Four Surprising Influences on We Love You, Charlie Freeman

This is one of Cash’s bleakest love songs and the lyrics are absolute poetry: “I’m no child of destiny, no fortune’s son/I’ve just chased you so long now, I’m too weak to run/So here I return to a back street of thrills/Back to any warm shoulder till she’s got her fill/ And then I treat shame like an old friend from home/That I can lean on till the misery is gone/A new day is here yet nothing is new/You’re still gone and I tremble for you.” We Love You, Charlie Freeman is as much a frustrated love story between Charlotte and her friend Adia, as it is a novel about a family. This song is the epitome of the word “bereft” and I imagine if Charlotte knew it existed, she would have worn out her Walkman rewinding it to listen to it over and over again.

This is a place that no longer really exists—it was paved over for the gentrifying Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston. If it still exists, it is probably a shadow of its former stinking, messy, glorious self. In high school, I had a friend who lived in the North End and I can remember dashing through the steaming, teeming, smelly market on the way to her house and then back again, in the mornings after sleepovers. The whole place smelled like fish and was full of trampled vegetables but you could also find things there like a whole, pale white octopus just quivering on a bank of ice, waiting to be purchased. Whenever I think of Boston as it really is, as it is when you grow up there, not when you live there as a student or a transplant or come as a tourist, I think of that space. In writing this book, it was important to write about a part of New England that is usually ignored or just assumed to not exist. Haymarket is one of those places for me.