My inspiration for The Lyric Hotel and Excerpt

By Susan Sisko Carter

I lived in a boutique hotel that catered to musicians longer than Jeanette lived at the Lyric Hotel. The very nature of a hotel is character-driven. Strangers sleeping under the same roof of a small hotel can create a feeling of consanguinity, an overture to intimacy that may or may not include sex. I discovered through my conversations with men at the hotel that men were often more emotionally layered than women might imagine. And I realized, through my interactions with the guests, that I was learning about myself while learning about them.

I thought a small upscale hotel would make a great setting for a novel. And the perfect setting for Jeanette to learn about who she was after the loss of her husband. It took me many drafts before I realized the fullness of Jeanette’s character. The more I got to know her, the more I liked her, and the more I wanted things to work out for her.

THE LYRIC HOTEL

“Carter’s debut is a sparkling romance with vivid characters and sharp, crystalline prose … A page-turning tale of the healing power of love.” — Kirkus Reviews

“The Lyric Hotel is one of the best reads I’ve had in years. Funny, heartbreaking, raw, eloquent, and surprisingly heroic. Susan Sisko Carter has created a jewel box of great characters and sparkling dialogue in telling the story of a woman’s unconventional journey in search of real but ever-elusive love.” – Stephen Tobolowsky, actor, author of The Dangerous Animals Club

“Susan Sisko Carter writes like she sings: she’s sultry, yet playful, mixing the improvisation of jazz with the urgency of rock n’ roll.” – Michele Kort, author of Soul Picnic: The Music and Passion of Laura Nyro

Six months after the loss of her husband, Jeanette moves to the last place she felt truly
alive: the Lyric Hotel—where she spent a night with a musician. A night that changed the course of her life.

A successful director of commercials, Jeanette doesn’t tell her rep. She doesn’t tell her oldest friend. Not even her mother. She vanishes from the world she knew and takes up residence in a hotel that caters to musicians on the road. At the hotel, Jeanette can be the architect of her evolving self: a woman unfettered by preexisting conditions of who she was—or wasn’t.

Jeanette’s quest to lose herself is funny and heartbreaking as she encounters an assortment of complicated men. But there is one constant: longing; like the longing of a Brandi Carlyle song or the moan of an electric guitar through the wall of her junior suite.

Inspired by Susan Sisko Carter’s real-life adventures, The Lyric Hotel is an escape from a harsh world to a world where a Privacy-Please sign keeps out the past so the present might flourish.

EXCERPT

THE LYRIC HOTEL

A NOVEL by SUSAN SISKO CARTER

                                                                   1

                                                           TIMELESS 

She was no Edith Piaf. At the end of Pont Notre-Dame, the second oldest bridge in Paris, an accordionist, possibly the second oldest busker in Paris, played and sang a sloppy “La Vie en Rose.”  But who can resist “La Vie en Rose” in Paris?   Not the tourists who videoed the busker, without paying for the privilege, on iPhones sticky from Berthillon ice-cream cones.  The first time Jeanette saw the accordionist was twenty-six years ago; another bridge.  Same tune.  She’d taken a black-and-white photo of the busker with her trusty old Canon AE-l camera: an evocation of Paris.  For years, Jeanette had displayed the photo on a shelf that was packed with LPs, beside the Miles Davis soundtrack to Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, its black-and-white cover featuring a sultry, French-noir-cool Jeanne Moreau.  Today, Jeanette barely paid attention to the busker.  But she placed a euro and her last Metro ticket inside the open accordion case.

     Only six more hours and Jeanette would be on a plane, wishing she were arriving in Paris instead of leaving.  It was a quick trip, three days, long enough to see her mother. And to meet with an expat ad exec about directing a commercial for a new feminine hygiene spray.  Could she in sixty seconds persuade women that their vaginas would be more appealing if they smelled like room deodorizer?  The ad exec would be meeting with two other candidates, both men, before he made his decision.  Jeanette was the only woman being considered for the job. 

     She’d purchased a postcard on the rue de Rivoli: a nineteenth-century painting of a nude woman, leaning over an unmade bed, her left breast sloping toward crumpled sheets; the beige-red of her nipple the same color as her lips.  Her brown hair was fastened in a loose bun and thick strands that looked damp curved her cheekbone. 

     Jeanette leaned against the railing of the bridge as she studied the postcard. Was the nineteenth-century woman warm from the heat of her small Paris apartment?  Or because she’d just had sex?  Or maybe she was simply longing for it; longing for someone.  Perhaps, some nineteenth-century, brooding, bohemian dreamboat, she’d met while sipping absinthe at Café de Flore.  One thing Jeanette was certain of: No way that woman’s vagina smelled like room deodorizer. 

     She decided she would frame the postcard.  Hang it on the wall back home in San Francisco as a reminder––longing is timeless.

                                          

                                                          Excerpted Chapter 3   

                                      

                                              THE COLOR OF A GOOD NIGHT

He was sitting on a bench outside a hotel in West Hollywood, his cello in its case on the sidewalk beside him, a Winston cigarette between his gifted fingers; blowing smoke rings toward a sad, skinny palm tree; thinking how, later, when he called his wife, she would ask if he’d been good about not smoking, and he would say, yes, he’d been very good.  Perfect, in fact. 

      And that’s when he saw her.  

      She was wearing a black tank top, black low-cut jeans, and Saucony running shoes, bounding up the steps of the hotel with a black mutt on a green leash, a Lab-golden retriever mix, loaded with canine charisma.  Evan was immediately struck by their similarities––the dog and the woman––energetic with dark, shiny hair and smart, brown eyes, alert for play.  

     Evan dropped his cigarette into an empty Perrier bottle.  The ember sizzled as it hit bottom, and he said: “Great dog.”

     “If you find me I’m lost,” she said, walking toward him. “It was scribbled on his collar when I rescued this beauty-boy from the freeway.”

The dog offered his paw.  Evan felt the warmth of the rough paw pad against his palm.  

“Al doesn’t trust most men.”

“Did you tell her she could call you, Al?” he said to the dog. 

“Al knows you’re a dog person.”

“My golden.  Golden retriever,” he said. “Fifteen years he was my best friend. Yesterday, he…”  Evan relinquished the dog’s paw.  “He died.”   

Jeanette sat on the bench beside him. 

“When my dog died I…”  

She put her arms around him.  

“I wasn’t with him.”  

Evan––he tried not to––cried into her shoulder, a shoulder that smelled of lavender and suntan lotion, and sweat at its absolute best; a shoulder soft against his mouth.  

“Just let it out,” she whispered. 

“You call taxi?” A harsh, male voice with a Russian accent collided into her tenderness; a miserable slob, driving a Beverly Hills Cab, pulled up in front of them.    

     “Me,” he said to the Russian, feeling like he’d just emerged from anesthesia. “I called.” Evan ran his fingers through his hair, which was brown and full of untamed waves, suggesting an equally restless mind.

“You okay?” she said.

 “This is”— Evan rose from the bench, clearing his throat of tears—“it’s not something I do every day.”

     “You don’t lose a best friend every day,” she said, looking up at him with those smart eyes; and he could see they were wet with empathy.  He figured she was thirty-nine, forty, maybe.  Maybe older; probably.  Evan was forty-three. 

     “You’re sweet,” he said.  “Both of you.”  He kissed the dog’s head, picked up his cello, then got into the cab.

“If you need to talk,” she said.  “I’m in room 144.”

As the Russian pulled away from the curb, Evan leaned out the window and heard himself say, “I’m in 219.”      

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Susan Sisko Carter has written for some of the major producers in television, and her teleplays have been included on the Writers Guild of America’s list of 101 best-written TV series. She has published essays in Shondaland, LA Weekly, and HuffPost. She is an internationally acclaimed singer/songwriter. Susan’s recordings include albums for Verve and Epic. She has recently completed a new composition, “Sipping Wine in Paris,” as a companion piece to The Lyric Hotel, her debut novel. Susan lives in Los Angeles – but spends as much time as possible in Paris.

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Category: On Writing