Author Post: Sean Beaudoin Author of Fade to Blue

I had a friend in high school. She was short and wore nerdy glasses and black skirts and really liked bands like The Cure and Bauhaus and Echo and the Bunnymen. I liked heavier guitar-oriented stuff, but when she’d come over and say hi to my mom, accept a cookie, and then tromp up to my room, I usually let her DJ. We never did anything particularly interesting. I had a small, dark room with ugly brown carpet and dark blue walls covered with posters of athletes I no longer cared about. We’d lay on the floor and listen to music. We’d prop our feet on pillows and make fun of things in low voices and cut up her fashion magazines. She used pinking shears and I used my dad’s army knife. She’d purposely spill the glue on me. I’d make her smell my sock. She’d talk about wanting to change her hair color and I’d talk about wanting to change it back. She always had some guy she liked who never approached her and I always had some girl I liked I was afraid to approach. It was utterly unromantic. There was never any thought that we’d be a couple and never any weird tension about it. We were cool and easy and it didn’t need a lot of analysis. She had a tiny little hatchback we drove around town in. My legs barely fit under the dash. It smelled like the baby of the aunt she’d bought it from, and was always running out of gas.

It went on like that for a year.

And then we just stopped hanging out.

I’m still not sure why.

When someone asks me what Fade To Blue is about, I usually give them a pretty stock answer: losing your mind, being paranoid, trust, having a little brother, ice cream, basketball, zombie fantasies, nurses, that guy, that girl, that parent. I tell them that because the truth is too hard to explain. The truth is that Fade To Blue is really about what it felt like for that year to be lying on my bedroom floor. With that friend. To not be worried about what you said or did or if you acted stupid or if your joke was funny enough. Being at ease and understood. Knowing someone’s reference before it even comes out of their mouth. Fade To Blue is about clangy music and bad sweaters and an entire pubescence of lousy stuff to choose from in the fridge.

And then losing all that. For no good reason. I wanted to capture that feeling, and somehow it just ended up becoming a book.

www.seanbeaudoin.com