“Have you heard that rumor going around about Lady Gaga?” my agent asked offhandedly. I hadn’t written a novel in six years, and until I heard those particular words, nothing was clicking. Nothing, if I was being honest, had clicked for a very long time. But there it was, that frisson every writer feels when he or she stumbles upon the barest flicker of an idea, that small, undefinable moment before it catches fire.
It was the summer of 2020, and I was waiting out the pandemic, holed up at my house in Maine. I wasn’t thinking about writing another book. I’d been infected early on in lockdown and had developed Long Covid. At that moment, I was just trying to survive. But improbably, that’s when Ava decided to appear. I’d always written about pop culture in one way or another, so when my agent mentioned an urban legend involving one of the biggest pop stars in the world, I was immediately intrigued. Who wouldn’t be fascinated by the origin story of the early days of Lady Gaga on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and her supposed rivalry with her closest friend, another female singer whose tragic suicide had left behind more questions than answers?
After we hung up, I sat down at my desk and scoured the internet until darkness fell, clicking through link after link, investigating the brief friendship between Stefani Germanotta, who would be reborn as Gaga a year later, and Lina Morgana, a talented young singer/songwriter. That night I fought through my fatigue to pound out a rough chapter—the same chapter that appears almost intact in the finished book—and with that, the legend of Ava Arcana and Lexi Mayhem was born.
But the rabbit holes I went down, the darkest corners of the internet I scoured in search of the truth, left me feeling uneasy. Even so, I tried to keep my distance, to maintain a level of professionalism that kept me detached from much of what I read. And those stories—that feeling of not being able to discern the truth from a web of lies—is what helped create the character of pop icon, Lexi Mayhem in my new novel, The Rise and Fall of Ava Arcana. Lexi is an iconoclast, an enigma. Full of charisma, but impossible to fully unwrap. She does not narrate the book (something I’m sure she is still fuming over), but she is an unreliable presence in the novel at best.
Much of what I uncovered online seemed preposterous—Lady Gaga had been accused of everything from shoving her former best friend off a rooftop to murdering Lou Reed (yes, you read that right). It’s common knowledge that the most driven among us generally will do whatever it takes to succeed, but the accusations aimed at Gaga seemed downright excessive. The rumors were gendered in general, the worst theories reserved for female pop stars rather than their male counterparts (I challenge anyone to find nefarious content about Harry Styles on deep subreddits), and I became fascinated by the depths that some of these online threads went to discredit Gaga, to paint her as a literal Fame Monster.
Still, despite these rumors, Gaga continued to soar ever higher, first in her music career, then in TV and film, appearing on Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story: Hotel as a vampire, and as the lead in the remake of A Star is Born, scoring an Oscar nod for the song, “Shallow.” As I clicked through interview after interview, fascinated by the strangely unsettling combination of her driving ambition, coupled with an unflappable, almost robotic demeanor, I began to create the character of Lexi Mayhem, a pop diva with enough secrets to fill every closet in her Malibu mansion.
But to my surprise, it was Lina who wound up capturing my heart. Lina, who I would recast as Ava Petrova, a shy girl from Ukraine, an introvert with a gift for songwriting who had the musical chops to make it to the top, but not the temperament. In the few photos I could find of Lina online and in her lone music video shot only months before her untimely death, there was something about her, that same ineffable quality that captivates Kayla in my book, a journalist from Rolling Stone magazine who comes across Ava’s image by chance and follows the story down a twisting, dark road in a desperate attempt to uncover the secret behind Ava’s tragic end. And in Kayla’s dogged pursuit, I saw my own. Because isn’t that why we write? To make sense of the unknowable? To find meaning where there is none at all? As Joan Didion puts it, we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Of course, Didion is referring to the lies and half-truth’s we mutter in the dark while staring at the ceiling in the dead of night, the bargains we make to live with the things we have done. What bargains did Lexi make to reach the top, I wondered as I wrote the first few chapters at a fevered pace. And what of Ava’s?
We will never know exactly what happened between those two, real-life friends—and perhaps rivals—so long ago. But in my novel, we find a snapshot of what could have been, in a time long gone and a place much changed. These days, the Lower East Side is hardly the same refuge for misfits, musical prodigies, and freaks, but the home of NYU students, frat bros and trust fund babies—nothing like the place of my youth, when Soho and Alphabet City still had more shells of burned-out cars and illicit drug deals than million-dollar lofts. When downtown still felt electric with possibility, the blare of car horns a symphony, the energy of the city moving through and around you as effortlessly as water. This was the landscape I tried to recreate in my novel, how I wanted Ava to feel when she first moved to Manhattan, that sense of blind loyalty and abject fascination with the streets of New York, that feeling of falling in love with a place itself, a mythical city that becomes, in many ways, a main character.
Lexi is not Gaga, and Ava is not Lina—not any more than the narrator of Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde is Marilyn Monroe. Like all good fiction, the story of Ava and Lexi traveled far from where it first began. Instead of a novel about the music industry and the making of a star, it became a narrative of one reporter’s search for the truth, of the way the past rises up from the dead, coming back to haunt us again and again. And most of all, it is a story of friendship, of betrayal, of two women falling in love with a city, transfixed by the images they create of themselves—and each other.
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