Photo: Susanna Hoffs | By Beth Greenfield, Yahoo Lifestyle | If you’ve not followed Susanna Hoffs since her days as the big-haired, honey-voiced, side-eyeing lead singer of the seminal ’80s band the Bangles, you’ve got some catching up to do. For starters, she’s 64 — a fact sure to jolt Gen X-ers — with adult kids of her own. She’s also released a slew of other albums over the years, from solo efforts to collaborations, and has a brand new one dropping in April.
Hoffs is also in the midst of a late-in-life career pivot: With the April 4 release of her book This Bird Has Flown, she is officially a novelist.
“I just kind of threw myself in,” she tells Yahoo Life, likening her technique to the title of her new album, The Deep End, and giving much of the credit to her elder son, Jackson, 28.
“He said, ‘Mom, why don’t you write a novel? You’ve always wanted to,’ and that’s all it took … my kid posing that question to me. I thought, if not now, when? I have always wanted to do it and I’ve always got my head in a book. I love disappearing into stories.”
But Jackson’s encouragement — spurred on by that of her younger son, 24-year-old Sam — didn’t end there, as he told her, “‘Tomorrow, I want you to sit at the kitchen table. Open your laptop, stare at the blank page, and just start to write,’ and I did. I did that,” she says. “I didn’t know what would come out.”
Turns out it was an a charmingly effervescent love story between a British professor and a fading pop star who meet cute on an airplane, with a lovely balance of levity, sex-drugs-rock-&-roll and redemption.
The process of writing the book, Hoffs says, “felt quite different” from that of creating music.
“With songs, it’s more like you’re writing a poem that needs to work to be sung … It’s more confining. Whereas, I felt a freedom in writing the book, and a different kind of pleasure, because it’s almost like working out the puzzle — a Rubik’s Cube, or something,” she says, explaining that she’d work for about six hours a day and give herself “a pep talk” if she felt stuck. “And then it was as if going through a portal into my imagination. It was like this movie screen would come down and I would just watch it … and music would trigger scenes [that] would just bloom to life, like cinematically.”
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Read the full interview here:
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/bangles-susanna-hoffs-aging-unapologetically-120017843.html
Photo: Susanna Hoffs & book
https://www.facebook.com/OfficialSusannaHoffs/
Bangles Front Woman and ’80s Icon Susanna Hoffs, 64, Isn’t Obsessing About Aging: ‘I don’t want to waste my energy’
