'Long Island Girls' is all about indie rock, friendship, more

In one of the opening scenes of Gabrielle Korn's new novel, "Long Island Girls," the 17-year-old protagonist, Susan Goldstein, is barreling down the Long Island Expressway with a group of friends, off to see her favorite band.

This magical night in 2005 will establish all the important themes of the book: the power of friendship, the indie rock scene of the era, troubled relationships between men and women, queer identity, and the lasting influence of Long Island on those who grow up here. The novel dips into Susan's life five more times over the next 20 years, tracking her relationships and her career in what Publishers Weekly described as a tender, mordant appeal to millennial nostalgia, and to which Kirkus Reviews awarded its prestigious star.

Korn lives in Los Angeles now, but we caught up with her on Zoom shortly after her book hit the stands.

Let's start with your Long Island bona fides.

My family moved from Providence, Rhode Island, to Dix Hills when I was 11. I went to middle school and high school in the Half Hollow Hills district. Because I was the new kid, certain details stood out to me that I might not have noticed had I grown up there, like the fashion choices. My first day of sixth grade, I wore a tie-dye T-shirt and cargo pants, thinking I looked great. Then I walk into school, and all the girls are wearing matching Juicy Couture sweatsuits with Tiffany jewelry, pin-straight hair and makeup.

That sounds just like your character Eliza, Susan's crush from that pivotal first night.

Yup, that's her. A reader recently said to me that everyone still dresses like that on Long Island, which I just loved knowing.

At one point, a character comments that Brooklyn girls dress to look cool, L.A. girls dress to look sexy, and Long Island girls are "just out here doing the best we can." Do you relate to that?

Definitely. When you grow up in the suburbs of a city, I think it kind of gives you this perpetual outsider feeling, and even if you make it big and move to the city, you never really become a city person, and you’re forever running into all the people you grew up with.

You never say exactly what town Susan and her BFF Katie are from.

In my mind, it's Dix Hills, but to anyone from the middle of Long Island, the landmarks will be familiar: from hearing the train conductor on the Ronkonkoma line listing the stops on the way to Deer Park, the Walt Whitman Mall and what used to be Tower Records, this particular diner that used to be on the service road to the expressway, I think it was called The Ground Round. If you were around in the early 2000s you might remember the all-ages indie rock shows at the Masonic Temple. There's a scene that takes place at the Huntington Harbor ...

Where Susan's date takes her parking? Where "the air smelled like Kyle’s Axe body spray and the fish that died every fall in the heat and then bobbed morbidly to the water’s surface, lifeless mouths gaping?"

That's the one. I rowed crew in that harbor, and I will never forget that smell.

As a critic I thought it a remarkable use of a setting detail to enhance the emotional effect of a scene. How much does your life overlap with Susan's? Are you involved with music?

I gave Susan my taste in music, but I've never been in the thick of the industry the way she is. My wife played in a band when we were living in New York, and I covered music when I was an editor at Nylon. In the early 2000s, everybody who was involved in the music scene at all felt like it was something really edgy and countercultural and niche. Then we grew up and realized that everybody else was having the same experience, downloading the same music and obsessing over the same bands. These days this genre is known as sad dad rock, but we still love it anyway.

I was fascinated by Eliza's comment that "realizing you're queer is like being granted access to multiple parallel universes."

Eliza is a character who has been sexually abused by the guy she likes, then she unexpectedly feels desire for a girl. Suddenly she understands that her life does not have to be tethered to men. She doesn't have to be stuck in the heterosexual, patriarchal thing that she was brought up to think was her destiny. She sees all these different ways her life could go, and she's filled with hope.