playlists

The FIREWORKS paperback is out today and I could not be more excited. This book is a 90s boy band fever dream and I feel like it was always sort of meant to be read in paperback: in the backseat of a car on vacation or in a pool float shaped like a flamingo, the pages waterlogged and heavy in your hands.

Just in case you’ve never heard me talk about it: I always say that my personal brand is messy, complicated love stories, and the messy, complicated love story in FIREWORKS is a friendship. It takes place in Orlando in 1997–so, right in the eye of the manufactured teen pop hurricane–and it’s about two lifelong best friends, Dana and Olivia, who get sucked right into the storm. It’s about ambition, and the cost of growing up, and the shitty categories we put girls into–and also swimming pool kisses and state fairs and sitting on the kitchen counter in a crappy efficiency apartment with Cheeto dust on your hands, falling a little bit in love.

Among many, many other things, this book is very much a love letter to the delicious, sticky effervescence of late 90s pop music: so what better way to celebrate than with a lovingly curated playlist full of all my very favorite bops? Hop on over to Spotify to have a listen, and pick up the book right this way.