The Year the Music Changed Reader's Guide

About the Book | A Conversation with Diane Thomas | Reader's Guide Questions

About the Book

The mid-1950s South is not the best place to nurture a shy, facially disfigured fourteen-year-old named Achsa McEachern, who is too intelligent for her own good and yearns for the Bohemian life in New York. When she fires off a deceptively self-assured fan letter to an achingly earnest young country singer named Elvis Presley, he answers, beseeching her to teach him how to "talk good" so his grammar won't hold him back. The result is a year's worth of letters that rock both their lives.

Lonely Achsa finds solace in listening to her radio and the new, raw rock-and-roll music broadcast over "WDDO, Daddy-O Radio" by the enigmatic late-night DJ, Penelope the Dream Weaver, even as her beautiful, emotionally distant mother and her sternly religious father lurch toward tragedy and her own life begins to unravel faster than she can write about it. Elvis acts as her sounding board, and in so doing chronicles his own startling rise to become the greatest rock-and-roller of all time.

Set in the twilight days of the segregated South, The Year the Music Changed can also be read as a small-canvas study of a region - and a nation - on the brink of monumental change.

A Conversation with Diane Thomas

Diane Thomas has worked as the entertainment editor of the Atlanta Constitution newspaper, as a staff writer for Atlanta magazine and as a freelance writer and editor. The Year the Music Changed, her debut novel, received rave reviews, was voted a BookSense "Notable Book" and has been translated into Italian and Japanese.

What led you to write The Year the Music Changed?
I've always been fascinated with the 1950s. People tend to think of those years as very repressive, very "Ozzie and Harriet" and "Father Knows Best," but they weren't like that at all. All sorts of rebellions seethed under their placid surface. The decade brought us the Beat Generation and its writers, great jazz, the civil rights movement, rock and roll. Ultimately, the Fifties gave birth to the Sixties, that hallmark decade of creativity and revolution. That's what I wanted to write about, that fascinating "bubbling under" aspect of the 1950s, where a lot of things weren't at all what they seemed - or what people wished us to believe.

Also, I just plain, flat-out love early rock and roll. A way too significant portion of my brain is taken up with 1950s rock lyrics and a few earlier lounge lizard-type songs. I wanted to write about that music. There was this one year where the music completely changed character. You went into it with Patti Page and Perry Como and came out of it with Chuck Berry and Little Richard. That was the same year Elvis happened. It was also the year the civil rights movement got its start. I wanted to write about that year.

Finally, who listens most to music? Teenagers. That meant a coming-of-age novel. I'd been leaning in that direction anyway. I love adolescence. It's such a magical-realism time; every perception is heightened. So I put all that in the hopper - the Fifties, the music, the heightened reality of adolescence - and The Year the Music Changed came out.

You left out race and religion.
That's because I didn't start out intending to write about them. They're the twin linchpins of most every Southern novel, and I started out wanting to write something that wasn't specifically Southern in nature, a relationship story about a plain teenage girl and her beautiful mother that could take place as easily in Cincinnati or Seattle. I couldn't do it; I'm too much of a Southerner. As a Southerner, I never live a day, probably not even a couple of hours, without considering race or religion in some fashion. In the South they're like wallpaper: We're staring at them all the time without realizing it.

In what other ways do you think being a Southerner affects your writing?
Wow, I feel like Achsa when the Columbia students asked her how it felt to be Southern. I don't know how I'd write if I weren't a Southerner. All I can say is, I read writers from other parts of the country - Western writers in particular, who tend to be so beautifully direct and spare - and in comparison Southern writing, mine included, seems much more convoluted. You don't find a lot of Southern minimalists. I suspect it's got a lot to do with the humidity and all the steamy plant life that thrives in it. The best Southern writing twines itself around you fast and grips you hard, like the thickest kudzu vine. I regard that ability as one of the great creative accomplishments.

You did a lot of different types of writing in your working life. Do you think that hurt you or helped you when you wrote your novel?
Well, it hurt in that it delayed me from writing The Year the Music Changed. But when I did, I was astonished at how much I had learned from these other forms of writing that I could apply to fiction. Reviewing films and plays as entertainment editor of the Atlanta Constitution taught me the importance of story line and narrative drive. Working as a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution and Atlanta magazine taught me to pay attention to dialogue and speech patterns and what they say about the speaker - and to pay attention to a person's body language. Writing advertising copy taught me how to catch people's attention in a very few words and how to move them emotionally. Writing training manuals taught me clarity and logic and how to stay organized and focused while working on large projects. Every bit of the writing I'd done earlier taught me something I was able to put to use when I sat down to write my novel. I wish I had known this at the time; I would have paid a much deeper kind of attention.

What advice would you give an aspiring writer?
Write, of course. That's the most important thing you can do. Take it seriously, don't treat it as a hobby. Write every day, even if on some days it's just for 15 minutes. A friend told me of a weaver she knows who is part Navajo and who won't go more than a day without weaving because she believes "spites and evil spirits will get in an idle loom and gum it up." Writers don't use looms, but I think spites and evil spirits get in our brains if we let ourselves get out of touch with the thing we're working on.

And read. Read everything, especially the kinds of books you want to write. Those are the two most important things you can do.

Next, do whatever you need to do to recognize when your writing is good - take classes, join a critique group, whatever is right for you. When you've got something good, finish a first draft and then polish it by revising and revising until it absolutely glows, until magic jumps out from every page. Then make careful preparations (an error-free manuscript, an agent, if you need one) and take your work out to the wider world. Try your best to find a publisher for this magical thing you have written. If you succeed, be humble; know that this is a whimsical business you have entered and that better than you have failed. If your work does not find a home, reread it, learn from it - then set it aside and begin something new right away. Any published writer you talk to will invariably list the most important characteristic of his or her success as persistence - and the second most important as good luck, which is what I wish for you.

Questions for Discussion

1. Most of us already knew a fair amount about Elvis before reading The Year the Music Changed. To create a fictional Elvis who seems as real as possible, Thomas has coordinated his fictional letters with the real Elvis's tour itinerary and other events that occur in his life during the book's timeframe. This tactic makes the fictional Achsa seem real as well (so real, in fact, that a representative of a New York-area auction house contacted the author to see if she wanted to sell "the original letters"). What other strategies does the author use to make Achsa seem as real as Elvis?

2. Brown vs. the Board of Education was decided late in 1954, ushering in the slow process of school desegregation in the southern United States and the movement for civil rights. Historians have speculated that the civil rights movement would not have come about nearly so early nor so forcefully had it not been for the advent of rock and roll. Discuss the ways rock and roll music may have hastened the budding civil rights movement of the mid-1950s.

3. The Year the Music Changed is really Achsa's story, rather than Elvis's. In what ways are we made aware of this early in the novel? Why do you think Achsa's story is the one the author chose to tell?

4. Unrequited love stands out as a dominant theme in the novel. Every character wants something he or she cannot or will not get. What does each character want and what internal and external forces keep him or her from achieving it? How does Achsa deal with her own unrequited love?

5. Another major theme in The Year the Music Changed is the seismic change that is about to take place in the relationship between whites and African-Americans in the South. At the novel's start, these two groups occupy parallel universes and rarely interact except in accepted, often ritualized ways. We see these parallel worlds in Achsa's third letter, where she tells Elvis how, as a child, she discovered the "colored balcony" in a movie theater. Each group was watching the same movie, but separately and under vastly different circumstances. As the book progresses, these two groups in their parallel universes draw closer. What examples of this does the book give? How close have the two groups become by the story's end? How is this shown? Discuss the role that Penelope, the DJ, plays in the novel.

6. In the 1950s, it was generally accepted that beauty was a woman's only real currency, the only thing of value she had to trade, as she made her way in the world. Achsa's mother is stunningly beautiful. Achsa, because of her facial disfigurement, is not. In chapter 12, when her mother makes up Achsa's face, she tells her daughter, "A woman puts on her face every morning. It's something she gives to the world. And what the world expects from her." When Achsa asks why the world expects that, her mother replies, "Maybe the world thinks that's the best of what you are." Achsa frowns and her mother rubs the frown away with her thumb. What do you think this exchange says about the differing ways Achsa and her mother regard society's obsession with beauty? Do you think Achsa's mother is well served by her beauty? In what ways has her beauty made her life easier or more difficult? In what ways does Achsa's lack of beauty make her life more difficult? In what ways, if any, does Achsa's lack of beauty make her life easier?

7. In the novel, Elvis believes God "talks to us and tells us what we need to know." Achsa, in contrast, sees God as something far more abstract: "It's like there's this net of tiny lights spread out across the valley. Each light is a family, and each family has got its own secrets and stuff, but they are all woven together in the darkness. When I think things like that I always want to cry, but in a good way. I guess if God's ever going to talk to me, that's when." In what ways do Achsa and Elvis's differing views of God affect their decisions and their lives? How does Achsa's vision at the end of her last letter, of Elvis's music drifting out over the town, illustrate her religious beliefs? How does it relate to the passage quoted above from one of her letters?

8. Achsa is very drawn to the city of New York. What do you think it represents to her, and why?

9. When Achsa finally meets Dr. Jacobson, she tells him, "I was born knowing [about you]." In what ways has Jacobson been present all along as a phantom fourth member of Achsa's family?

10. There are three points in the story where characters experience unusual releases: Achsa, shen she sees Elvis sing in Mississippi; Jacobson, when he tells Achsa his story; and Achsa, when she finally allows herself to cry. What do these three releases have in common and how do they affect the characters involved?

11. From the "editor's" introduction, we learn what became of Achsa in her later life even before we encounter her through her letters. Why do you think the author chose to give us this information before we read the letters? How do you believe your experience of the book and your reaction to it would have been different if this information had not been given until the book's end? Why do you think Achsa was able to realize her innermost dreams, while Elvis was not?

12. How does the epigraph from Sara Teasdale's poem, "Those Who Love," apply to Achsa? To Elvis? To Achsa's mother and father? Think particularly of the phrase, "the fates fighting in somber pride." Which one of all the characters in the book do you believe loves most truly and deeply?