“What’s purity, control, freedom, integrity if you’re stuck in a get-along gig most of the livelong day, foaming milks or pushing a little cursor around a screen?” asks Maggie Corbin, protagonist of Susannah Felts’s literary novel The Come Apart, with a candor that can pierce any artist.
Felts has written for the Chicago Reader and multiple literary publications. In 2008, she penned This Will Go Down on Your Permanent Record, an identity-driven debut novel about an adolescent Nashville photographer. The Come Apart returns to Nashville, offering a fresh perspective on creative success through the eyes of a complicated heroine who doesn’t fully achieve it.
Maggie Corbin is a songwriter and the female vocalist for an indie rock band called Spinning Birds. It’s the early 2000s. The Nashville native spends years hustling in Chicago with her partner, Matt, to the tune of critical acclaim for their debut album. What follows isn’t as dazzling. Interpersonal conflicts collide with shifting perspectives on the music, eventually culminating in Maggie fleeing Chicago for Nashville. From there, she reflects on everything she’s lost, only to realize she’s also gained valuable things in the process.
Fictional Women in Music
Maggie Corbin slots into a familiar archetype. A few years back, I plucked a novel from a Little Free Library by Laura Hankin called Happy & You Know It (2020). Its musician protagonist, Claire, shares many of Maggie’s core traits. Both women are struggling indie artists with rough-edged personalities who are closing in on the big 3-0 and haven’t quite reconciled this with their current reality. Laura Hankin’s Claire is more brazen and carefree, and Susannah Felts’ Maggie inhabits a more existential headspace, but they share similar temperaments and navigate similar situations.
Both women contemplate how difficult it is to make their art work, and how to move forward when it doesn’t. Claire is ousted from her rock band and replaced with a better-looking alternative; Maggie is slowly iced out by her own creative partner and lover. Claire turns to hosting musical playgroups for influencer moms’ babies to hold on to her dream, while Maggie explores other art forms, such as baking and connecting with the land, to quietly redeem hers.
The Come Apart also fits beautifully into the musical fiction genre alongside novels like Daisy Jones & The Six (2019), which was adapted into a gripping miniseries in 2023. Taylor Jenkins Reid’s story contains much more chaos and drama than Susannah Felts’ The Come Apart, but its intimate glimpse into the lives of young artists shares some emotional territory with Felts’ novel. Again, we see two sharp, talented, smart-mouthed women working through their issues—boy troubles among them—to find their footing in the precarious world of music.
Where Maggie diverges from Claire and Daisy is in her trajectory. The other women’s narratives are often tangled in self-destructive behaviors and, at times, abject misery from fame (or lack thereof) and toxic social dynamics. Maggie is forced to abandon her original dream of spurring her band toward stardom and construct a new life woven with different forms of art. Instead of spiraling, she alights on unexpected perches of satisfaction.
“What if she didn’t write for a band anymore…? What if the new songs were just for her? If only to see the pen move and the shapes form and the notes vibrate. To feel the words in her body and the strings against her fingers. What if the songs themselves were the end point?” writes Felts. “There are loaves to bake, songs to write and songs to sing, songs to make your own, to take in and breathe back out… There is work to be done.”
Maggie doesn’t land the glamorous music career she wanted—she doesn’t even rub shoulders with Momstagram (or whatever its 2000s equivalent was)—but this doesn’t negate the value of her experiences. A gentle life lived well is often more meaningful than the quick-burn, starry-eyed dream we build up in our heads. In Maggie’s story, artistic value isn’t tethered to personal ability or worldly metrics of success. It asks us to sit with a deeper question: Is a soul less valuable if its voice never tops the charts?
“I was definitely anxious, bringing the book into the world, to see how real-life career musicians related to my informed guesswork in creating a character who is a musician,” Felts shares. “A lot of it, if it’s on-target, comes simply from the universality of the creative brain, of having a mind that is forever attending to certain aspects of perception.”
She elaborates, “It’s what you notice, and the kinds of things you’re distracted by, in a good way. It’s the way you filter the sensory input of the world around you. That, and having grown up from a very early age being coaxed into becoming a music fan. It does a wonderful thing for your brain.”
Felts proves herself a master of noticing, an art form in itself, throughout The Come Apart. The novel is generously seeded with lines such as this one: “Some songs were a long birth—excruciating but productive. Others were an enchantment, a blow to the chest, in and out of you, done.”
Susannah Felts believes artistic understanding can cross mediums. “I take in sensory input in a way that turns things into metaphor and which is highly attuned to detail, texture, and light. These are the kinds of things I would assume a songwriter would be attentive to.”
Of Mellotrons and Men
“Everything in Maggie’s life is pulling her toward solitude,” Susannah Felts shares, “and thinking about where she wants to make a home. There’s a sense of being stripped down and back to basics, casting off some of the structures that you’ve built around yourself.”
One of Maggie’s internal structures is her conception of the sonic direction Spinning Birds should take, and what that means for certain band members. When the band’s drummer is injured, Maggie’s partner, Matt, gets a drum machine. Maggie objects, and people treat her as unreasonable; even the drummer doesn’t really question his future in the band.
“I’m so over boys who make shitty decisions,” Maggie laments to her baker friend. “Who end up causing problems for the rest of us.” About the drummer, she adds, “But that’s harsh—I mean, he obviously is not well. Who am I to attack him when he’s down, you know?” Maggie’s friend counters, “Yes, but it’s a hard time for you, too.”
Maggie’s stance on drum machines isn’t entirely about drum machines. It’s about potentially losing a bandmate she cares for and the history and familiarity he brings to the group—things that anchor her to it, too. It’s also about losing creative control over a project she’s poured herself into, as she watches her input slowly recede into the background.
The drum machine isn’t the only culprit. Matt buys a Mellotron, too, and the instrument gets a similarly frosty reception from Maggie, especially as it absorbs Matt’s attention. While talking to the band’s drummer, Dogtreat, Maggie complains, “At our place, you’d have to listen to Matt fuck around with the Mellotron all the livelong day.” “Get you some Mellotron action. If you want it,” Dogtreat suggests. “Did I say I wanted it? I just want us to finish the songs.” “Mellotron on some tracks could be cool.” Begrudgingly, Maggie says, “I guess.”
Maggie’s vision for Spinning Birds is acoustically driven. Bringing in new electronic instruments against her wishes seems to violate her position within the band. I asked Susannah Felts about this during our conversation.
“There are two different tracks Matt and Maggie are going down. Neither one is wrong, but with the Mellotron, what Maggie maybe can’t see yet, as she’s having her aversions to it and the drum machine, is that she’s not listening to her inner self. It’s telling her, ‘Maybe you should be doing something else for a while.’ These instruments become obstacles and stand in for what Maggie can’t see: a greater sense of rupture.”
“Maggie thinks, My partner in art who I love… we are not connecting in the way that we did. It’s very scary for her. There is a metaphorical level, too, of the natural versus the synthetic, the hand-held record versus the digital file, and what you’re internally grappling with and how it takes an external form.”
Art in a Streaming and AI-Saturated World
Another shifting challenge faces the novel’s protagonist and real-life artists: their relationship with the music industry. The rise of streaming in the early aughts simmers in the background of The Come Apart, occasionally gnawing at the corners of the characters’ minds when they question what a successful life as an artist looks like. Today, a new pressure weighs on creatives: artificial intelligence.
“It’s almost quaint now to think about streaming and its arrival in the early-to-late-aughts. It’s like we’ve come so far, but we really haven’t come far at all because we’re seeing the same problems, except they’re magnified and sort of accepted as the norm,” says Felts.
She chuckles in mild disbelief. “There’s this thought that if you don’t play by the rules of this new technology, you’re going to get left behind. What’s interesting is that, with AI, as opposed to streaming, there seems to be more overt resistance. There is a sense that it’s an existential threat [to creatives]. With streaming, it felt like it was making it impossible for artists to make money. With AI, it’s bigger than that.”
“It’s almost threatening the art form itself and the people who make it,” I say. Felts agrees. “It’s like you’re uprooting and questioning the very value of human-created art. It feels even more grave now than during streaming, but at the same time, I’m delighted that musicians are still out here forming bands and promoting their work.”
“My hope is that people reading The Come Apart would be spurred to look back at the early streaming era and reflect on how things have changed and how they haven’t.”
For now, Felts remains hopeful, especially for live performances. “If the human is in the room with me creating sounds and melodies and harmonies, that is so life-giving. Anything where you’re in the audience watching people express themselves in front of you is life-giving.”
Musicians Rooted in Place
Susannah Felts absorbs her surroundings in a way that manifests like paint on the page. Each attentive description of her settings is a vivid swipe of color, delicately blended in but never diluted with borrowed or overly familiar language.
Chicago, one of two main settings in The Come Apart, is not merely a collection of tall buildings or a generically rendered cultural hotspot; it’s an entity bristling with complicated people, energy, and a kind of collective consciousness. Nashville is similar but with a clearer musical bent.
“Coming home or coming back to the place that you grew up after you’ve been away for a good span of time is never not complicated,” says Felts, speaking to Maggie Corbin’s painful decision to leave the Windy City for the Music City. “I’m going to hazard a guess that if a person decides, of their own volition, to go back home, they are seeking something that could ultimately be restorative. They may have to dig rather deep or wade around in the muck for a while to get to that thing. Maybe it’s unfinished business, but something is calling them back to that ground.”
Maggie begins to regain artistic perspective when she returns to her roots while in Nashville. There, she embraces baking, an activity she enjoyed with a friend in Chicago. “What is bread baking, anyway, but another way of making something out of nothing… You watched a man work an enormous pile of dough, folding and shaping, tucking it here, kneading it there. So lovely to watch his hands work that dough, the confidence and ease with which he patted and prodded it into what it needed to be. It looked like a pillow. You yearn to touch dough like that, to rest a cheek against its dusty cool.”
The urge to create hasn’t abandoned Maggie. It’s simply shapeshifted into something more tactile, less enmeshed with performance and external validation. Baking is rewarding while it’s happening, not just when it yields a finished product.
Maggie also develops an appreciation for the farm where her old friend and her deceased father have worked. Knowing her father tended that land (including chickens he named after women musicians) helps Maggie clarify who he really was and how nature has its own restorative power, like music.
“Her father had come here to shed a skin, to complete a rebirth through good old honest labor, the thing everyone believes has the power to redeem. Had he truly become a different man?” Maggie tells her friend she “could use some eggs for baking” and calls them “my inheritance” when she’s given some. By the novel’s end, immersion in a place and the outdoors becomes a new lens of creative possibility for Maggie.
Music doesn’t leave the picture, either. Maggie plays with her roommate. She conceives new songs. She worries less about satisfying an arbitrary end goal and more about the acts of playing and of birthing songs. Much of this healing and creative expansion follows Maggie’s move back to Nashville.
“Coming home or coming back to the place that you grew up after you’ve been away for a good span of time is never not complicated,” says Susannah Felts. “I’m going to hazard a guess that if a person decides, of their own volition, to go back home, they are seeking something that could ultimately be restorative. They may have to dig rather deep or wade around in the muck for a while to get to that thing. Maybe it’s unfinished business, but something is calling them back to that ground.”
A series of hurtful situations in The Come Apart threatens to unpiece Maggie’s dreams seam by seam. She flees to her hometown, its neighborhoods, and the region’s literal earth to begin healing from everything that forced her to leave in the first place. Home is where the heartache is, but it’s different from Chicago—older and deeper. Chicago is Maggie’s crucible of broken dreams; Nashville is where those dreams flicker to life.
Perhaps Maggie’s goals for her band, which increasingly feel as though they don’t belong to her, may have spurred a desire to ground herself in her roots (“anchors”) after years away from them. “Right,” says Felts. “Going home might not be the answer for everyone, but in Maggie’s case, that is very true for her. By the end of The Come Apart, she’s only just starting to realize it.”
“I enjoy thinking about the next part that’s unwritten or unsaid and what it means to be back in this place. Maggie has changed, and her relationship to [Chicago] has changed, too.”
Between Indie Rock and a Hard Place
The entertainment industry is famously hard to “win” at, no matter the medium. Not “making it” isn’t a mark of failure. It’s the standard. The arts are a place where even the smallest achievements—a share from a beloved band, a glowing review from that indie publication—are occasions worth celebrating. They’re moments when you puncture the void and prove, however modestly, that your gifts carry and your voice can cut above the noise of the world.
It’s noble to want to use one’s talents to create a better society. Where would we be if people didn’t strive for this? The danger lies in intertwining our worth with success to the point that we lose joy altogether. Purpose-led work should be life-giving.
Maggie shows that that kind of joy-filled creativity can be found in many places. The same is true for Susannah Felts. “It’s what you notice, and the kinds of things you’re distracted by, in a good way. It’s the way you filter the sensory input of the world around you and… having a mind that is forever attending to certain aspects of perception.”
She adds, “In the writing classes I teach, I encourage people to allow associative energy to take over. Get out of the part of your brain that wants to organize, structure, and follow a pattern. Let the associations do their thing.”
Associations can’t flow as easily if we’re fixed on one set outcome. Chasing a narrow vision of creative success can paradoxically block creativity altogether. If we ever find ourselves in Maggie’s position, it may behoove us to let our expectations come apart so we can put our creativity back together again.
Technology shouldn’t deter creatives from creating. Neither should the troubles that plague Maggie Corbin throughout The Come Apart. “Keep making your work,” Felts says when asked what she’d tell people in Maggie’s position—people who may be working that unglamorous job “foaming milks” or “pushing a little cursor” around a dusty monitor, licking relationship wounds, or navigating a world that can seem hostile toward their art.
“Keep giving yourself permission to be creative, and to find that awesome feeling you get from a flow state or tuning out the rest of the world for a few hours. Allow yourself – in the silliest or most serious ways – to explore some kind of creative production that makes you feel good. Don’t ask too many questions about it. Let things come out first, and then reflect on what you’ve made and ask yourself, ‘What does this mean for me?'”
Susannah Felts doesn’t want the vibrant parts of ourselves to get “sloughed off”. Whether we’re at the top of our game or, like Maggie, stuck between indie rock and a hard place, Felts wants to see “everybody who has the urge to make things embrace that part of themselves.”
“My hope with [The Come Apart] is that anyone with this sensibility will see themselves in Maggie’s story to some degree. I feel that it’s written largely for an audience of creatives and artists.”