Tara McCarthy’s Backstory

A small replica of an old vaudeville poster of Daisy and Violet Hilton—famous Siamese twins from the twenties and thirties—hung in the basement of the house my family lived in up until I was in the fourth grade. My father can’t really explain why he owned it, but every time I went downstairs to play with my Barbie dolls, I passed a picture of these cute girls with spiral curls in their long hair, wearing silky green dresses and holding saxophones, and they were joined at the lower back. I guess that sort of thing sticks with you because I’ve been sort of obsessed with conjoined twins all my life.

Many moons later, having started and failed to finish two novels, I was rooting around for an idea that would really hold my interest and the notion of doing something about conjoined twins was floating around. Then I heard the Britney Spears song "Baby One More Time"—it was being covered by a band called Travis, who sort of stripped it down to a more acoustic guitar version—and the line "I must confess that my loneliness is killing me now" popped out in a way it hadn’t before. And I thought how devastating a lyric it was—but also how hilarious it would be if sung by Siamese twins. The idea of a pair of contemporary pop star twins—Flora and Fauna Sparks—grew from there and I got excited, right away, about the larger canvas that the idea implied: the idea of the red carpet as a modern day freak show.

It took me a while to figure out that the narrator of the twins’ story should be a single woman—someone who thinks she craves couplehood above all else but then meets her ultimate foil in the twins. I’d been wanting to put something out there that was sort of a dark antidote to chick lit and once the idea of the twins came together with that, I was off and running with Sloan Madden, a celebrity journalist who’s thirty-five years old and alone, in the narrator’s role. I didn’t want to write a depressing book about being single—or a creepy book about conjoined twins—and I quickly found that the way the ideas played off each other (imagine Sloan complaining to the twins about being single) provided a lot of comic potential. Having the twins in the room sort of freed me up to really go deep into the anger and self pity that sometimes accompanies being single.

Very soon after I began to write the book, a friend of a friend told me about her brother’s rock band, Dutch Kills. I subsequently went to their website and became obsessed with their song "Anchor." I’d already decided that Fauna, the more talented, artistic, twin, was going to be trying to write material toward a solo album and I latched onto this song, "Anchor" as the sort of tortured song she’d write. I played it endlessly, to the point where I was almost making myself sick from it. It’s a really dark, tortured song, and it started to impact the story, which was heading toward tragedy on the one hand, but also toward redemption for the character of Sloan on the other.

The song has a lot of amazing imagery, about pirates and such, and it influenced plot points that I’d rather not reveal. I always imagined I’d end up writing original lyrics and replacing them in the text, but when I finished the book I really wanted the lyrics to "Anchor" to stay. So I emailed the songwriter and asked permission to use the lyrics. He said yes after he read the book, and then we started dating and got married. Which is pretty wild. Because I was determined to write a story that would follow a single woman on an extraordinary journey that did NOT end with her meeting a man. I think I was using these characters to help me answer the question, "What if I never meet anyone?" And then I did, but only because I wrote the book. No matter what other books I write down the line, Love Will Tear Us Apart will probably always be my favorite for that reason.

Love Will Tear Us Apart is Tara Mccarthy's first novel