Three Weeks To Go!
The Rock ‘N Roll Clock is ticking! My debut novel from Livingston Press, Searching for Jimmy Page, will be released in exactly three weeks, October 20, 2021. It’s the story I was always meant to tell, the one that is a love song to Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin and, to my knowledge, the first literary novel (as opposed to fan fiction or nonfiction) that features them, but it is also an homage to my mother, Frances Baker Alexander. Today I honor her memory, on this eighteenth anniversary of her passing.
She didn't get to read any of my published fiction or creative nonfiction or get to share my excitement when Joe Taylor at Livingston Press accepted my novel for publication in an April 2020 email with this felicitous subject line: “YES.” She did, however, watch the Led Zeppelin concert film, The Song Remains the Same, with me when I saw it for the first time, when I was fifteen, then help me hang Led Zeppelin posters in my room after I instantly became a disciple. She even developed a taste for the band’s music, which she had to listen to incessantly until I grew up and moved out of my childhood home. “Kashmir” and “Immigrant Song” were her favorites. When Jimmy Page was a guest on a two-hour episode of the call-in radio program Rockline the summer his solo album, Outrider, came out, Mom took over dialing duty at the halfway mark when I began to freak out because I couldn't get through. She put up with a lot from her neurotic daughter. She indulged my obsessions, and Led Zeppelin and Jimmy Page were at the core of them, just as they are for Claudia, the adored deceased mother of Searching for Jimmy Page protagonist, eighteen-year-old Luna. The mother-daughter bond is strong in the novel, as it was in my own life, albeit ours was far less complicated than Claudia and Luna’s.
I wanted to tell her. I wanted her to know what I’d always
believed, what I believed until believing anything seemed
a moot point. She was a goddess, an angel, mythical
and infinite. To me she was.
—From Searching for Jimmy Page, Chapter Two
Searching for Jimmy Page, a novel about a young woman coming to grips with the loss of her mother, is dedicated to my mother. I like to think she’d be thrilled and proud and, like any Southern mama worth her salt, pour us both a tall cool glass of sweet ice tea (with lemon) and declare in her inimitable timbre, “Christy, drop the needle on ‘Kashmir’ and let’s celebrate this book!” How wonderful that would be.
Photos of my bedroom in Greenville, NC, when I was a teenager in the mid-80s. My mother helped me hang the posters.
Mom and me, Dec 7, 1991, my college graduation. Photo by Steve Alexander.
