In 2008, Susannah Felts released her debut novel, This Will Go Down on Your Permanent Record. It centered on creativity, friendship, and the painful realizations that come with growing up. Felts’s southern roots were also rampant, with Nashville serving as the scene for this coming-of-age story. But of course, This Will Go Down on Your Permanent Record is only one aspect of Felts’s career as a writer. Her words can be found in publications like Chapter 16, Long Reads, StorySouth, The Oxford American, and more. She is also an editor for SWING, a biannual literary magazine published by the Porch, a non-profit literary arts center in Nashville. Felts co-founded the organization with fellow writer Katie McDougall.
While writing is a central part of Felts’s life, music also has a firm hold. The subject inspired Felts to write The Come Apart, her latest novel. It has a similar feel to This Will Go Down on Your Permanent Record, as it follows an indie musician named Maggie who leaves her boyfriend and band behind in Chicago. She returns to her hometown of Nashville in order to find herself. We have art, we have rekindled friendship, southern living, and an overarching narrative about coming into one’s own. Melodic Magazine recently had a lovely discussion with Felts, where we learned more about this gripping and relevant story.
We settled in for the evening with each other one week before The Come Apart was due for release, connecting via Zoom. “I’m so thankful to have this book out in the world and to have people reading it. Man, what a delight,” Felts shares. “To work with people who take your work seriously and treat it with care is such a luxury. It’s an incredible thing. I’m curious to see who does read it and what will the response be.”
The Come Apart was over ten years in the making, and originally, it was going to follow a character outside of the music realm. “At some very, very early stage, this wasn’t a story about a musician,” Felts says. “I remember I had an idea of a book called The Want and the idea of ‘want’ as a thematic thrust for fiction and how it powers us through consumer want, artistic want, all kinds of yearning.”
“I realized I can marry two things—my low-key obsession with music as a listener and my life as somebody trying to make a life that foregrounds art-making.”
It was a cool idea, but was it one that could be turned into an engaging work of fiction? “I think I was onto something with the idea of want and consumer culture, but that does not really a novel make,” Felts explains. “At some point, I started thinking a musician makes sense, and then without consciously plotting it out, I realized I can marry two things—my low-key obsession with music as a listener and my life as somebody trying to make a life that foregrounds art-making.”
With this concept at-hand, it’s easy to assume that Felts would go on to base the main character, Maggie, on herself. This did not happen, nor did Felts base any of the other characters on people she knew.
“There’s no character in the book that has a one-to-one kind of antecedent in the real world, if you will. Maggie’s not based on any living or passed away musician. She’s not really based on me although there’s some of me in here. There’s some of me probably in every character, I guess,” she explains.
If these characters are not based on actual people, then what about Maggie’s band, Spinning Birds?
“Oh my gosh, I wish I had a really great origin story for the Spinning Birds,” says Felts. “I wish I knew why that phrase came to mind. I would like to say something to the idea of birds, which are tiny creatures, are well established subjects of much poetry and song and myth and folklore and images. The bird is a hugely symbolic image in so many ways. And the idea that they’d be spinning, this sense of synchronized movement together. From there, you get to the idea of murmuration.”
The concept of murmuration, which refers to a group of birds in flight, is prevalent throughout The Come Apart. For their debut album, Spinning Birds named it Murmuration. “The whole idea of murmuration or the way birds flock is so fascinating and mysterious,” Felts explains. “And then the idea beyond that—what is a solitary bird? What is a bird in flight? Sometimes, you see a lone hawk and they’re just so magnificent. They just seem so completely possessed of their own space, so I think there’s something going on there.” It represents Maggie’s journey so well, from being in a band in Chicago to venturing to Nashville in order to find her purpose.
“There’s so many books about young, art-minded people in New York or Brooklyn. And for good reason, because people make that journey from their small towns to New York City and it’s this rite of passage. But that happens with other places too.”
Nashville is an obvious music hub. Plenty of musicians—whether up and coming or more established—flock to the city to level up their game or find inspiration. The same can be said of Chicago, even though the city tends to get overlooked. “There’s so many books about young, art-minded people in New York or Brooklyn. And for good reason, because people make that journey from their small towns to New York City and it’s this rite of passage. But that happens with other places too,” shares Felts. “It’s definitely true of Chicago, and I kind of thought, it’s a little bit of a twist to have the character leave her southern home to Chicago. It’s a little bit of a shift on a trope.”
Felts used to live in Chicago, so it seemed only natural to use the city as one of the book’s primary settings. She knew the places, the people, what it was like during the winter… A bit of personal experience can definitely go a long way in a work of fiction. This surely comes into play when Felts thought of Nashville, where Maggie relocates. “I really wanted to work with the idea of the 2010 Nashville Flood. It felt important to me to not break from reality for that, like to actually say it’s the flood of 2010, to not make it up,” Felts explains. “That’s a really tricky question for a fiction writer, like how much do you need to be true to what happened in a historical timeline?”
When it came to the timeline and the years that The Come Apart focuses on, a bit of time travel was involved. Felts wanted to incorporate the 2010 Nashville Flood, so she decided to work backwards from there. This meant that in order for Maggie to return to Nashville during the year of the flood, she had to have been in Chicago before that time. So, this places Maggie in Chicago during the mid-to-late 2000s.
The mid-to-late 2000s, specifically 2008-2010, was an interesting time. “Everyone had sort of accepted that streaming was the future; it had made a mess of things already in the previous years for artists, with illegal file sharing and whatnot, but Spotify hadn’t quite arrived in the U.S.,” shares Felts. “In the book, Maggie is also in a strange limbo of her own. I really wanted to address, to some extent, how the move to streaming was impacting artists. Of course we’re deep in it now, and for the most part, things are no less grim. But, are people always going to form bands, make art, try to do the thing? Yes, they are.”
“She’s so real to me. It’s been really fun to imagine her life after the last page. I hope that readers will, too.”
The process of going back in time brought about its challenges, but as for going forward? Felts feels confident about what Maggie would be up to in the year 2026. “I think about that a lot. She’s so real to me. It’s been really fun to imagine her life after the last page. I hope that readers will, too,” she says. Felts could have easily slipped in an ending for Maggie, one where she gets married, has kids, and falls back into music, but she kept the story open so that readers could imagine their own future for Maggie. “One very obvious choice for this book would be to end with her playing a show, going back to the stage, and maybe playing a show with Frank. I just couldn’t make myself do it,” Felts continues.
Frank is Maggie’s roommate in Nashville, and ultimately, the two bond over music. They spend many a night listening to Frank’s favorite songs and artists on vinyl, and it helps shape Maggie’s perspective of the Nashville music scene. He also drops the book’s title in one of his talks with Maggie, mentioning a “come apart” in conversation.
“In the early years of drafting this book, I was hanging out a bit and getting together at a coffee shop with another local writer. Her name is Jennifer Justice, and she’s pretty southern,” shares Felts. “She just has one of those very charming southern accents, and I’m pretty sure she either said or wrote that phrase. She talked about somebody having a ‘come apart’ in the kitchen and I was like, ‘That’s interesting. I like that. That’s a good idiom. That’s the title.’”
“Keep going. Keep making things. Keep creating because the world needs creators. Keep making art because the world needs artists.”
Maggie’s journey is one of messiness and unease, embodying the “come apart” concept throughout the book. An artist’s life can be full of inspiration, but it can also have its heavy moments. “The creative life as an artist in modern times…I feel like it’s getting even harder,” explains Felts. “But there is value to sticking with your passion, your talent, and finding the way that you can fit it to the world. Keep going. Keep making things. Keep creating because the world needs creators. Keep making art because the world needs artists.”
When life does become too much, as it does for Maggie, it makes sense to unplug for a while. One of the messages that Felts wants readers to take with them from The Come Apart is to have more appreciation for nature. When in nature, a primitive form of belonging can surface, which helps us to better center ourselves and make sense of our lives. “I sort of gestured at this, but one of themes of the book is stillness,” shares Felts. “The word ‘still’ is in the book quite a bit. Very intentional. I hope readers may come away with a new sense of appreciation for slowing down, taking a pause, and refusing the relentless churn that our culture encourages us to participate in every waking moment.”
To wrap up our conversation, Felts emphasizes that she is “forever a music fan.” She absolutely loves to share music with others in the hope of them experiencing the excitement that she feels when listening to a really good song. “I hope that there will be some readers who are really inspired to look into some of the bands that are name-checked in the book,” Felts says. “I would be so stoked if people were to read the book and be like, ‘I’ve never listened to Gram Parsons. I’m gonna listen to Grievous Angel now.’ Or just Sister Rosetta Tharpe. If I can influence someone to listen to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, I’ve done some good in this world.”
The Come Apart by Susannah Felts is out now via Northwestern University Press. You can order a copy here.
Check out Susannah Felts’s playlist for The Come Apart here.
Find more real-life connections to The Come Apart here.
Keep up with Susannah Felts: Instagram // Linktree // Substack
