Just Between Us

By Corine Allen

Rock journalist, Frankie Reeves has just arrived in Miami to interview the world-famous and elusive rock musician, Sara. Reeling from her own breakup brought on by her heady lifestyle in L.A. she has a chance to redeem herself by interviewing Sara for the Thunder Mountain Review. However, Sara is about to tour her big break-up album, written after a break-up publicly brought her to her knees. The two women are long-standing acquaintances, Frankie having interviewed Sara throughout the years. As the interview unfolds throughout the night, Sara reveals to Frankie that the only way out is through.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Corine Allen
• Release date: Jul 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005012502

Corine Allen

Corine Allen has written the novella, Just Between Us (July 2021), the short novel Murder Ballad (December 2021), and the novel Soft Bodies (January 2021). She was born where the Rocky Mountains lay their head to rest, has lived in Boston and Spain, and for the time being has found herself tucked back behind the Rockies' right ear.Much of her work peers into the spaces between things, the unspoken, the buried, the wild and weird.

Book preview

FOREWORD

THIS NOVELLA CAME out of a certain swampy period of my life. My own marriage was clearly over; I had an eleven-year-old and a two-year-old, and I had no idea how to move forward. I had an unsold book, a completed screenplay, and some poetry under my belt and that was about it. We had moved to the States for my husband’s interests, and I had stayed home full-time with my kids.

I thought about how hard it has been historically to have a career, while being a mother, but how difficult it is when that career is in the arts. I thought about all the ways we judge each other as women, how we internalize and continue these patterns of misogyny that we’ve inherited. Lana Del Ray had just had massive success and was getting just ripped on by the press, Chan Marshall publicly went through a very tough time, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth had a very messy and public breakup of not just her marriage but her band, and I looked at interviews with Lou Doillon who also has had a lot of criticism, as an artist, single mother, and daughter of famous parents. The particular time period in which this book was incubating was also the beginning of the rise of Trump; he was beginning to campaign and float on the high tide of misogyny into presidency of the United States of America.

We do talk to each other differently when men are not around, and I was also curious about that. At first, my intent was to flip the script and write Sara as the most famous musician in the world (the film A Bigger Splash starring Tilda Swinton came out just after I’d written this), but as I edited and reworked the piece, another character emerged. A rock journalist who I imagined a little like Annie Leibovitz, a reporter Frankie Reeve (Francesca) entered the story. She was a slightly jaded, rock journalist, who had just been dumped by her girlfriend.

Sara herself actually proved more difficult. Who was she exactly? She was immensely powerful, famous, but also an artist and sensitive. She was all of the above-mentioned women, able to reinvent herself time and time again, to be fragile, someone who got through the breaking point to ride the wave, someone intellectual, creative, empowered, and self-aware. The framework of the interview seemed to be a natural form for this kind of conversation, how much we reveal, how much we trust, how we speak to each other when no one else is around, what will be on record, or off record, how we choose to present ourselves by what we reveal or don’t, and it became a very interesting canvas to layer on.

I was also interested in using the form of cut-ups to create this piece of work. Most famously used by William Burroughs, I thought it entirely fitting because of how jagged our thoughts and conversations often are. I watched a film about William Burroughs, wherein he talks about his form of cut ups, about how by cutting into the present, the future leaks out. The idea was one of those delightful ones that just won’t let go of you. I pulled several interviews with Chan, Lana, and Lou - printed them out, cut them into quarters, and repasted them together at random. I then went through and circled paragraphs and sentences that were working or popped out to me, and I then went ahead and cut those out in strips, shuffled, chose at random, and patched those together. I then began to weave the story around this framework.

It became a sort of paean to the realizations we often have as we step into autonomy. The things, once realized, we have to face instead of shy away from, the cultural ring of fire we often have to step through when claiming our own personhood and femininity on our own terms, our own definitions, our own acceptance.

This mille crepe cake of a novella is the result. 

ONE

OBVIOUSLY, I WAS confused. Laying on my hotel balcony, unable to choose between them earlier, I had a mai-tai in one hand and an aggressively healthy green cucumber concoction in the other. I was in this between state of certain comfortable failure, or, hope for either a smaller ass or a bigger one. Shallow, but pertinent, as I’d just been dumped by my younger girlfriend. The call came that she was ready. I’d already given up due to her being notoriously elusive and prone to cancelling interviews. I was already in my bathing suit, drinks in hand, sitting on my balcony half in my robe.

As I said, I was between states. I was between being grown-up and professional, and reveling in a lost weekend: shenanigans to ensue and never to be spoken of again, or an article for Thunder Mountain Revue. I was in that odd frame of mind you find yourself in when you have unexpected waiting time, and you're in a different time zone, and your girlfriend has just left you and taken your dog, and you're thirty-nine, so no bars to go pick up chicks because that makes you feel sad and old and that's the last thing you want to feel right now. You’re also mildly horrified by the swipe culture of apps, so no sliding into someone’s dms. You are old.

Plus, the last Lesbian bars have shut their doors. It's a wasteland.

I had flown out from Los Angeles to interview Sara and was supposed to have met up with her this afternoon. I'd let her team know I'd arrived and was en route to the hotel, and they uttered the doomed words, she'll let you know. But the call hadn't come, and as the afternoon had waned, so had I. Staving off the sadness of a breakup. And the loss of my dog, I'd opened my suitcase but not unpacked. I'd started a shower but changed my mind and put on a bathing suit and then, after ordering room service, put on a robe. I'd ordered the aforementioned fun-size mai-tai and then embarrassed at just ordering that, the green juice, and then on further thought steak and eggs from room service. If you are a sensitive and attuned person, these things would be your first clue to my unraveling inner state of affairs.

After hearing myself agree to meet Sara in an hour, I hung up the phone and looked at the drink I'd set down on the side table, looked down, at my bare feet with chipped polish, puzzled at the one egg, and half a steak looking back up at me from an unnecessarily big silver tray and looked out at the pool. At the hypnotic rounds of people doing water aerobics in the shallow end of the pool over the hibiscus vines. Who were these people? Who feels a sudden need to do water aerobics in a hotel as the sun sets? Come to think of it, who does water aerobics while on holiday? I feel out of place and unsure of myself.

Actually, as I take a sip of my mai-tai, I have that odd sensation of something, something in my mind sliding sideways. The hotel's nostalgia makes me feel odd, unsure. It's a strange inversion of time and space. Are they serious or joking, or is it a strange mixture of both? It's how I feel about hipsters. I take a sip of the green juice that smells strongly of cucumber. It's delicious. It's confusing and annoying, and I like it, and that in itself is annoying.

I'd given up on tonight, resigned myself to settling in for perhaps a long weekend, hoping that the call would come, expecting it probably wouldn't, and was going to spend most of tomorrow drunk, laying in the sun or floating in the pool and nursing my broken and bruised heart. That was the plan. I know Sara fairly well; I've interviewed her a handful of times since the nineties, and not only is she is notoriously moody, she had just gone through a very public, very speculated about relationship breakdown and breakdown, about which little was actually known, and about which had been expressly stated as off-limits in the terms of agreement to do this interview. Actually doing this interview was not the plan. 

Downing my mai-tai, I decide to make some coffee in the tiny coffee maker and lay down on the floor, which is a bad idea because it smells vaguely of sauce down here, also of steak