CR 019: Marissa Stapley on Writing, Rock Stars, and Rom-Coms

The New York Times bestselling author discusses her new novel, “The Lightning Bottles,” and writing rom-coms under the pen name Julia McKay.

Marissa Stapley, photo by Philippa Croft

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Marissa Stapley always knew she wanted to write a novel set in the ’90s-era alt-rock music scene. Growing up, Stapley was a superfan of Sinéad O’Connor, Hole, and Nirvana, while everyone else in her small town, she says, “was listening to country music and driving pickup trucks.” In 2014, Simon & Schuster published her debut novel, Mating for Life, which follows an aging folk singer, Helen Sear, as she grapples with her identity as a wife and mother. Additional books followed, including 2021’s Lucky, which was selected as a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick and went on to become a New York Times bestseller.  

But it was The Lightning Bottles, a story about love, fame, and destruction steeped in ’90s music, that Stapley continued to return to. “The idea came to me six years ago,” she says. “I started it, and I didn’t realize at the time I was just getting to the heart of these characters. I wrote almost an entire novel in letters and journal entries and sent it to my agent, and she was like, ‘This is great, but it’s very epistolary. Maybe this isn’t the approach.’”

When her mother fell ill, Stapley put the novel aside because, she says, “there was something so dark and difficult about it.” It was only after her mother passed away that she was able to return to the story. “I worked on Lucky, and all this exciting stuff ended up happening. Then I went back to The Lightning Bottles, having lost someone. And unfortunately, now I get it. Now I understand. Because that idea of what you wouldn’t do to get that person back—I fully understand that now. So, it’s the book I always wanted to write.”

The novel tells the story of Jane and Elijah, two teens who develop an intense bond over their shared love of music and their desire to escape the lives into which they were born. The duo forms a band, the Lightning Bottles, which takes the world by storm. And yet, despite her songwriting contributions, Jane is seen as nothing more than a hanger-on and hindrance to Elijah’s talent. When Elijah vanishes at the height of the band’s fame and is presumed dead, Jane becomes the most hated woman in the industry and finds it impossible to leave her past behind her. Things take an even more complicated turn when a Lightning Bottles fan approaches Jane years after Elijah’s disappearance and says she’s found clues indicating that he might still be alive. An engrossing page-turner, The Lightning Bottles takes readers back and forth in time to follow the pair’s ascent to stardom, their fall from grace, and Jane’s pursuit of the truth.

Over a Zoom call, I chatted with Stapley about the music of our youth, the act of incorporating real-world events into fiction, and why she writes rom-coms under a pen name.

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For those of us of a certain age, The Lightning Bottles is an incredible blast from the past, and it’s obvious you’re a fan of music from that time. How much of yourself and your own life did you pull from when writing this book? Did you keep journals back then? Did you pull from actual experiences or thoughts that you had?