Welcome to "The Rabbit Hole"

I could have named it "The Sh*tshow," and that would have worked too...

…but "The Rabbit Hole" felt more accurate—and a little more inviting.

If you've read The Strangest of Places, you might recognize the reference (and if you plan to read its upcoming continuation, A Nightfall of Diamonds, you’ll see it again). It's the moment Autumn MacLeod realizes she's only scratched the surface of something much bigger than she expected, and she wants to go deeper. If you're here, reading this, I'm going to assume you feel the same way, and I’m flattered that you’d spend some of your time in my own weird little corner of the internet.

Welcome! Fill your mug, or water bottle, or flask—no judgement—and kick up your feet.

First Things First: Who Am I (and Why Should You Care)?

I'm a Gen X girl from Boston's South Shore who spent her childhood years spinning 45s on her Holly Hobby record player, her teenage years riding the T with a Walkman constantly in use, and her adult years adding old and new favorites to her ever expanding arsenal of playlists. I was that music geek who bought albums based on three-second snippets heard on MTV, drove hours to see shows as often as I could, traded live concert tapes, obsessed over set lists and fell headfirst into a music scene that felt like finding my people for the first time.

I wrote a book about that girl. Her name is Autumn MacLeod, and while she's not me exactly, she's close enough that writing her story felt like finally putting words to something I'd been carrying around for several decades.

What You'll Find Here

The Rabbit Hole is where I'll share a patchwork of different types of writing. You might find some stories that didn’t make it into the book, some color commentary on those that did, and probably a few random musings on whatever else I feel like sharing.

You'll also find a series of posts under the category “Autumn’s Playlist.” I want to call those out especially because, if you haven’t already visited the New Reader’s page, you should know that a common element you’ll find in all my books is that each chapter is named with a song title. If you read the chapter and then listen to the lyrics in its associated song, you should be able to discern a connective tissue between the two. You don’t have to listen to the song, of course; it’s purely an optional side quest, but if you’re at the same level of music geek as I am, you’ll love that interactive element.

Peppered throughout both the random posts and the playlist series you'll find personal essays about music, memory, and what it meant to grow up Gen X in the years before the internet flattened everything into an algorithm. You'll find behind-the-scenes stories about how this book came to be, what's true, what's fiction, and why I'll probably dance around saying definitively which is which.

What does that mean? It means I've taken elements from my own life and used them as inspiration—real events, real feelings, real people (really, fragments of several different people combined to make a new character) woven into a story that's bigger than any one memory. Some of it is straight memoir. Some of it is entirely made up. Most of it lives somewhere in between.

Why "The Rabbit Hole"?

Because discovering good music is like catching an unexpected glimpse of that elusive white rabbit. Something about him intrigues you—the flash of his coat, the urgency in his movement—so you follow. He bobs and weaves through unfamiliar landscapes, and before you know it, you're tumbling down after him into a world you didn't know existed.

You pull at a loose thread—a band, an album, a single song—and suddenly you're three hours deep into a discography you'd never heard before. You're at a show in a city you've never visited. You're standing in a parking lot at midnight making friends with strangers who feel like family.

There's no map for where the rabbit leads. There's no coming back unchanged. And honestly? You wouldn't want to.

That's what happened to Autumn. That's what happened to me. If you've ever gone down that particular rabbit hole—or hopped on the bus when it came by—yourself, you already know: once you follow the music, everything gets curiouser and curiouser.

So pull up a chair. The music's already playing.