A founding member of the Bangles, a solo artist, and a collaborator, Susanna Hoffs boasts one of pop music’s most striking and beloved voices. She joins to talk about her prolific music career and her new book, “This Bird Has Flown.”
Debbie Millman:
They are rare, but there are voices in pop music that are just irresistible, and Susanna Hoffs has one of them. In the 1980s, she co-founded the All-Girl Group, The Bangles, whose hits included Walk Like An Egyptian, the Prince-penned Manic Monday and Eternal Flame. She’s also had a long and illustrious solo career and a prolific collaboration with the singer-songwriter Matthew Sweet. And now, Susanna Hoffs has written a book, not a memoir, as you might expect from a musician in the limelight for nearly four decades, but a novel titled This Bird Has Flown. The book is about a female rockstar who falls on hard times and then falls for a charismatic literature professor she meets on a plane. Susanna Hoffs, welcome to Design Matters.
Susanna Hoffs:
It’s such a pleasure to be here,
Debbie Millman:
Susanna, is it true that you were bat mitzvahed at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem?
Susanna Hoffs:
Yes. My older brother who’s only a year older than me, had his bar mitzvah at the Whaling Wall, very quick, just reading one little stanza, and then we had a luncheon afterwards at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, and I did a little [foreign language 00:01:14] prayer over the bread and that was it. Boom boom.
Debbie Millman:
Nice.
Susanna Hoffs:
Bat mitzvah. Bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah, all in the same day.
Debbie Millman:
You grew up in Los Angeles and your mother, Tamar Simon, was initially a painter then a filmmaker, and your dad was a psychoanalyst. What was it like to grow up with a live-in therapist?
Susanna Hoffs:
It was fantastic. I love this question. I really feel like my journey as an artist has been very much informed by my upbringing, and in particular, the fact that I had a psychoanalyst father also having an artist mother. I think that it informed the fact that I chose to make my life’s work in art, in many forms of it. And obviously, as a musician, but also now having written a novel, but also going to UC Berkeley, where I was an art major, having started as a drama dance major, I pivoted to art because in a way, art encompassed everything that I was interested in.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve written about how you grew up with a tantalizing library of paperback novels.
Susanna Hoffs:
Oh yeah.
Debbie Millman:
And included books by John Updike to Gustave Flaubert, the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Baldwin, Erica Jung. Now, is it true that you now have all of those dogeared paperbacks you read in your own library now?
Susanna Hoffs:
I do. My mother was an and is an avid reader, and I have all of these sort of tattered paperbacks, and they’re so precious to me, and I read a lot of these. There was an open vibe in the household, so some of these books I read as a teen and ended up with the paperbacks in my library, but they still funnily resonate in the stuff that I’m making now. It’s fun to have made it this far. I’m 64 this year, and for some reason, maybe because of the Beatles’ song When I’m 64, I’m more aware. I’m reflecting a lot on the journey from then till now because both of my brothers are living nearby me now, after not living close by. We’re all sharing our LA stories and our childhood, so a lot of this stuff is resonating in a particular way.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I totally understand the reflection mode. I’m going to be 62 this year, so I’m always thinking about what’s left. One of the questions that I know that you asked yourself as you were thinking about writing your book, if not now, when? That’s on repeat in my brain every single day.
Susanna Hoffs:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Debbie Millman:
You said that you fell in love with music as a child. As a baby, your mom was always playing the radio, and she loved the Beatles and Burt Bacharach. And I believe your uncle put a guitar in your hands when you were six or seven. Were you even big enough to hold it?
Susanna Hoffs:
There’s a picture of me from, I think when I was just seven, or I’d just turned eight, where there’s this big guitar in my lap and I’m wearing a dress with a little Peter Pan collar and I’m sitting on the porch outside. The guitars were all gigantic. Now, they’ve made smaller guitars, but back then, I think my uncle just… He had so many instruments lying around that he just gave me one that he didn’t need to keep for himself.
But I learned, I think with the same, this is also an old story that I’m reflecting on now, that I just learned by doing. I feel embarrassed to say that I don’t read music. I can’t read a musical chart. I can look at it and see when a note’s higher and note’s lower, but I’m not schooled in it, and I never really took a writing course either. But for me, it’s all about just throwing myself in, fueled by a passion, and it just crosses all genres. But being self-taught, at this point, I just accept that I am that. I don’t know if I can learn new tricks, and I never really thought I’d get to this moment, although in some way I did. But it’s just been a really fascinating journey to get to this precise moment with the novel.
Debbie Millman:
I read that you wrote your first song at eight years old, and it was titled The Rock Island Line. You described it as vintage-y folk style. And I was wondering if this was influenced by your love of the band, the Kingston Trio, which was also a band that I loved at the same time.
Susanna Hoffs:
That’s so cool. It was very much influenced by the Kingston Trio. Yeah. I love that sound. It’s just the organic sound of acoustic guitars and voices.
Debbie Millman:
You were also involved in musical theater and plays all through middle and high school, and you said that theater was almost like your major in high school. At that point, were you thinking that you wanted to be a professional actress?
Susanna Hoffs:
I considered it growing up in a household where movies were king and that it was a big part of the family dynamic to go see movies and Westwood and I saw so many movies like Shampoo when it came out, the Exorcist when it came out, we would take the bus, my brothers and I too, or we would go with our parents, but it was always hard for me to get cast in the juicier roles in high school because I was very small. I was petite, and people always thought that I was younger than I was, which was horrifying in adolescence. It was practically a tragedy that I know when really… I felt like outside the cool people group. I didn’t think anyone would ever cast me any in anything.
So early on, I decided to just keep exploring the arts and see what happened and when I was in college and the Patty Smith Group played the Winterland Ballroom and the Sex Pistols played there too, and I was at both of those shows, it was an epiphany for me that starting a band in that zeitgeist of the band as the Art project and really having a graphic sensibility, a musical sensibility, a very clear mission statement, if you will, I started to think about that. Around that time I was dating David Roback, who ended up going on to form the band Mazzy Star, but some of what we were doing, and we were living together at a certain period during the four years I was at college, to really create a sound that when I did advertise myself upon graduation, coming home to LA, and it was a circuitous path.
I was leaving flyers that I drew and designed myself in record stores and at the Whisky a Go Go when the Go-Go’s were playing there, that led me also to put an ad in the recycler, a throwaway paper where you could buy a car or a rug or a old sofa. And it led me to the sisters, Vicki and Debbi Peterson that we met on a night, and I want to say January of ’81 in the garage where I was living, because people live in a garage. Kids who come back from college and haven’t quite figured out how to afford an apartment, we just lived in the garage and renovated it. So the Petersons came over. We played the song White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane, which they taught me, and I learned it. It was only two chords. It sounded so much more sophisticated than two chords, but that’s what it was.
And my mom was listening in from the house. We had a house guest from New York, and they were like, “You guys sound like a band,” and were. That’s the night we met. We never looked back. We were a band from this blind date that we had with each other in the garage.
Debbie Millman:
I love the fact that you handmade a flyer, and Susanna, I came upon one in my research. It’s a glorious flyer. It’s blue, eight and a half by 11. Kind of looks a little bit like a punk ransom note. I want to try to describe it for our listeners. It had the headline Girls in what looks like a very handwritten, original font. Very sharp, and it states-
Susanna Hoffs:
Yep. It was handwritten. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
It’s states you were forming a boss all-girls group to play rockabilly, psychedelic, and surf music with a mercy beat, and you stated your influences were Love, The Go-Go’s, The Last, Beau Brummels, The Birds, Blue Caps, and then handwritten under those bands that were in a sort of font, it was The Modern Lovers. You also wrote underneath that, “Must be nice,” in all caps and asked people to call you weekdays after 5:30 and weekends. And you put your first stack of flyers, I believe in a Go-go’s show in the bathroom, as you mentioned, at the Whisky a Go Go.
Susanna Hoffs:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
So I just have some questions about the flyer. Actually, before the show listeners, Susanna and I were talking about whether or not we were going to talk about design, and I didn’t think we would very much, but now I’m actually going to ask a couple of questions about the design of this flyer. So what made you decide to… It’s so interesting, this combination of handwritten type, of type set information and then the add-on of The Modern Lovers. Talk about even the whole notion of making a flyer to put in the bathrooms at a nightclub.
Susanna Hoffs:
I know. It was this DIY spirit. I loved graphic design, I loved music, I loved art, and I was the flyer maker of all the early Bangles concerts. I have other ones that I haven’t shared yet, but in some, I took a cutout. There were mostly collage because I don’t know how to use a computer. There were no computers anyway.
Debbie Millman:
Right, right.
Susanna Hoffs:
So I would just tape and glue and I would cut out things from magazines and hand write stuff. Yeah. This is an slightly off-topic story, but a friend forwarded me a letter that I had typed to a guy who had a band in the South Bay Area, just me saying, “This is my number. I’ve left a bottle of whiskey at your doorstep.” I had tracked down this guy’s home address where we’re all living with our parents. We were kids, and he had saved this letter for 40 years, and just stumbled upon it because my brother somehow got roped into this group online, and I thought, “You know what? That was a brazen thing to do to track down this musician who I admired,” but that’s just how I approached everything. I didn’t really think that hard about it. I was like this scrappy 17 year old who was just determined.
So the same thing. I have other flyers, and now I feel like I should put them up on my Instagram.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely.
Susanna Hoffs:
They were all collages. I was just making art. My mother was always doing that, and my grandmother before her. It was like a family tradition. I didn’t even think twice about it, but it makes me so happy that you were charmed by that.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. So why an all-girls band? What made you decide at that point that that was the sound you wanted and that was the way you wanted to introduce your music?
Susanna Hoffs:
It was a combination of things. One, that I had worked with David Roback in our Pre Mazzy Star template of what we were doing. When that relationship became fraught, I came back to LA. I was still very close with David because he was like a member of our family having grown up in the neighborhood and being my brother’s best friend all through childhood. But I thought maybe it would be less complex to work with other women in some way. I just got frustrated and I was so determined to make something happen, to meet people in LA that I could commune with, and we had similar tastes.
And so I think that I just started to advertise myself in all those ways, the flyers, the Recycler magazine. Yeah, and it was the right move because somehow it wasn’t even… Vicki wasn’t meant to answer the phone. I was calling the girl who had placed an ad I had in the Recycler, but the minute we played together, it was clear. Why look any further? It was like a blind date where you go, “Okay, this works.” So that’s how it was.
Debbie Millman:
I actually, what you said, which I loved. You said as soon as you met, it was weirdly instantaneously platonic love at first sight, as if you ran off to Vegas and got married in an Elvis wedding chapel.
Susanna Hoffs:
Exactly. That’s exact quote. That’s exactly sums it up.
Debbie Millman:
And that was 1981. You decided, at the time, to call yourself The Bangs. Why The Bangs?
Susanna Hoffs:
There had been an Esquire magazine in part that my mom had a subscription, and there was a famous cover with Ed Sullivan and Ed Sullivan was so in our, for the Petersons in me, very important because of that first Beatles. That’s how we all found out about the Beatles, and it was Ed Sullivan wearing a Beatle wig. And within the pages of that Esquire magazine were a bunch of really interesting hairstyles, and one was more of a bouffant kind of thing like this, and it said, the haircut or the hairdo was called The Supersonic Bang, or The Supersonic Bangs maybe, or Bang. The idea of The Bangs, both for our affection for that very ’60s look with the bangs like Barry Julie Christie in the movie, Darling. It was just so popular, and it was the beginning of the ’80s, but Vicki, Debbi and I were just obsessed with the fashion of the ’60s and the look and feel of movies and everything and the sounds.
But then we soon thought, “Ah, supersonic Bangs is a bit clumsy and long,” and so we just shortened it. But then there was a New Jersey band, right when we were about to put out our first EP on a small indie label, we discovered that there was a band in New Jersey who was claiming to sue us. So we had 48 hours to change the name of the band, and it just became The Bangles.
Debbie Millman:
You all, Vicki and Debbi Peterson and Michael Steele, you quickly became part of the Paisley underground scene. And unlike most of the girl bands, then or now, you wrote much of your own material. You actually all played your own instruments. You made your own decisions about how to present yourself. I read that you didn’t have anybody helping you. Everything you all wore was either from thrift stores or cobbled together from your own closets. And you described your style as a retro beatnik Bohemian steeped in an obsession with ’60s music and fashion.
Susanna Hoffs:
That’s pretty accurate. That is accurate, I think. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
And I was wondering how you would describe your style now.
Susanna Hoffs:
Oh gosh. It’s much different. I’m wearing what I now call… I got this on sale during the thing, what I call my David Burn sweater. I don’t know if you can see this.
Debbie Millman:
Stop making sense.
Susanna Hoffs:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Yes, it’s that big.
Susanna Hoffs:
And I’m relieved that I don’t have to try to be her, the girl from 1980. I think there was a period of time where I thought, “Oh, I’ve got to present her,” this alter ego, even though it’s all part and parcel of who I am, but I don’t feel the need to traipse around… I can’t bear wearing high heels. I don’t believe in stilettos. No offense to people who love them, but how can your toes get squashed like that for so long? I don’t understand. That’s torture to your feet, and I think it looks really sexy and hot, but really? Can you really walk around in those all day? I’m just having a epiphany that at this phase of my life, I like to be comfortable. I find myself wearing pants at home. Of course, it’s sweatpants, but my fashion sensibility has shifted a bit.
Debbie Millman:
I understand that when Peter Philbin first came to see you play, he asked, and this was before you were signed, he asked one of the artists he was working with to join him, and that was Bruce Springsteen who came to see you at Magic Mountain in Valencia, California. And apparently, he asked Bruce to weigh in, “Should we or shouldn’t we sign them?” And Bruce gave you a thumbs up, and you got signed to Columbia Records in March of ’83. Looking back on it now, do you feel like this happened really fast for the band? There were some bands that it happens right, not right away, but fairly soon, and others that take quite a long time, wondering how you feel about the kismet serendipity of it?
Susanna Hoffs:
Yeah. I love that question. The kismet of it was just incredible, but to be honest, it didn’t feel fast. The fact was that Columbia was the only record label, an amazing record label. Simon and Garfunkel, Dylan, Springsteen, and way going back for generations. It was a major label. So because we were do-it-yourself, because we are scrappy local band in LA, yes, part of this very cool Paisley underground scene that was so fun to be a part of. And we had been on Faulty Products, which was Miles Copeland’s smaller imprint, then we were on IRS with the EP that Craig Leon produced. But we really didn’t have any major label interest. So it was a huge deal When we met Peter Philbin, who had brought Bruce Springsteen to our show, schlepped him out to Magic Mountain from wherever he was living. It was quite momentous.
Debbie Millman:
Prince happened to come upon a video of the band singing Hero Takes a Fall, which is on your first album from Columbia, one of the tunes from All Over The Place, and he reached out to you. And at that point, another serendipity, you had first heard When Doves Cry. And so at one of your Hollywood shows, you were told Prince had come to see you. What was that first meeting like?
Susanna Hoffs:
Oh, gosh. I can recall that we were in the dressing room at the Palace on Vine Street near Capital Records. That was the venue, if I have the info remembered correctly. And we were in the dressing room and somebody in the crew mentioned it, and then we started to play our set. And he really did love this song Hero Takes a Fall, but the record wasn’t like on the charts exactly. We were still quite underground. And I’m standing on the stage and I could still see, came in from the wings, already shredding on the guitar, and he was playing this really beautiful guitar. And I never, before or since, witnessed the kind of genius, everything about him. It was a supernatural event occurring on the stage. Him just playing this solo that was channeling something says the Gods of some sort.
Well, anyone who’s seen his solo in While My Guitar Gently Weeps from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame performance with Tom Petty and many others on the stage, there will never be anyone like that ever again. And then to get the gift of Manic Monday, that changed so much for The Bangles. That was our first real AM FM radio hit.
Debbie Millman:
And apparently, he gave you that… He started performing Hero Takes A Fall at his shows and ultimately, gave you a mixed tape of songs that he’d written, which he thought would be perfect for the band.
Susanna Hoffs:
Well, really, the one. There was two-
Debbie Millman:
Jealous Girl, right? Jealous Girl.
Susanna Hoffs:
There were two. There were two. Yeah. We hovered around the cassette player. This was the ’80s. Wasn’t digital really yet, and the minute I heard that song, the minute I heard that riff, I was like Baroque pop. It’s like what I loved growing up as a child, the sounds of the ’60s, but modern. And also the first time I stood in front of that mic and I looked over and the red light was on recording and I sang it, I was like, “Oh, yes.” You just know sometimes. There’s songs that I’ve wanted to sing in my life, and I think this will be so a perfect fit. And then you try them on and they’re not, and you just have to accept that. But everything about Manic Monday was like putting my foot in the glass slipper. I just went, “Oh my God.” And I could tell David Kahne, our producer, was feeling the same feels in that moment.
Debbie Millman:
Prince asked for the pseudonym Christopher to be used on the album credits. Why Christopher and why a pseudonym?
Susanna Hoffs:
I don’t know. My feeling about it was knowing him. He championed artists. He championed all kinds of artists, including many, many female artists. And I think he wanted it to be about The Bangles. If he had had put Prince on there, the initial story would be different. He wanted us to claim it, I think, and make it obviously, make it our own. He offered to send us the backing tracks, but we as Bangles, it was our feeling that we wanted to Bangle-fy it, to start from track it ourselves and add all the guitars and do our own spin on it. But I just thought it was a generous act. That’s how I think of it.
Debbie Millman:
Well, the album Different Light, was one of the biggest hits of the 1980s. It spawned several more hits, including the song Walk Like An Egyptian, which was actually ranked Billboard’s number one song of 1987. But I understand that the band was divided about whether it would be a failure or a success.
Susanna Hoffs:
Oh, Walk Like An Egyptian?
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Susanna Hoffs:
Oh yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Why?
Susanna Hoffs:
Yeah. I was sitting in David Kahne’s office at Columbia Records, just talking to him about songs and what might or might not go on the album because he and I had a quite close relationship. And he played me this demo tape of it, a wonderful singer named Marty Jones. It was her version that I heard, and it had this groovy bossa nova feel to it, the Marty Jones version. And I love bossa nova because it, again, it’s that ’60s thing. It’s very swinging ’60s. The bossa nova was really popular then. And even the Look of Love, which is a Burt Bacharach song, it has a feeling like that. So yeah. Even though it’s nothing like Walk Like An Egyptian, which was obviously a quirky song, but I got to know Liam Sternberg who wrote it. He was very close with Chrissy Hein and came from Akron as well. And we had been on a ferry or something in Europe, and everyone was on the boat going as it was going through this rocky surf. And somehow, that spawned the lyrics to that song.
But it was an afterthought to release Walk Like An Egyptian as the third single. And who would’ve thunk that the kids would call their local radio stations? And boom, as you said, we couldn’t believe that it was number one and ended up being the biggest song that year.
Debbie Millman:
This also happened with the song you wrote for the band’s third album, Everything, Eternal Flame, which is now arguably one of your biggest and most enduring songs. It was initially voted off the album. Why? How did people not recognize that it was what it was?
Susanna Hoffs:
I don’t know. For some reason, I was so proud of it. And speaking of Bruce Springsteen walking around with the cassette of Nebraska, his Nebraska album, at least that’s the lore, I walked around. I never left my house without the cassette of the demo that I made with Billy and Tom of Eternal Flame, because the minute we wrote that bridge part, the sun shines through the rain part. I was like, “Oh my God, I love…” I was so excited about this song, and I was playing it for my or The Bangles attorney and anybody that would listen. But when it came time to actually do the band meeting, which was always a little bit tense, obviously, because everybody was like, “Here’s [inaudible 00:27:08] song.”
At that point, we were all writing mostly with others because we were just thrown together for near a decade at that point. It was many years in a van. We needed a little bit autonomy from each other. I guess that’s why we all split off and wrote with other friends, but I don’t know why we just had this… Everybody got equal amount of songs on the record, and it had become oppressive, honestly. There was a little bit of a road weary. It’s hard to make art by committee. It just is. So that’s why bands generally last for a discreet amount of time, because they’re so amazing when it’s happening and all the energy’s there, but it can become wearying after a while.
So anyway, I thought it was a shoo-in, but the other girls didn’t pick it. But then Davitt Sigerson, who was so great to work with, such a wonderful creative producer and such a big-hearted guy, and I’m friends with both David Kahne and Davitt to this day, partway through the recording of the record, he’s like, “Sue, I keep thinking about Eternal Flame. I have this idea for it.” He knew I was obsessed with Patsy Klein. Maybe Sweet Dreams came out around that time, the Jessica Lang biopic of it.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, yeah.
Susanna Hoffs:
But-
Debbie Millman:
Probably a little bit, yeah, right around that time.
Susanna Hoffs:
It might have, yeah. And so he said, “I’m picturing this little music box,” which it was a little music box thing, and I have this idea. And so we went out to the valley to work with Phil Chanel, who was a keyboard player because there wasn’t really a keyboard player in The Bangles. It was two guitars, base and drums was the setup. And we crafted a little arrangement for it, and that’s what it became.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that bands are like marriages, but it’s not just two people in the marriage. It’s all the people in the band in a marriage. And some of the best music has been created with that tension. I’m thinking of Fleetwood Mac or The Beatles or The Birds or The Beach Boys. How important was a certain amount of friction or debate to the band? Or was that tension what ultimately caused the band to break up that first time?
Susanna Hoffs:
I think tension is inevitable, just like it is within families when they squabble about small things, but also bigger things. Yeah, I think that we were pretty good at working through our differences. We were extremely respectful of one another, and I’m so grateful for that. My partners in the band were and are fantastic human beings who I admire. But I think the tensions of being on the road, I think there were little factions that evolved. I think we grew weary. I think there were pressures in the band. I think Eternal Flame, which may not have been favored by the other members. And I’m not even saying that’s true or not, but I think that song took off unexpectedly, and perhaps they feared that it would cement the idea that I was the lead singer of the band, even though it was a band like Fleetwood Mac where there’s multiple singers. Yeah. I think it’s just a difficult marriage to sustain over a very long period of time.
Debbie Millman:
10 years after you broke up, the band got back together, and you’ve released three albums since. As a solo artist, you’ve recorded five albums, two EPs. You performed as a duo with Matthew Sweet recording three stunning albums Under The Covers moniker. You also starred in all the Austin Powers movies as a singer in the band Ming Tea. You’ve also raised a family, and as we’ve hinted at, talked just a little bit about, written your first novel.
But before we talk about the book, I want to just ask you a few questions about your solo career and about your collaborations with Matthew Sweet.
Susanna Hoffs:
Sure.
Debbie Millman:
Your first solo album was released in 1991 and was titled When You’re a Boy, which is a lyric from the David Bowie song, Boys Keep Swinging from the 1979 album, Lodger. Why that title for your album?
Susanna Hoffs:
I can’t remember the exact impetus for it. I was reflecting on that recently because that was recorded a very long time ago. And I was thinking that when you’re a boy, you can do anything. And I was thinking that a lot about the experience of being a woman in this world and how complicated it is, and how we still have to fight for things that I would have thought by now would not be the case. And how the experience in life and my own personal journey to get to where I am now, at 64 as a woman, the challenges and all the glorious things about it. So I think that it was just a little bit like food for thought to put out an album with that title. And obviously, I love David Bowie, so it was fun to honor his song.
Debbie Millman:
Susanna, let’s talk about your brand new book, the novel This Bird has Flown. Writing is such a solitary act, but I read that you found an unexpected sense of freedom sitting alone in your room, writing for hours at a time. Given how much you’ve collaborated musically, was it hard to adjust to working entirely by yourself?
Susanna Hoffs:
I thought it would be. It was unexpectedly not an issue at all. And I don’t know why writing a novel would be that different from writing a song, although there’s a lot of things that songs typically have rhyming schemes and certain meters, and then it’s the melody part of it too. For me, I always gravitated to the melodies, and weirdly, now that I’ve written thousands of words on a page, I feel like maybe This Bird Has Flown will be an opportunity to be less fearful about the lyric part of it, because I found that in the writing, I would do inner rhymes and I would use alliteration, and there was a lyric quality to what I was doing from time to time. And I’d be like, “Okay, I’m doing that thing, but okay, I’m going to go with that as the style of the pros.” And it was so fun to do that. So I think now finally, I could tackle the solo writing venture, and or I could, again, hook up with my beloved writing compadres and see what we come up with.
Debbie Millman:
You were able to create a lot of suspense in telling this story, and you do it really well. I started reading it in evening and ended up staying up way past my bedtime because I was so engaged in the story and wanted to know what was going to happen. I was almost tempted to read the end before I was even halfway through, because I was like, “How does this turn out? I have to know.” Did you take classes or lessons to learn how to build suspense in that way?
Susanna Hoffs:
I didn’t. I didn’t.
Debbie Millman:
No?
Susanna Hoffs:
I’ve just self-taught again. Every night, I watch something as either an old movie on the Criterion Collection, I rewatch movies and I just read a lot. And I’m married to a filmmaker who’s a great storyteller. There was a few times where he hasn’t even read this draft. It’s been a while since he looked the book over. But every once in a while I’d say, “I want to work on Jane’s Predicament. I want to keep people guessing,” and I’d have a conversation with him. I also, once Little Brown bought the book, the draft and then I went on to have an editor.
I have wonderful readers. Let me put it this way. I had wonderful readers along the way. My agent, Sarah Burns, who edited the book, The Lovely Bones, came from editing, had good ideas. My best friend Margaret Stole, who’s the one who encouraged me to stop hiding my draft, this behemoth draft. And she actually said, “Send it to Sarah Burns,” because Sarah’s her literary agent. And she was right because Sarah read it over the weekend and said, “Let’s meet.” And so I flew to New York and met with her.
Debbie Millman:
And you wore a suit for that meeting, I believe.
Susanna Hoffs:
I did. I did.
Debbie Millman:
Why? You’re a rock and roller.
Susanna Hoffs:
Well, I was channeling the idea of being in New York City, being a novelist, I guess, and I just wanted to feel presentable. And it was like you can walk through the streets of Manhattan and you can see why they can film movies that are set in the ’50s if you find the right block to walk on. And I knew I had to walk from Midtown to the Upper East Side, not too far up in the Upper East Side, but I had to cross from the west side to the east side, and I was teary-eyed. It was a freezing day. I didn’t want to show up in jeans and a T-shirt. I don’t know. It was very. It was very meaningful to me, and it felt like the literary world was not the scrappy world of Hollywood rehearsal studios where you show up in whatever.
I wanted to dress for the occasion because to me, if for no one else, it was so momentous. It was ultra momentous. It was like, “I’m here. I did this thing. A literary agent read it and wants to talk to me.” I don’t know. It was so emotional. It was one of the most emotional experiences I’ve ever had in my whole life.
Debbie Millman:
Wow.
Susanna Hoffs:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
So you wrote the entire book without even knowing if you were going to get a book deal?
Susanna Hoffs:
Yeah. If I could give myself one gift in my 50s, it was taking the plunge and doing this lifelong dream and just teaching myself how to do it by reading and having been a lifelong reader and studying films and stories, again, in all formats. It was so unexpectedly fun. It is such hard work. It is hours and hours and hours of work, but I never tire of it.
Debbie Millman:
And your son, I understand, kept urging you to write this by telling you, “If not now, when?”
Susanna Hoffs:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
And I love that. I say that all the time to myself now.
Susanna Hoffs:
Good.
Debbie Millman:
Little Brown has described your book as one for lovers of Daisy Jones and the Six and inspired by favorites like Jane Eyre and Bridget Jones’ diary. That’s quite a range, and I was wondering if you agree with that description.
Susanna Hoffs:
I think it’s actually a marvelous description. I became friends with Helen Fielding several years back, and I had read all her books beyond the Bridget series. At one point, maybe I had access to ones that I didn’t know about when our friendship blossomed. And I just had lunch with Taylor Jenkins Reed, which was so thrilling. Talk about a great work ethic. She’s written so many books. This is a passion. But I love, again, the subgenre of books. Well, I love female protagonists. So Helen is so masterful with books, even when they were not the Bridget series, but other female protagonists. And Jane Eyre was a seminal work that I’ve revisited starting from adolescence, I would say, through my 60s. There’s something about the fierceness of that character. She doesn’t come from wealth. She’s basically like an orphan. I don’t know. There’s just something in the fierceness of her convictions and also her integrity as a character. I just find her endlessly inspiring and relatable, even if we’ve live in different time periods. And it’s just such a marvelous book.
Debbie Millman:
I feel the same way about that book. I still remember being 12 or 13 years old and picking it up in a doctor’s office of all things and just being completely and utterly riveted. Just riveted. And seeing her and Mr. Rochester speak over the ocean. It’s just, yeah. Is Jane your character in the book, Jane Start, named after Jane Eyre?
Susanna Hoffs:
I did grab the Jane from Jane Eyre. I like how it’s such a simple name. It sounds so beautiful to say Jane. That’s the weird thing. I didn’t have a page with 10 names written on it. There was this just instinctive firing different pistons and just different synapses all reacting. It just kept happening. It was like playful in my mind.
Debbie Millman:
There’s quite a lot of flirtatious literary banter in the book, which as an old English major, I quite liked. The other main character, Tom Hardy, is not named after the actor. He’s actually named after the author of what I believe is your favorite novel, Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Yeah, [inaudible 00:41:22]-
Susanna Hoffs:
One of my favorites.
Debbie Millman:
One of your favorites. The man who wrote that was named Thomas Hardy.
Susanna Hoffs:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that you were drawn to several themes that informed this story. They include these questions. Will the ghosts of relationships pass threaten our chances of finding true love and happiness? And will our own personal demons do us from succeeding in our work? And I’m wondering, Susanna, why those particular questions?
Susanna Hoffs:
In my life, it took many relationships to realize when I met Jay that that was the right partner for me. But if you’ve ever experienced a relationship that’s gone south or didn’t work in a kind of way that eroded your sense of who you are-
Debbie Millman:
Oh yes, many times.
Susanna Hoffs:
And so you start to lose your confidence. You think, “Will I ever connect with another human being?” The wounds that are left behind, they may scab over, but they’re visible. They stay there for a long time. And also to just be among my friend group, to hear other people’s stories and how to watch them suffer through bad breakups and wonder, “Will I ever find somebody who understands me and I understand them? And I can feel confident that they will not hurt me?”
Debbie Millman:
I understand that the book has already been optioned for a movie.
Susanna Hoffs:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Congratulations. Thank you. Will you be in it at all?
Susanna Hoffs:
Oh, I don’t know. Maybe a cameo. That’s the first. I’ve never thought about that yet. Perhaps a cameo. That’s the [inaudible 00:43:13].
Debbie Millman:
And anyone you hope will play Jane Start?
Susanna Hoffs:
I don’t know yet. That will be so fun to see down the line.
Debbie Millman:
And then my last question, have you started working on a second book or a sequel? I’d love to know how the relationship between our main characters evolves.
Susanna Hoffs:
Well, I’m right there with you. I have been collecting ideas, and I have a whole file of them on my computer and to be continued, and I would love to talk to you about it as I get closer to figuring the answers to those questions.
Debbie Millman:
Wonderful. Susanna Hoffs, thank you so much for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Susanna Hoffs:
Ah, it was such a pleasure.
Debbie Millman:
Susanna Hoff’s novel is called This Bird Has Flown, and her latest album is titled Deep End. You can read a lot more about all of her work on her website, susannahoffs.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.