he needed to leave before we got back."

    Jason drawled "Staaaaace" like a stoned hippie surfer. "He just got out of jail yesterday. He's got nowhere to go. Six months in County for some coke that wasn't even his, give the guy a break."

    I knew who     he was before his voice rumbled. "I just wanted to say hi to Kara."

    Adrian. The last time I'd seen him, we did heroin beneath the metal stage they used for summer concerts in Scoville Park. Then, we lay entwined on the hilltop watching the sunrise, but when it didn't come up in color, I freaked. The sky looked a sickly gray. Our skin looked gray. The grass looked gray. I crawled to the front of the stage, puked, and ran my fingers through the dying gray grass, wondering if that was what Adrian's hair would be like when he was old. I started laughing and crying at the same time because I knew that neither of us would grow old. Especially me, I was going to die right then and there. The thought satisfied me at first, but then I panicked, started screaming for Adrian's help and got no response.

    I guess he'd nodded out and when he came to, he found me. He'd slapped my face, trying to bring me around, and when I didn't wake, he ran to the payphone to call Ava. Apparently her suggestion of calling 911 conjured images of the cops he'd been avoiding for a month, so he dropped the phone and ran. Ava and Stacey hated him for it, but honestly, I hadn't expected anything more from him, even though that night, strung out and groping on the grass, he'd told me he loved me for the first time.

    "Kara doesn't want to see you, so get out of my house!" Stacey snapped.

    I didn't want to see him. I did, but I didn't. I shouldn't. I did want to see Lina though, and as I crept warily down the hallway toward the living room, I caught my first glimpse of her: sprawled out across Jason, her head in the crook of his arm, little stocking feet dangling over his knees, right hand loosely gripping an empty sippy-cup. Both Stacey and her mother had had children with men who had ginger hair and green eyes. Both Stacey and her daughter looked nothing like their fathers. With near-black hair, faces that freckled in the sunlight, and heavily fringed, blue eyes, they appeared cloned from Stacey's mother.

    I wandered into the living room, drawn by the beauty of my childhood best friend's daughter. I knelt down by Jason's legs and carefully took the cup out of Lina's hand, stroking her silky skin. I couldn't believe I'd been so selfish and stayed away from her so long just because I was afraid to confront my past.

    "Kara," Adrian whispered.

    I stared at the sleeping baby for a moment longer to steel myself before I faced Adrian.

    He was a relic of the early nineties, of our crazy youth: the same leather jacket, the same strong shoulders, the same thick waves of tawny hair that stretched to the middle of his back, the same sharp jawline peppered with the same stubble, the same searching brown eyes.

    When his gaze locked on mine, I mentally chanted my mantra of     I can't stay, and then I let him embrace me. His scent had always reminded me of a muskier version of the air off Lake Michigan, and as soon as it reached my nostrils, it shattered the icy indifference that I'd tried to force myself to feel about him. As I melted into his familiar arms, I could no longer deny it: I'd missed him and I'd missed home and I'd gone on too long without facing all of my bad memories and old ghosts.

    Suddenly, I envisioned my high school best friend Maya standing behind Adrian. Her red hair glistened (even though it wasn't red the last time I saw her, that's the way it remains in my memory) and her gray eyes had an ethereal glow to them. Right hip cocked, hand firmly clamped to it, she made that mischievous I-told-you-so face that she always flashed when citing one of her grandmother's cliches, and she told me, "Kara, it's like my grandmother always said, you're gonna have to face the music."

    All Written Content including novel excerpts copyright Stephanie Kuehnert, 2008.