An interview with Clea Simon, author of HOLD ME DOWN

​Matthew Turbeville: Hey Clea! It’s so exciting to get to pick your brain about Hold Me Down.  This is a really exciting and thrilling new crime novel that’s grounded in Boston and music and a lot of topics really relevant to America today and women in general.  Can you talk a little about how you conceived Hold Me Down and how long it took to write? Did this novel in particular end up how you wanted it to be as when you first sat down to write the first draft? How did it change? 
Clea Simon: I can try, Matthew, but honestly, I’m not sure I remember. I’ve been working on Hold Me Down for several years now. I don’t know how many drafts I went through, though I can tell you that every time I sent out a draft to a reader, thinking I was done, I would find issues – usually with the tense changes and I’d be appalled!
 
 For me, this was the kind of book that gets deeper with each iteration, though. Like, take the songs in the book. I knew that Gal, my protagonist, wrote songs, and so I came up with some. But only after a few revisions did I realize how revealing these songs were – not only of what she thought she was writing, but what she was really showing about herself. (I have to add here that I love having these songs – because once they’re written, they stand on their own. Different characters react to them in different ways. Even Gal reacts to her own songs in different ways over time!) As for how it ended up: Yes, I’m really very happy with it.
 
MT: I love that a lot of crime writers often pick a place, oftentimes even more than authors of different genres, and really develop the landscape and people of the setting of many or all of their novels.  Can you talk about the world(s) of your different novels, and what brings you back to a place in more than one novel, and how you find something new to write about using place in each novel? 
CS:  I’m happy to talk about setting, but for me it’s the other way around. The stories I want to tell are so intrinsically bound up in their settings that these are never consciously chosen. The settings are part of the stories. I mean, I adore my city – the two adjacent cities of Cambridge and Somerville (what now we tend to call “Camberville”). It’s very artsy and weird and makes a perfect setting for my witch cat cozies – because we actually do have many active covens here. At the same time, with all the gentrification and development, we have some natural antagonists, for my protagonist Becca and her cats!
 
Hold Me Down is a very different book, obviously. In many ways, in general, the music scene is a perfect setting for a mystery because it’s a self-contained little subculture. People who care passionately about music are thrown together, making it a hotbed of relationships and also antagonisms. Add in various substances, and you’ve got a dozen different plots to kick off. But for me, this world was also important because it’s a world I know very well. It was home for me for many years, and I got to mine my own experiences for the book. 
 
Of course, I also did my research and spoke to a lot of the old crew and came up with additional details that ended up helping me with the plot. Like, at one point, a friend who used to sing in local bands told me that she didn’t think anyone knew this, but that from up on stage, she could see all the way to the back of the club. What a great detail, right? So I have Gal noting that. But I also hope that readers can suss out that her perceptions might not always entail what we would call truth.
 
If I had one recurring theme in my music-world books – Hold Me Down and 2017’s World Enough – it is that memory and perception are flawed. That, thanks to nostalgia or denial, we all see what we want to see – and remember what we want to remember. I guess that’s true of me and the Boston music scene, so for those stories, I suspect I’ll keep on coming back to the clubs.
 
MT: Can you talk about your history with music, why it’s so important to you, and why or if you feel mystery novels and music go together? Do you feel there’s any connection or similarities between the two? 
 
CS: I started my writing career as a music critic, and, before that, I played in bands. I was one of those people for whom a certain set of clubs served as a “third place,” you know – not my home or work. As the years have gone by, I’ve certainly done that less and less – but music, live music, has remained important to me. I started HMD pre-pandemic, so spending a couple of hours in a loud and crowded club was still a reasonable option.
 
When I talk about the music world – or club land, as I think of it –  it encompasses a whole range of places: the bars and basement clubs, the stinky practice rooms – and anyone who has ever spent hours in a windowless basement cell trying to grind out something good knows what I mean – and the late-night load outs. The decaying burlesque theaters that have been repurposed for rock shows, and also the radio stations and record stores and even the tour buses of what we used to call “major label” bands, back when there were record labels.
 
Rock and roll has a thing about authenticity. Punk, especially, with its DIY ethos, is not simply supposed to be about entertainment. It is supposed to be about tearing something out of ourselves. Creating something out of nothing and hoping that it sings. That’s what we do as writers too, of course. In crime fiction, we’re looking for the truth – the whodunit or the whydunit. But on a larger scale as storytellers, as novelists, we’re also always looking for a larger truth: Who our characters are. What makes them tick. Why we care about them. 
 
MT: What novels, recent or decades past, have helped shape you as a writer and informed or helped develop a book like Hold Me Down? Were there any books that helped shape you as a writer and the novel in particular during the writing process itself? 
 
CS: I read pretty widely, and I think everything feeds into everything, so I’ll just say that I love Hilary Mantel and Lauren Groff and my new favorite find is Melissa Broder (check out The Pisces). I also review books for the Boston Globe and other places, and that makes me read very critically. I think I learn from all of these – what to do or not to do. I’ll be reading something and it will hit me, “oh, that’s an interesting way to deal with exposition…”
 
MT: What are your favorite music books? Novels in any genre relating to music? What are the best ways crime novels that somehow use music in a really great way that feel incredibly honest or true? 
CS: I just wrote a piece on my favorite novels about music but that aren’t crime fiction! To excerpt myself, I’d start with Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, which is just poetic perfection (about jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden). Then I’d move onto Pagan Kennedy’s very funny The Exes, a fictional tale of a Boston band made up of two former couples and Walter Mosley’s RL’s Dream, a wonderful and moving straight novel – not a mystery – about a bluesman. Those are great books that I don’t see people talking about – so let’s give them a plug!
 
In terms of crime fiction, I love how Donna Leon and Kate Ross use (or used, in the case of Ross) the opera world and the theatrical backstage world. They so clearly knew it and lived in it, and that helps. There are so many others, and I’m going to pass on naming them because I know I’ll leave too many people out! What I don’t like are books that just try to put on the setting for the glitz. I mean, I used to love Anne Rice, but when she made one of her vampires a rock star, Lestat, I think, I lost it. She so clearly did not know the world, and it just read very false.
 
MT: What are the albums, bands, artists, etc that have shaped the novel? Could you give us a sample of what a music playlist might be like for someone who loves Hold Me Down, and also for you while you’re writing any of your novels? What type of music do you return to during the writing process? 
CS: I do want to do a playlist! I think there ought to be some good tough women rockers up front: L7 and Sleater-Kinney for starters, and X and X-Ray Specs and the Bangles, and just kickass singers like Etta James, Barbara Lynn, Irma Thomas, and Kate Bush. But while I was writing this, I also found myself listening to a lot of male-fronted bands that had the right mood. Songs that I could hear Gal writing (and singing), like the Lazy Cowgirls, the Rankoutsiders, the White Stripes, the Nervous Eaters and the Outlets (both Boston bands!). And, of course, the Clash. Always the Clash.
 
MT: Do you feel (whether due to your own life or the time you’re living in) you could have written this exact novel—or something remarkably close to it—at the very beginning of your career, as opposed to now? As a writer, how have you changed over the years, and has this also affected you as a reader? 
CS: No, I could not have. True story: I started World Enough 20 years ago, and it didn’t work. I didn’t have the writing chops to carry it off. More important, I didn’t have the distance, or maybe simply the emotional maturity, to see what it was really about: the false promise of nostalgia and the ways in which we choose to view the past. Hold Me Down deals with these same issues, but it goes deeper. There were issues in this book that I was not even aware of a few years back. I don’t want to give any spoilers, but one thing I have learned in the last few years is that it is easier psychically to take on responsibility, or even blame, than to acknowledge that we may have had no control over a situation. I didn’t know that when I started writing, and even if I did, I doubt I could have written about it. 
 
MT: Like many great crime novels, Hold Me Down functions as a mystery and a nicely drawn character study.  Which came first, the crime or the character, as far as the writing process is concerned, or how did they each shape one another? Why did you feel Gal was especially well suited for this story, and what are some other characters do you feel are especially well drawn in crime fiction? 
CS: Thank you! I don’t think I can separate character and story here. Like the setting, they all come up together. 
 
MT: If you had to group Hold Me Down with any other books currently being read today, or which should be more well read, what would they be? What books do you feel Hold Me Down could be in conversation with, and what books or authors would you like to see discussed with you and Gal? 
CS: I’m thinking of other books that are really focused on their complex, flawed characters. I mean, in an ideal world, I’d like to put Gal up against Melissa Broder’s characters – or Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell! Within the genre, I’m a little stuck – I’m catching up on months of backed-up reading and I fear I’m not current and that I’m missing wonderful character-forward authors. I do know I’d be honored to be considered alongside Catriona McPherson, Naomi Hirahara, Laura Lippman, or Attica Locke. I am doing an event locally in March with the poet Lloyd Schwartz. We’re friends and we read each other’s works, so we’re going to have a discussion of our new books and the themes that appeal to us both. 
 
MT: Do you have any books by rock stars, fiction or nonfiction? What’s something I probably haven’t read, but should? What would you recommend?
CS: I have Dr John’s memoir, Under a Hoodoo Moon. It’s not very good, to be honest, but I loved him and so it’s fun for me. A better music book by (sort of) the musicians themselves is The Brothers by the Neville Brothers with David Ritz. Other than that, if you’re looking for good music writing, I’d look for people who are writers first: David Hajdu, Anthony DeCurtis, Tom Piazza, and the like. David Hajdu wrote a very funny and utterly delightful skewering of the avant garde/art music scene called Adrienne Geffel. Now that’s a music novel!
 
MT: Did the answer to the mystery, the solution to Gal’s problem, or anything else essential to the novel change as you were writing it? Did you have any revelations regarding Hold Me Down or Gal as you wrote this novel? 
CS: Yes! I don’t want to give any spoilers, but originally I did think that Gal’s recovery of what happened in her life would be the big reveal. As I wrote that, though, I realized there was more – that a bigger issue was her realizing the implications of her initial reaction. Is that vague enough?
 
MT: You’re an incredibly gifted and prolific author, and I wonder: what book of yours is your favorite, and are there any of your books you’d like to write again, either to correct an error or to simply enjoy the writing process all over? Are there any books you’d avoid all together? What’re you writing now? What book will you come out with next? 
CS: Oh, I hate all my old writing – I see all the clunky bits – until I start reading something again and fall in love with it. And then I wonder, how did I do that? How will I ever do that again? As for what’s next, I’m working on a sort of creepy he said/she said about a couple very, very, very loosely based on my parents. She’s an artist. He is not. They have issues. I think it’s got a kind of Patricia Highsmith vibe, which surprises me, but there it is. I’m also trying to finish a draft of a more conventional (but, I think, very fast and fun) amateur sleuth set in a newsroom with a cop reporter with a weakness for bad boys. We’ll see if anyone wants to publish either of them!
 
MT: Clea, thank you so much for letting me pick your brain.  I loved reading and rereading Hold Me Down and recommend it to anyone who wants to marvel in a slower-burning mystery about a complex heroine with an incredible story.  I loved this book and can’t wait to see what you come out with next.  I can’t wait to see what readers think as well! 
CS:  Me as well! That said, it was a pleasure to  hang here today and to think about your thoughtful questions. Thank you, Matthew!