When I think about INVISIBLE VIOLETS, my book that’s releasing on March 13 (9 weeks from today!), it mostly fills me with joy and pride. I still tear up with feelings of, I can’t believe this is really happening, OMGGGGG!
Mixed in with all that joy and pride and omfg, though, is sorrow. It feels important to talk about that too. Some of the sorrows are too big to go into on here. One of them I may write about eventually but am not ready for yet because it’s something I learned about very recently. For now, I’m going to stick to the survivable sorrows.
Here is one of them: I’m sad in a bone deep way that my first book is coming out so long after Chris Cornell is gone. I’m sad that my book is dedicated to his memory and not to him as a still living person in the world.
Many years ago, I wrote my first full-length memoir manuscript. It’s known around these parts (this site) as Moonchild (named after one of Chris’s songs). I was always going to dedicate to Chris Cornell because it chronicled the year that his first solo album, Euphoria Morning, had a profound impact on my life. I was thinking about that back in maybe 2007, give or take a year or so, when he was alive and well and making music.
I wanted to put it out there, in the world, in concrete words in a book, how much his music had meant to me. I hoped he’d read it someday and feel good that his art had had such a profound impact on someone. Lots of someones.
But then I put writing on the back burner for all sorts of reasons for a really long time, and Chris died in 2017 and now my first book, a different book, is dedicated to his ghost.
On Christmas, I found myself thinking all sorts of sad thoughts about time and regret and how I know it wouldn’t have changed anything if Chris had read a book of mine dedicated to him back in the day but still I wish I’d had a way to convey the magnitude of his art’s impact on me (and on so many other people).
What if I hadn’t put my writing on the back burner for all those years? What if I’d gotten my shit together so much sooner? What if I hadn’t thought there would always be time, always be later, until there wasn’t?
The funny thing is, all the essays in my upcoming collection are from the back burner years. And Moonchild, if I ever do anything with it, will now be dedicated to someone else, someone who was a very important and good friend to me during the year the book focuses on, someone who died in 2023.
Things always change, and mostly I’m at peace with that, but sometimes there are sorrows that need to be spoken. For me, having a book launching soon is bringing up some of those sorrows. I think that’s okay. Grief is weird and nonlinear and yeah, I’ve found myself unspeakably sad lately about a rock star death that happened almost nine years ago.
It doesn’t help with the sadness that I’ve been working on a book playlist and listening to so much Chris Cornell, solo and in all of his bands.
The title of this post comes from the song “Disappearing Act” on Chris’s second solo record, Carry On, and here I give you the music video:
Disappearing Act Video on YouTube
Chrys
Image Description: Picture of Chris Cornell
Chrys Buckley 