Serenity’s Anthem: Kacey Musgraves’ “Dry Spell”
Writers believe we make deliberate choices about our characters, but then a song comes on the radio and we suddenly recognize something we’d written without fully understanding it.
The other day I heard Kacey Musgraves’ “Dry Spell” and nearly drove off the road. Serenity, the heroine of Love and Other Incurable Ailments, could have penned every line in her journal.
One of my favorite things about writing her story was giving her an interior life that was equal parts anxious, hopeful, and unintentionally funny. She’s the kind of woman who can overanalyze a text message for three days or convince herself she’s perfectly content being alone, until she can no longer deny it.
In “Dry Spell,” the singer catalogs evidence:
- no boots under my bed
- no truck in my driveway
- no notches on my belt
- nobody but the chickens are getting laid
That’s very much Serenity’s way of coping. She logs her daily chances of survival. She intellectualizes, overthinks, makes lists, finds patterns, and tries to manage life through observation, all while quietly denying that she really wants people to accept her for who she is.
And, yes, she enjoys sex. That much is clear. It’s one of the few times she can shut her squirrel brain down and exist purely in the moment.
The ways we cope… because we’re human
Loneliness doesn’t always reveal itself, even to ourselves. It hides behind jokes, busywork, and elaborate theories about other people’s lives. Or it comes disguised as independence. Or, as in Musgrave’s song, sometimes you just end up sitting on the washing machine, making questionable life choices.
Anxiety is a strange thing. It can convince us that what we’re really doing is being responsible, observant, prepared. We make spreadsheets, journals, survival percentages, pros-and-cons lists. Underneath all that activity is often something much simpler: we want to belong. We want to be chosen.
Serenity would absolutely understand that. One of the things I wanted to explore in her story is that longing or desire isn’t a character flaw. Wanting connection doesn’t make someone weak, desperate, or unfinished.
Though I suspect she’d be taken aback if she knew I compared her to a country song about a woman’s sexual appetite.
The Dry Spell
Kacey Musgraves said this song came out of the longest single stretch of her adult life, a break-up followed by learning to like her own company. When she sings, “I think it’s time for / Me to take the bull by the horns,” the move is half-flirtation, half-permission to act on her own want without pretending she’s pining.
That’s what Serenity finally does. The heart wants what it wants. Why apologize?
If Serenity sounds like someone you’d like to spend time with, I’d like to introduce you to her.
Love and Other Incurable Ailments follows a woman who tracks her daily chances of survival, discovers thirty-one-sided love letters in a dumpster, and drives 900 miles to a tiny island off the coast of North Carolina in search of the man who wrote them. What she finds instead is a community that challenges everything she thought she knew about love, belonging, and herself.
The novel publishes on October 27, but it’s available for preorder now. Every preorder helps an independent publisher. And the author! You can preorder it through Regal House Publishing or wherever you buy books.
