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

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 entrie…