It’s really weird, today, to try and remember how it felt to be writing Let It Be Beautiful last winter, before I was used to it yet. It felt, I guess, like attempting to navigate an overwhelming and intimidating landscape that didn’t even exist at all, one that would only come to exist in the future because of what I was confusedly writing today.

The first Beatles song I wrote was “Flying” (Logically, I decided, “Flying” should be written first and finished fastest. It’s the easiest one- it doesn’t even have WORDS!) I wrote most of “Norwegian Wood” on the same epic night I wrote “Flying”- to this day, “Norwegian Wood” remains the most unconnivingly beautiful story I’ve ever written. It’s mostly about a white bench.

“Magical Mystery Tour” is highly lysergic; “I Feel Fine” is God’s love letter to me, as I ran across the street in high-heeled boots, and I really did feel fine. “Free As A Bird” is also about acid; it was the first (but certainly not the last!) time I ever wrote about “Gonzo noses” in Let It Be Beautiful. “Honeymoon Song” was a throwaway when I wrote it, but it’s now one of my favourites from this period after reading them all back; it’s taken me ten months to get to a place where I value mostly for my writing to be “quiet”, “elegant”, and “emotionally neutral.” With “Honeymoon Song,” I accomplished this by accident. The main character in “Honeymoon Song”, not counting myself, is named “Bwsshnmnynya,” (Her hips looked very wide to me. They were beautiful, so Beyonce-brand slammin’ in that purple or blue or pink or green dress she wore.) which is how I always jokingly pronounced it while I was telling it to people in real life. It is largely an homage to The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers, which is my favourite book EVER.

The most IMPORTANT songs I wrote during the first three months of the bookwriting process were definitely “Girl” and “She’s A Woman,” both of which have been edited and re-edited countless times since; what they look like today is vastly different from how they looked when I first wrote their names down in a way I guess I’ll never really understand. Every time you edit a story, the old one goes away, which I guess is a little bit sad, but only in the same way that being twenty-five and not fifteen is sad: not really at all.

“Girl” and “She’s A Woman” are the Beatles songs that first set the tone for what the core narrative of the entire rest of my half of the book would eventually become. My half of Let It Be Beautiful is composed of five major narratives, the most prominent being the one that exists entirely in the present tense. I feel like I became who I am as a writer because I “cut my teeth” while writing for this blog. What I’ve always loved most about blogging is that it creates a narrative without your even having to try, “instant archival,” and what I really want to do with this book is apply that idea- in a more refined way- to literature. I have no idea how my book is going to end, because I haven’t lived it yet. That’s so exciting to me!!!

I wrote Girl last February, in the days leading up to Valentine’s Day, when I had a vicious eye infection, was unemployed, and drank a lot of cheap champagne “straight out the bottle.” I’m “Girl,” by the way. “Girl” centers largely around the plot point of myself slowly but surely destroying a fictional Beanie Baby (“An uncute ladybug… who is also a Volkswagen Beetle”) named Luvbug, though it mostly tells the story of myself destroying my own mythologizing of John Lennon’s fictional “Girl”, who I always assumed was ME!

But she wasn’t, and then I wrote “She’s A Woman,” which is a lot about the experience of being a single woman walking to Subway in the middle of a blizzard, using your leftover Subway napkins as toilet paper, and OWNING IT. It’s also about making fun of dudes’ bodies for being petite, watching The World’s Littlest Girl with your best friend, “If Paul McCartney was your boyfriend, I bet he’d go down on you a lot”, making mens’ entire lives feel like the guitar solo from “You’re Going To Lose That Girl” (“sexy, like having sex on a baseball diamond”), text messages, secrets (the cosmic kind), cats, and other such beacons of contemporary womanhood.