If music is a religion, fans are the acolytes. Some of the most fervent followers are teenagers on the cusp of adulthood, waiting for life to hurry up and start already. They worship at the altar of their favourite bands and commit lyrics to memory like lines from a bible. In Marissa Stapley’s new novel, The Lightning Bottles, the Toronto author slam dances into the mosh pit of Seattle’s emerging grunge scene to explore the chasm between creators and consumers. It’s an ode to the joy of ’90s music and the power of love – but it’s also a feminist takedown of the industry’s sexist history of relegating women to the sidelines, playing down their accomplishments and crushing their self-worth.

From the opening notes of The Lightning Bottles, readers are immersed in the rise and fall of the titular alt-rock duo of singer Elijah Hart, who has “the voice of a fallen angel,” and songwriter Jane Pyre, the band’s “creative genius,” as Elijah tells the Columbia Record execs. “Elijah, I wonder if you might want to keep that to yourself,” the president says. “Guys aren’t going to want to be screaming lyrics while headbanging in their pickup trucks to songs that were written by a woman.” Stapley writes, in searing detail, how Jane is belittled for speaking up – for Elijah, for their relationship and for their music – which eventually earns her a reputation that sticks: pushy bitch. 

“It’s just incredible the way these narratives stand and these stories are rewritten,” Stapley says in a recent phone interview from her Toronto home, citing examples like Courtney Love, Sinéad O’Connor, Madonna and John Lennon’s wife Yoko Ono, whose name, to this day, is shorthand for a woman who unduly interferes with a man’s career. “I just read that the lyrics to Imagine were taken from Ono’s poetry. Lennon admitted that way later, and no one ever talks about it.” 

The Lightning Bottles unfurls in a trio of timelines, beginning in Germany in 1999 as a lonely, 17-year-old super fan listens to a radio DJ talk about Elijah, the “rock god” who disappeared in a boat off an Icelandic beach five years before. “Hen” reveres Elijah, but is ambivalent about Jane; she believes the scowling, terse woman in the Doc Marten boots is “a talentless fake,” since she never writes another song after her husband dies. In the prologue, three crazy things happen: Hen reveals she has a comic Elijah drew for Jane that Jane threw away at their last concert in Berlin; she believes Elijah is alive and sending messages to Jane through street art drawn in the style of the comic; and Jane moves into the farmhouse next door in the fictional town of Wolf.

The story toggles between Jane and Hen in 1999 as they take road trips to venues where the Lightning Bottles played in Berlin, Paris and London, flashbacks to the events preceding Elijah’s disappearance in 1994 and Jane and Elijah’s pre-internet meet-cute in 1989. 

It’s the nostalgia-drenched tour of the decade, as Elijah, in Seattle, joins Jane’s BBS (bulletin board system) music chat room in Stouffville, Ont., through a computer connected by a phone line. “It was just words on a screen,” Stapley says. “It was so new, this communicating with a stranger .. . it was fascinating.” The teenagers exchange their top 10 albums lists, featuring Jane’s Addiction, R.E.M. and the Pixies; they send audio cassettes back and forth; and they write letters! 

When Jane turns 18, she runs away from her Evangelical single mom and straight into the arms of Elijah. Her constant presence at his band’s practices leads to its break-up. For the first time, but not the last, Jane is accused of being a limelight-stealing succubus. “Adam’s rib,” the lead singer snarls. “You’d be nothing without him.” This is also when Elijah’s mom inspires the Lightning Bottles name: “The music you and Elijah play together is incredible,” Alice tells Jane. “Your lyrics, his voice? Lightning in a bottle.”

It’s an intricate plot, and Stapley deftly moves from Elijah and Jane’s burgeoning love to their heady days of success to Elijah’s spiral into heroin addiction and alcoholism; even Jane, a teetotaler, turns to booze. But  make no mistake, this is Jane’s story. “He is not the main character,” Stapley says firmly. “And it so rarely happened in the ’90s that a woman [in rock music] did get to be the main character.”

A real delight is finding the full lyrics to three Lightning Bottles songs at the end of the book, including their No. 1 hit, Your Life or Mine, which Elijah writes after his parents die in a car crash. Stapley has the tune in her head, but won’t sing it; she claims no musical talent. She will admit she mined the poetry she wrote in old journals to capture the angsty feel of teenage yearning and they have the feel of an O’Connor song, who happens to be her rock goddess. 

“She was just fierce, such a messily emotional woman who really spoke to my preteen self,” the author says, remembering the 1990 Toronto concert – her first – that her grandfather drove her to when she was 12 (and waited outside). “I don’t think I really registered what happened to her until now. As I was writing, her memoir and her documentary came out, and it was very frustrating to see that someone had been erased. I had sort of accepted it, even as a fan.”

The author has reason to hope Lightning Bottles songs will one day be set to music. “I would love to see it developed the way Lucky is being developed, and maybe the songs get out there, somehow,” Stapley says, referring to her 2021 novel about a broke conwoman with a heart of gold who buys a winning lottery ticket, but can’t cash it in. When Reese Witherspoon picked it for her Hello Sunshine Book Club that December, it launched the book onto the New York Times bestseller list and into Hollywood’s orbit. Now, Hello Sunshine is developing it as a TV series, and an announcement is imminent. If Lightning Bottles strikes a similar chord, she muses, we might just see the small- or big-screen version of Jane Pyre and Elijah Hart. 

The boost in sales afforded the cottage of her dreams on Haliburton Lake near Ontario’s Algonquin Park, which Stapley and her husband of 20 years, IT systems manager Joe Ponikowski, bought last year. It was the family’s first summer there, and Stapley was supposed to be writing her next holiday rom-com, but spent too much time getting to know the neighbors and hanging out with her husband, 16-year-old daughter and 17-year-old son. As we talk, she’s under the gun to deliver her next holiday rom-com, and it has to happen before The Lightning Bottles publishes Sept. 24 and The Holiday Honeymoon Switch comes out Oct. 8. “Maybe I won’t ever release two books at the same time ever again,” she laughs. 

Honeymoon Switch, written under the pen name Julia McKay because, Stapley says, “it’s a fun way to differentiate my authorial brands,” is about two BBFs who meet at a frat party and bond over how much they hate Christmas and love New Year’s Eve. Which is understandable, given their first names are Ivy and Holly. Eight years later, Holly is about to marry her long-time, perfect-on-paper fiancé Matt, but he leaves her the day before the nuptials. Ivy offers up the isolated New York state eco-cabin she rented for a week; Holly insists Ivy take her honeymoon room at a luxe Hawaiian resort. Cue the hot men, steamy sex and happily ever afters as Ivy and Holly meet new matches and fall in love, for real.

Stapley writes romance novels to reset her brain – sort of like a “palate cleanser.” She needed something fun and uplifting after Lightning Bottles, which was intellectually and emotionally taxing, given its intricate structure, mountain of research and deep dive into the dark side of fame. “I love the hope of a romance novel,” she says. “It helps me … to just immerse myself in a sure-fire happy ending without any risk.”

The empowerment narrative is just as strong in Honeymoon Switch as it is in Lightning Bottles, and Stapley gets just as riled talking about romances where female characters sacrifice everything for love as she does when discussing the bad and sometimes criminal behaviour of her former male idols, like Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The inspiration for Kim, Elijah’s lechy, drug-and-alcohol-addled bandmate, Kiedis admitted to sleeping with a 14-year-old girl (statuatory rape) in his 2004 memoir, now being made into a biopic. “It makes me so very angry that men get this redemption arc and women do not,” Stapley says. 

She wanted to get Lightning Bottles to O’Connor, her muse and the real creative genius behind Jane, when the news broke in July 2023 that the 56-year-old singer had died. Although Stapley never met the singer-songwriter, she was devastated. “She constantly stood up for what she believed in and went through such difficult times and mental health breaks. It’s sad and it’s admirable, and I just want so much more for female stars.”