Page 50 of When I Picture You

“You’re saying you can write a whole song on an old envelope.”

“Sometimes you have to.” She rummaged through the file and pulled out a subscription card from a magazine. It was covered in cramped writing, some of it crossed out, other parts circled. “That’s ‘On a Dime.’”

Renee was gawking at Lo, but she couldn’t help it. “On a Dime” was from the last album. It hadn’t been a single but charted anyway after a sped-up bit of the chorus, where Lola almost growled—you wanna see me turn on a dime?—went viral. It became her first dance number one.

And Lola had written it on a literal piece of trash.

She held the card up for the camera and explained, “I was on a plane somewhere and we were held on the tarmac, and it came to me.”

“Thewhole song?”

Lola smiled sheepishly. “In that case, yes. I recorded the demo on my phone before we even landed. But that’s not how it usually works.”

“Tell me how it usually works.”

Renee sat across from Lola on the floor, the camera in her lap, as Lola flipped through notebooks. Some were filled when her handwriting was still big, childlike loops, others with a bubbly high schooler’s hand. She’d pause, and say something like, “This page is literally tear-stained” or “Don’t tell anyone, but this song is actually aboutThe Bachelor.” Sometimes she simply pressed her lips together, a furrow in her forehead, and didn’t say anything at all.

It was like having the corners of Lola’s mind turned out before her, but Renee still felt ravenously curious. She knew Lola well, but at the same time, she’d never know enough. Everywhere there was intimacy and absence.

That same intimacy and absence marked all of Lola’s songs: precise details, but when you pulled back, the picture felt universal.

“I’ve never written more in my life than in high school. Most of these songs I never played for anybody.”

“How does it feel looking at them now?” Renee asked.

Lola watched the notebook she’d been examining fall closed. “It’s a little hard. Songwriting was an escape. When things were bad at home and things were bad at school, I kept my brain busy with stories. I was writing songs about a different life than what I had.”

Renee’s eyes flicked to the camera, wondering, for a moment, if Lola had meant to say that on film. She rarely spoke publicly about her family. When Lola had first become famous, her mother practically had the tabloids on speed dial, telling stories about all the sacrifices she’d made for her baby. That was bullshit: even as a kid, Renee understood that Lola only held her mother’s attention when she wasin the spotlight—in a pageant, performing for a crowd, on TV. When Lola wasn’t, her mother’s interest in, well, mothering was unpredictable, and her father was gone a lot on his trucking routes. That was why Deborah had often sent Renee next door to ask if the Grigorian girls wanted to come over for dinner, or to do their homework or watch a movie. Lola—and Claudia too—had succeeded in spite of her mother, not because of her.

“Anyway, a lot of these songs are fantasies,” Lola said.

“Fantasies?”

Lola arched an eyebrow. “You knew me in high school, Renee. Did you think everything onSeventeen Candlesreally happened?”

“You could have been getting up to stuff on the weekends.”

“I was working on the weekends. Anyway, it wasn’t only the songs that were fantasies.Musicwas a fantasy. I thought I’d be swept away into this brilliant career, and everything would change.” She shook her head with a self-effacing laugh. “What kind of kid daydreams about a job? No wonder I didn’t have friends. Of course, now that I have everything I wished for, I realize I didn’t know how good I had it before.”

“What do you mean?”

Lola leaned back against the couch, clutching the journal in her lap like a security blanket. “There was no one watching. No deadlines, no pressure, no producers or managers or label, no fans. I didn’t have to worry about what they’d read into the lyrics, who they’d think I was singing about, if it’d go viral. The only person I truly risked letting down was myself. At the time, Ihatedthat no one else cared. Now sometimes I wish I was back there, when nothing I did mattered to anyone.” She frowned, then added, “It’s arrogant, isn’t it? I spend so much time thinking about myself, my feelings, my stories, so I can turn them into songs that strangers can listen to. Now I’m doing this documentary. What if I’m not that interesting?”

“I think you’re interesting,” Renee pointed out. “This is interesting.”

Lola balled her hands into the sleeves of the cardigan. She didn’t look at Renee when she spoke. “You’re not worried that America’s Pop Princess has run out of things to say?”

“There are a lot of things you don’t say.”

Lola raised her eyes. “That’s not the same thing,” she said quietly.

Renee wasn’t sure how to respond. As a director, she should keep Lola talking. But as someone who cared about her, she really just wanted to give Lola a hug.

She settled for changing the subject. “Tell me about the first song you learned on the guitar.”

“The first?” Lola thought for a moment, then her face transformed with a mischievous grin. “You’re going to love this. It was ‘What’s Up?’ by 4 Non Blondes.”

“It wasnot,” Renee gasped.