With sisters Maggie and Terre, Suzzy Roche is part of New York's beloved vocal trio The Roches. But she's also an actress, and now with Wayward Saints, she's an author, too.
The novel, which Hyperion Books publishes Tuesday, is about Mary Saint, "a scrappy little rock star girl who has kind of crashed and burned," says Roche. "She ran away from home at 18, so we see her now about 18 years later."
Originally from small-town Swallow, N.Y., the girl now lives in San Francisco, and has not seen her mother in all this time. When she's approached by a high school teacher to return home and perform a solo concert at the school, she agrees.
"The book leads up to the concert and what happens to both Mary and her mother in the process of anticipating seeing each other," continues Roche. "In the meantime, all sorts of characters--priests, townspeople, aging hippies and the like--are running around, and they're all sort of wayward saints in a way."
Asked whether she herself can be found among her characters, Roche laughs as she stresses that the story is "totally fictional," though the ideas and themes are "certainly of interest to me personally."
These include "the dangers of the music business and the mysterious nature of creativity--and also how everyone has different opinions about what someone does creatively," she says, "and also matters of faith: The pivotal problem that both mother and daughter are reacting to centers around faith--but I don't want to give it away!"
The "dangers of the music business" involve drug abuse, and "people in the music business who are totally traumatized in their own different ways, whether they're very, very successful, or not even close to really being in the music business--but think they are," says Roche. "I wanted to talk about the whole celebrity culture, and creativity: This girl had no education or anyone who influenced her in wanting to be a singer, but happend to have a special quality that people responded to--but no craft or technique to go with it. So the idea was, What is it that makes somebody have a talent? And also, how do many people have different opinions regarding what someone does creatively?"
Roche's headlong venture into prose came about after her short story Love was published in Carved In Rock: Short Stories By Musicians, a 2003 anthology also featuring contributions from the likes of Eric Burdon, Joan Jett, Kinky Friedman, Graham Parker and Mary Lee Kortes.
"It was only five pages long, but someone read it and said, 'Make a novel out of it,' and I sort of did!" she says. "It took six months for the first draft--and I didn't do anything else but write every day, all day. It was very difficult to have faith that I could do it, so I kept it to myself and didn't tell hardly anyone about it--and it got bought very quickly, which was shocking to me. It's just one of those once-in-a-lifetime things that happened, so much so that it feels like someone else wrote it!"
Twice-in-a-lifetime, apparently, at least, for Roche has already completed a children’s book, Want to Be in a Band?, to be published next year by Random House. She says she's working on another book concept, but much depends on the response to Wayward Saints.
She shouldn't worry. The book has already garnered great advance word from The New York Review Of Books, and Roche has scheduled a number of reading/singing appearances to support publication that should be as wonderful as a Roches show.
"It's interesting that musicwise, I seem to be in a position where I have to read from the book, and sing by myself--which is not something I thought I would do but I'm enjoying," she says. "There's something about having a book as a companion, that takes me out of the context of the long career that I have had and makes it seem fresh."
While Roche wrote songs for her book's Mary Saint--which Roche herself "could never perform"--she picked songs from others, as well as her own, that remind her of the character and that she does perform. These include John Bucchino's "Sweet Dreams" ("kind of a complete short story, that Judy Collins recorded--but my rendition is quite different") and the late Judee Sill's classic "Crayon Angels."
"It's a beautiful song, and she was a casualty of the whole music business situation that's so much a part of the book," says Roche of Sill, whose influential two-album career was tragically cut short by drug abuse in 1979.
Roche will appear with daughter Lucy Wainwright Roche Jan. 26 at Barnes & Noble's Union Square outlet, and will perform a Wayward Saints book release concert at Dixon Place in the Lower East Side on Jan. 29.
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