B.C.-born Holly Brickley's debut novel Deep Cuts to get movie adaptation

Holly Brickley's Deep Cuts begins in the year 2000. Boy bands and pop princesses are topping the charts, while music lovers thumb through CD binders looking for their favourite album, or even a special song, to play on their CD player. 

Percy, the protagonist, exchanges words about the popular music of the day with Joe, a songwriter and fellow student at UC Berkeley.

From there, a love story between the two, but also between Percy and her music, develops. 

Brickley's debut novel, just released on Feb. 25, has already garnered interest from filmmakers; Brickley said The Iron Claw director Sean Durkin has been greenlit to write the adaptation himself, and stars Saoirse Ronan and Austin Butler have been cast as the film's leads.

LISTEN | Brickley speaks about what went into her debut novel: 

North by Northwest15:45Holly Brickley on her debut novel Deep Cuts

Holly Brickley's debut novel Deep Cuts is a love letter to music and coming of age in the early 2000s.

"It's a dream come true," said Brickley, who grew up in Hope, B.C., and now lives in Portland, Ore. 

"The best part about it is that everyone involved is really high-quality, high-calibre talent. Saoirse, in particular, has a fierce intelligence but also a tenderness, which is exactly what I was going for with Percy's character."

Ronan will also produce the film, and Brickley will be an executive producer.

The story follows Percy, "a young woman with lots of opinions about music but no real talent for it," as Brickley describes her. 

While the book isn't autobiographical, Brickley said there are certain aspects plucked from her own life — the cities Percy lives in, the jobs she has, the schools she attends and the music she listens to during the same period Brickley herself was doing all those things. 

"It was really fun to go back to that time," she told CBC's North by Northwest host Margaret Gallagher. "I don't know what it's like to be young now, I think probably pretty similar in a lot of ways. A lot of that beauty and pain is evergreen."

Brickley grew up in a musical family in the small B.C. town of Hope, 122 kilometres east of Vancouver. Her dad was a professional songwriter, and her mom, aunts, uncles and brother were all musically gifted. Though Brickley was passionate about music, she said she didn't have a natural talent like the rest of her family did. 

Instead, she focused her creative energy on writing. 

"I love thinking of music in the context of writing, even though I'm not dealing with notes, I am dealing with rhythm and the sound of words and the way sentences and words can kind of play off each other within a paragraph," she said. 

Nostalgia

Durkin, who will adapt the book for the screen, is a big fan of the book and wants to stay as close to the original story as possible, Brickley said. 

Part of the interest in the story, she thinks, could come from millennials leaning into nostalgia for the early 2000s. 

Setting the story in the 2000s, or the oughts as they're known to some, meant fewer technologies for accessing music and communicating with others, something Brickley appreciated as she looked back on those years. 

"Now, [technology] follows us out into the bars and clubs and pulls us away from each other, but back then it seemed to only want to help us connect. The iPod, I think, was the most glorious moment in modern technology when you could have thousands of songs on a device in your pocket, but your boss couldn't email you on it. We should have stopped there."

Setting the book at that time also meant referencing music from the 2000s or earlier. Brickley gives shoutouts to Canadian artists like Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. 

"Joni is a once-in-a-generation absolute genius," Brickley said. 

"How can you write a book about music without Joni, especially a feminist book, which I hope this is."