Virginia Woolf is so truthful about the experience of being a woman.” I feel robbed because I read from the male perspective for so long. I loved One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but all the men in the asylum had depth and range, and the women didn't. With writers like Salinger, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, the male characters were complex and complicated. “I realize now how poorly a lot of my favorite authors wrote women. Woolf made her realize the lack of depth of most female characters in the American canon.

Quinlan was raised on a steady diet of male writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck. One of Quinlan’s biggest recent inspirations is Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. “There’s something strange thinking of those words because to me that still means doing something where you come home at the end of the day and are physically beat.” “I've given myself to writing music, but I still have a hard time with that word work or labor,” she told me. Her father worked in a tool and die factory and her mother, a visual artist, was also a house painter. Quinlan has a hard time calling what she does “work,” though. And when it comes time to write, it has to be in deep black ink on off-white and slightly rough paper.

Her day often begins with cereal-it has to be Oatmeal Squares-and reading with soft piano music in the background. She used to find the coffee shop productive, but now it’s a cup of tea at her admittedly cluttered table. Frances Quinlan has her rituals, but they change once they’re no longer useful. Rituals give us confidence because we know that they’ve given us success before. There’s a certain comfort that ritual provides to the artist: the predictability offers confidence, the idea that I’ll be able to write this song so long as this part of the process stays the same.

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