As a teen in the mid-1990s, I spent countless hours with my friends, rooting through our parents’ LPs from the Sixties, while also swooning over Jakob Dylan and styling ourselves after the rockers of Lilith Fair.
Those memories were so strong that when I was writing The Singer Sisters, my debut novel about two generations of musicians, it was pure joy to reenter that mindset and channel Emma Cantor, the daughter of two folk singers who becomes an alt-rock radio sensation herself. In this section, Emma has achieved her L.A. dream, but she’s grown estranged from her mother—and she is starting to get a glimpse of the other side of fame.
Los Angeles, 1999
By Emma’s eighth month in L.A., so lonesome she’d started talking back to the TV, she got a call from an underling at her agency: an actor named Ben Felt wanted to go on a date with her.
Since his star-making turn in Merry, a teen retelling of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Ben’s visage, pouting and big-eyed, was plastered on the bedroom walls of America’s girls. His round eyes and heart-shaped lips gave him that androgynous look, which contrasted with his otherwise rugged features. He wasn’t her type (she went for scruffy, bearded guys)—but he was objectively gorgeous.
Emma hadn’t dated anyone since she broke up with her high school boyfriend after graduation. She’d grown spinsterish. She’d slept with people on the road—men and a few women—and occasionally felt a wild heart rush of affection for someone, a road crush, but nothing blossomed. Her friend, bandmate and informal manager Mae had accused her of having “intimacy issues,” but in Emma’s mind, a relationship would distract from her goal of stardom.
“He loves that video of you in the black dress,” said the publicist. Emma winked at the receiver. Everyone loved that video.
“Flower,” the lead single from her Female Troubles (Female Singer) album, hit number one on the charts a year after she recorded it, so ubiquitous that Emma herself began to hate hearing it even as she was chauffeured down the freeway to one event or another in LA.
As full tilt as the first part of her success had galloped, the second was faster. She had first come to L.A. to shoot the video for “Flower” in a glittery black dress, framed by peacock feathers, with black lipstick and electric-blue eye shadow, rendering her face ethereal. A week later, a magazine reporter drove up to interview her for a short feature, and she languidly invited him to join her in the hammock, where they flirted and smoked and watched the sky.
“I’m in a hammock snuggled up with the stunning Emma Cantor, and we’re looking at the clouds,” he wrote. She had to stay out west after that.
Emma was an It Girl. Parties and ceremony invites piled up; people gave her numbers for trainers and dietitians and smoothie guys. Smoothie guys. So in one sense, this Ben Felt request felt natural.
But inside, Emma was shrinking. Though the single slayed, the album itself wasn’t selling as well as expected. Her mother had never sent word. Not about the songs or the secrets. No phone calls or emails or postcards.
Emma and her brother Leon instant messaged, her father Dave emailed daily with weird articles about essential oils and the Beatles, and Sylvia checked in weekly on the phone. The only actual message she got from Judie was her mother’s pointed refusal to comment when journalists tried to ask about the album. “I love my children and am proud of their work,” she said in one canned statement or another—and that was it.
When those same reporters asked Emma about the two songs she credited to Judith Zingerman, with herself and Mae as secondary writers, she tried to be honest: “My mom isn’t thrilled about my choices for these songs. But she’s let me do my thing, and I’m so grateful.” Her mother still hadn’t called.
She would go on the date with Ben, though she tried to play it cool with the publicist.
“Can we go to Canter’s?” she asked on the phone. “I’m starving. And homesick.” Unsaid: And more alone than ever.
She’d had a blowup with Mae a few weeks back. They got high on excellent weed and watched Don’t Look Back. Mae sided with Baez and Emma with Dylan because “no one in the universe wrote at that level and no one will again,” and the stoned argument became a proxy war for all the pressures of fame already driving them apart. “Sometimes you have to make choices as an artist that hurt people,” said Emma.
“You never sided with Dylan before that stupid black dress video went to your head,” said Mae. “I don’t even know why. It made you look like a generic brunette.”
“I looked hot!”
Mae had been drumming on records around town and even been offered a producing gig or two, so she ended the fight by yelling, “I don’t need you—you need me!” and slamming the door. But as a fellow New Yorker, she didn’t drive freeways either, so they had to wait together in the kitchen, fuming, arms crossed, while the cab crawled over the hills to pick Mae up. They had emailed once since then, about a business thing.
Mae loved it out here, but Emma thought West Coast living sucked. She had been alone in the house for months, and shadows, breezes, made her jump. Were there intruders outside? Fans of her music asking for autographs like they did when she left restaurants?
“That’s a lot of meat you’re eating,” Ben said three days later, at their big dinner. “Wow. I love that. I would have thought you were vegetarian.”
“Not by choice,” she said. “It’s too damn healthy out here. Smoothies as far as the eye can see! I needed a sandwich.” She opened her mouth wide to dig in and he raised his eyebrows.
“So how do you stay skinny?” he demanded.
“I can’t drive to the grocery store,” she said. He laughed.
“I mean I have like, this amazing trainer and like, a green juice guy you should totally call!” she chirped.
“You’re funny,” he said. “Not as angry as on your songs. You seem pissed on that CD.”
Emma paused, mid-Reuben, and smoldered at him.
“So why did you call?”
“You looked hot in your video,” he said. “I mentioned that you were cute, and my publicist thought it would be a buzzy match—go out a few times, get our pics taken.”
“You’re being straight about your transactional approach,” she said.
“People out here are both fake and full of themselves—and I’m definitely full of myself, and I can’t change that. So I try at least not to be fake at the same time, you know?”
“Life here is contrived and vapid,” she said before ordering a cream soda, not diet.
“Wow, good SAT words,” he said. “Why stay?”
“I’m in a tight spot with my family,” she said.
He touched her forearm with such kindness that she began to melt.
“Hey—before we split, you should check out your teeth in the mirror,” Ben said later, after picking up the check. “You got some corned beef in there and there are paparazzi outside.”
As if she’d sat on a scorpion, Emma got up and ran to the bathroom to floss the meat out with her fingernails, imagining her aunt Sylvia doing the same thing in New York.
Outside of the restaurant, a handful of flashes went off. Emma’s face grew sweaty and she looked away, grabbing Ben’s substantial arm for support. He patted her hand and helped her into a waiting car. A perfect shot.
“Nice touch with the arm,” he said. “You’re adorable. To be honest, less feminine than in the video—but I like your tomboy thing. And your vocabulary. What’s your address?”
He looked right at her then, his eyes tunneling into her soul—and for half a second, she swooned like one of his teenage fans. How calming it might be to lean her head on his gym-enhanced chest and let him pretend to protect her.
“Look, I’m not about to get exclusive, but I had fun tonight,” he said. “And I like your whole vibe, like I said. Want to take it back to your place for a bit?”
“I like you too, but I’m not that desperate.”
She got home and brooded. She was that desperate.
A few days after the corned beef date with Ben, time she’d mostly spent contemplating whether to call him, her father came to visit. He came onstage at her Anaheim show.
“What a crowd!” he said, exuberant, as they arrived home around one in the morning. “Reminded me so much of my Sweet Camellia Wine tour, when you were but a babe.”
Emma moved Dave’s scattered shoes and jacket into the closet. Dave required managing. Emma would try.
“Hungry, Emma-bear?”
Dave asked her now, rummaging through her fridge. “I know you enjoy a grilled cheese at night, but dairy is terrible for the voice. Are you exercising yours?”
“Trying,” she said.
She sliced some cheese and layered it on a loaf of macrobiotic bread he had presented her at the airport, while he looked on.
“I eat cashew cheese now,” he said. “Cashews are one of Mother Nature’s most inventive foods.”
His bread crumbled but did the trick. After the toaster dinged, Emma sat down and demolished the sandwich, then rummaged for beer.
“Dad, you seem too skinny,” she said.
“I’m healthy,” he insisted. “I can’t outrun genetics—my dad was a sickly guy—but I’m trying.”
She regarded her father again, in his green sweat suit. Her own circle-ringed eyes were worse than his, but he did seem wan. She shifted the conversation to her writer’s block.
“Don’t be like Mom,” he advised. “Waiting for the muse to come down like lightning. Don’t you know Calvin and Hobbes? Inspiration—you have to go out and chase it down, with a club?”
“That’s Jack London, Pops,” Emma said with a smile. “Calvin said it is not like a faucet—you can’t turn it on. You have to be in the right mood. Calvin’s more like Mom.”
“Jack London is my guy, then,” said Dave. “Screw Calvin.”
Before they went to sleep, he wanted to see Emma’s small but growing stash of guitars, her makeshift studio. Each chose one to play: a Fender Stratocaster, a Les Paul. Then they switched to acoustic, so they could sing. At four in the morning they were still going. They’d avoided their own catalogs, grooving on old favorites: “Buffalo Gals,” “Sixteen Tons,” “Dink’s Song,” Dylan.
His guitar work had been undervalued, she always felt, because he’d had the fortune to top the charts with one corny song.
“Still got it, Pops,” Emma said.
He held his hands out again, staring at them as if they had been sutured onto his arms. “You know that Mom had tremors before she quit performing, and I wasn’t sympathetic.”
She’d heard the story so many times: the shaking, the knee injury, the pills that made Judie act nuts. The babies that redeemed her, allegedly. Emma yawned and told Dave she was calling it a night.
***
A horrible grinding sound woke her the next morning.
“Dad?” she called down the stairs. It was noon.
“Making smoothies with this blender of yours!” he cried. “Too bad you don’t have silken tofu, but I found some old spirulina powder.”
She pulled on leggings and a t-shirt, splashed water on her face—her “team” would be shocked at her dearth of lotions, but she didn’t feel like it today.
“What’s the story with the Top Forty this year?” Dave asked her as they sat down at the table. “All these robotic layers between listener and song. These boy bands.”
“The Beatles,” Emma said, smiling, “were a boy band.”
“Don’t try to compare.”
“What about Britney?” asked Emma, arching her voice. “Surely you can’t resist that midriff and those pigtails?”
“She’s a sexy pop star,” he said. “The music’s uninspiring.”
Emma had the opposite sense—since she’d dropped off the charts, every song on the radio sounded like Handel’s Messiah.
“I should call some people from before I came out here,” she said to Dave. She ran her finger over a chapped lower lip. “I should really call Mae.”
“You should call Judie,” said Dave, his mustache now spirulina coated.
“Mom should call me.”
“She is calling you. She sent me here. I am the telephone.”
“Don’t lie for her,” said Emma. He held up his hands.
He handed her the smoothie in a mason jar. She tasted his concoction, made a face, but gamely kept drinking. Maybe it would help her look less haggard.
“It’s not good, all the stuff we kept from you,” he said. “But I’m bringing up my own dad because I never got right with him.”
***
One afternoon, they took a hike in a canyon. That’s what people did out here. Emma held Dave’s elbow. “I tried,” he said. “To clean up. To be around for you. Now that you’re famous too, you get what it’s like to be me,” he continued, and she rolled her eyes. Count on the ego to counteract the kinder impulses. He pointed down to a small ravine, at some animal tracks, and they reminisced about the raccoons they once saw fighting in New Hampshire.
“Have you written a song recently?” she said as they walked back.
“I have lyrics,” he said. “I could use help rounding out the tunes.”
Emma wasn’t otherwise engaged. So from then on out they made music every day, even recorded it on demo tapes. Their whole time together, only one question she asked seemed to bother him: “How did you let Mom quit music?”
“I gave up,” he said. “After a decade or so. For years I badgered her to write,” he said. “Then I got used to things being a certain way.” He paused. “I didn’t lock her in a room and make her write songs. But would she have? She said that you and Leon were worth a thousand hit songs—”
“But she was unhappy.”
“She was unhappy in the Singer Sisters, too. Some people are constitutionally discontent.” He paused. “Maybe she’s better now, without us around.” They squeezed each other’s hands. They got Leon on the phone and he said he’d help them master an album in New York, with the songs from that week and more.
And then her father flew home, and Emma was alone again. She told her label guy that she was working on a stripped-down album of folk classics with her dad, and he cursed and hung up on her.
Stuck once again, she stashed the demos away in a shoulder bag Sylvia had given her before she came to L.A. and promised to explain it all to Dave in a few weeks.
“Call Ben for another date,” her agent said. “Just to make them forget the acoustic dad album idea.”
It took three nights for her to pour herself a Sylvia-sized gin and tonic and call Ben. “Does your offer still stand?” she asked.
“Come by anytime,” he said.
They had athletic sex in several rooms of his bachelor pad—Ben liked showing off his arm strength by lifting Emma up and throwing her on the bed, then the couch, and she didn’t mind being manhandled. His roughness told her: You exist.
In public, she symbolized an “empowered” woman, but in private, she pressed on the tender spots where Ben’s hands had been and tried to exult over the millions of young girls who wanted to be in her place. She had won.
She had won it all, and she hated it all.
From The Singer Sisters by Sarah Seltzer. Copyrights © 2024 by the author and reprinted by permission of Flatiron Books