Researching my debut novel, The Maidenheads, which is set in the DC music scene from the late 1990s until 2012, sent me down some curious rabbit holes. I toured backstage at venues in DC, read all I could about the DC punk scene of the 1980s and 1990s, and listened to so much music from the years when my book takes place. The ’00s were a period when guitar-heavy bands like the Strokes and the White Stripes existed alongside more electronic, Brit Pop-inspired groups like Interpol and MGMT; what held it all together was that you could dance to it. The bands I created for my novel—the Maidenheads, a raw but promising art-punk duo, and Les Somnambules, a more introspective and polished indie-folk group—are less pop-inflected, but they have some of the same influences.
As I immersed myself in this period of music, I also read books that felt in conversation with my own, which tells the story of two queer musicians falling in and out of love, repeatedly, over the course of about a decade. Specifically, I read novels about queer heartache. I was hungry for books that showed queer characters making morally complex choices around romance and experiencing the painful consequences. Over time, my playlist and my reading list agglomerated in my head, becoming a mutant beast of ’00s indie rock and sad gay novels.
Below is the unholy result: eight queer heartache novel recommendations, based on your favorite ’00s indie anthem. The protagonists of these novels aren’t always sympathetic—which is part of the pleasure—but we are still drawn into their struggle, even when it’s clearly their own fault, and cheering for them to emerge whole, if perhaps chastened, on the other side. In truth, whatever your musical preferences, you should just read them all.
If your favorite song is “Last Nite” by The Strokes, read Nevada by Imogen Binnie
This song is so fundamentally heterosexual, but reduced to its core elements (girlfriends not understanding and walking out the door) it’s a story of bolting when a relationship gets overwhelming—relatable to all! Nevada, first published in 2013 by Topside Press and reissued in 2022 by FSG, tells the story of Maria, a woman fleeing her cis girlfriend and bookstore job in New York to road trip out West, where she foists her intimacy issues onto a Walmart employee she has determined is an egg-phase trans woman. A classic bolter road trip novel (Maria even steals her ex-girlfriend’s car) as well as a seminal novel of messy trans lives.
If your favorite song is “A Better Son/Daughter” by Rilo Kiley, read All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Matthews
I love the manic earnestness of this song so much, as well as the implication that holding yourself together and caring for the people around you can be an act of epic heroism. All This Could be Different conveys some of that same energy. The protagonist, Sneha, has moved to Milwaukee for a corporate job immediately after graduation, right in the depths of the 2008 recession. Overwhelmed by the strictures of her sketchy boss and her immigrant parents, Sneha cordons herself off from vulnerability, allowing a new girlfriend to believe that her parents have died when in fact, they self-deported home to India. The novel is a beautifully told story of how the slow, tentative opening of connection—with a partner, with family, with a community—can change lives, change the world.
If your favorite song is “Fell In Love With a Girl” by The White Stripes, read Mrs. S by K Patrick
The narrator of this song is deeply in love in a way he knows is going nowhere good; the object of his affection has another partner and only seems interested in him as a source of novelty. So, too, does the unnamed narrator of Mrs. S find herself at the outset of this gorgeous, very sexy novel: working at a British girls’ school and helplessly in love with the headmaster’s wife, who may or may not be queer and is certainly married to a man. I’m fairly sure Jack White’s wasn’t intending to write about the mindfuckery of desiring girls who may be straight, but if any lyrics ever described the feeling better, I’ve not heard them.
If your favorite song is “Maps” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, read A Sharp Endless Need by Mac Crane
Maybe you are familiar with the internet lore of this song, according to which “Maps” stands for “My Angus, please stay”: Karen O wrote the song for her then boyfriend Angus Andrew, the lead singer of the band Liars, expressing despair over how conflicting touring schedules were tearing them apart. I didn’t have that information 20 years ago, though, and just experienced this song as a pure, cathartic rip of pain. Similarly, Mac Crane’s A Sharp Endless Need, while on one level an expertly crafted basketball novel, is also a book-length wail of dogged hurt, the most elemental queer adolescent version: “they don’t love you like I love you,” when “they” is undeserving teen boys and “you” is your soul mate/best friend/sexual awakening, who again, may or may not be queer herself.
If your favorite song is “Modern Girl” by Sleater-Kinney, read The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
Tom Ripley, protagonist of this perfect novel, is the ultimate Modern Girl: happy, hungry, and angry all at once, fighting to construct a world that looks very much like “a sunny day” but in fact is a fabrication of his own dark desires. Both fueled by capitalism (his lust for the accoutrements of an elegant life) and doomed by it (because even with those accoutrements he’s still a working-class queer who will never, ever fit in, no matter how many people he murders), Ripley exemplifies the song’s lines about what money can and can’t buy, and the emptiness caused when we conflate the two.
If your favorite song is “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” by The Darkness, read Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth.
Deduct points immediately for matching an Irish novel with a quintessentially English song, made famous by its inclusion in the quintessentially English film Bridget Jones’ Diary—apologies, Chloe! But hear me out: Sunburn is a paean to manic queer teen love, the kind of love that makes you sure you’ve met your soulmate when you’re in high school, the kind of love that makes you want to kiss someone every minute, every hour, and every day.
If your favorite song is “Boy From School” by Hot Chip, read Bellies, by Nicola Dinan
“Boy From School” is a classic peppy-sad song (maybe my favorite kind), and Bellies, Nicola Dinan’s debut novel, has some of that same poignant exuberance. It’s a very funny, very sad novel, the story of a couple who fall in love when they are, literally, boys from school, and then fall apart over years when one transitions. The no-fault defeat described in “Boy From School” echoes closely the ache of the central relationship in Bellies, in which both members of the couple are trying, but they just don’t belong.
If your favorite song is “Party Hard” by Andrew W.K., read Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran
Songs and novels about parties always feel sad to me. Why do we “party hard,” if not to pretend, briefly, that the world makes sense? Andrew W.K.’s most famous song is an almost mechanically enthusiastic tribute to good times, but we sense the insecurity and sorrow lurking underneath. So, too, in Andrew Holleran’s classic Gatsby-esque novel of Manhattan and Fire Island in the 1970s, do we experience the tragic emptiness beneath the glitter. There are dated aspects to this novel, but its campy mournfulness feels eternal.
