A tale of two plots
Stop Your Memory's past and present heartbreaks
In Stop Your Memory, Roger and Iris handed me one of the most challenging plots I had ever written up to that point. Like all of the Degrees of Desire books, aside from When It Was Us, the book alternates between the FMC and MMC’s points of view. This one also alternates between the present-day thirtysomething Roger and Iris and the high-school-age Roger and Iris. One storyline ends in heartbreak and illegal activity. The other ends happily ever after.
The nineties plot is a lot of fun, although it clearly dates the book a bit. Sharp-eyed readers will note that the book technically takes place in 2013, as it includes a major newsworthy event from that year. If you’ve been reading this Substack for a while, you might remember that all of the books originally took place in specific years. So, being in their early 30s in 2013 makes Roger and Iris just a few years older than I am and definite nineties high school kids. Therefore, I got to revisit the slang of my youth (you better recognize), glitter jeans, blue nail polish, purity culture seminars in public schools, and, most importantly, the music.
Roger and Iris bond over their love of indie pop. I’m over here babysitting my inbox for some unicorn somewhere to call out the serious deep cuts playing on Roger’s car stereo. The majority of their shared bands are from the Elephant 6 Collective, the history of which is an entire article for a completely different Substack. The music was about 50/50 artists trying to out-weird each other and actual, ear-pleasing melodies.
And this is the soundtrack to rebellious suburban Iris’s fledgling classical ballet career. One of the bands from this collective (one of the few bands that is actually still active) is/was of Montreal, whom Trevor and Maria bond over in Future Perfect and When It Was Us. In my defense, I wrote this series between 2017 - 2019 while working a day job that shunted me into a back room office, where I listened to indie Pandora all day.
In the present-day plot, Roger and Iris haven’t forgotten their musical bond, nor have they changed their tastes all that much. Iris is still choreographing ballet routines to The Decemberists, and Roger is doing econometrics to the tune of Skeletal Lamping.
Do you need to know or care about late-1990s indie dream pop to enjoy or understand this book? Definitely not. The crux of the matter is that a washed-up prima ballerina crashes her high school ex’s tenure drama in the middle of the night. An earth-shattering, terrifying thing happens a few days later. No one moves on. Instead we flash back to the 1997-1998 school year and tease out the reason our high school sweethearts turned sour.
The two plots run parallel for most of the book. The Ardmore-Merion Math Ninjas compete for the gold in the past while Roger prays for tenure as an adult. Teenage Iris battles her parents for permission to attend the Philadelphia Creative and Performing Arts magnet school. Adult Iris is completely unmoored after a Grade 3 ACL rupture derailed her ballet career.
Are they wiser and more mature as adults? Um… Maybe? Not entirely. But what fun would it be if they sat down at Roger’s dining room table for a civilized conversation before being emotionally prepared and also making a ton of bad decisions first?
Stop Your Memory is Book 2 in the Degrees of Desire series. It’s a deeply emotional, angsty, interconnected standalone contemporary romance filled with forced-proximity tension, an opposites-attract academic clash, and a second-chance love story fifteen years in the making. The entire series is free to read on Kindle Unlimited.
