Gabrielle Korn is the author of three novels, including Yours for the Taking and its sequel, The Shutouts. Her latest, Long Island Girls, is a sprawling, music-soaked love story tracing the relationship between Susan and Eliza from the mid-2000s to the present day, refracted through memory, desire, and the particular emotional weight of adolescence. Korn, who grew up on Long Island before working in women’s media and eventually becoming a full-time writer, brings an insider’s eye to the creative industries and the personal costs they exact.

The book is centered on music. Where did the initial idea come from?

I was actually at a music festival when I had the idea. It was Just Like Heaven — the festival referenced towards the end of the book, all the bands that were big in the early 2000s. I saw Broken Social Scene, Wolf Parade, Franz Ferdinand, Metric, Death Cab — all the bands I listened to in high school. I was able to both hear that the music wasn’t as good as I remembered and also feel really emotional about hearing it. I started to think about why music from adolescence just hits harder, no matter what it is, and what else we hold on to from that period of time. I loved indie music so much as a teenager — I thought I was going to become a music journalist. The first things I got published were music reviews for local magazines. Music was a huge part of my life for a long time.

I love how you handle memory, giving Susan her core moments across a long history without ever making us feel we’ve missed the years in between. How do you write nostalgia without it becoming overworked?

I wasn’t actually thinking about nostalgia while I was writing. I was just thinking about recreating moments in time, and then having future moments where we look back on those moments. In earlier drafts, I had more chapters that were shorter. I essentially wrote the beginning, middle, and end and then backfilled a chapter for each year in between. In doing that, I lost Eliza. There was just too much plot. So I condensed it to one chapter between each appearance, and anything that had been a full chapter but could work as a page-long flashback, I turned into a flashback. Through that process, you start to get this sense of constant remembering.

A lot of readers felt they understood Susan’s relationship with Eliza before Susan did — that the infatuation was really with an idea rather than a person. Was that always the intention?

Yes, for sure. You experience Eliza through Susan, but I wanted it to be clear to the reader that they don’t actually have that much in common. Their interactions are Susan constantly searching for common ground, focusing on the similarities instead of seeing the full picture. By the time you get to her realization at the end, I wanted it to feel like a sad but natural conclusion. Even if you’ve been rooting for them, you realize it when Susan realizes it. Someone said to me it almost feels like an anti-romance. I don’t know if it’s that exactly, because it’s not against the idea of romance. But it’s very much in favor of knowing yourself before you’re able to let someone else know you.

Readers from very different backgrounds have described the book as deeply relatable despite its specific setting and world. How do you account for that?

There’s a saying: Specificity is the gateway to universality. And I think it’s just really true. I thought I was writing a niche, specific story, but the more specific you get, the more people see themselves in it. My first couple of novels had multiple perspectives, and I felt like I was trying to incorporate such a diversity of experiences. I think that may have actually made those books less relatable, since they were speaking to too many people and therefore to none of them quite as deeply. Susan goes through things that everybody goes through, even if the wrapping looks different. Who hasn’t become disillusioned with the thing they were most passionate about, whether that’s a job or a person? That’s part of growing up.

The book asks whether this kind of experience — loving someone before you fully know yourself — is something everyone has to go through. Do you think it is?

I don’t necessarily think it’s necessary. But I think queer people are often on a different timeline. In the early 2000s, you weren’t going to find your community in high school. I think everybody has fallen in love with someone only to realize they didn’t really know that person — what differs is how quickly people are able to let it go versus how deeply they imprint on it and carry it with them. For queer people, there’s something so miraculous about your desire being returned that it can become easy to overlook the ways in which it doesn’t feel good. You’re so used to unrequited feelings, and then suddenly this person wants you — and you can overlook almost anything.

[Photo by Lindsey Byrnes.]

Patrick Davies is a freelance writer based between Amman, Cairo, and London. He is concerned particularly with histories of displacement and (voluntary or forced) cultural transfer in the Middle East and North Africa.