Music and Shared Memory

Music and shared memory form a recurring bond between Tully Hart and Kate Mularkey, turning songs into a record of their friendship across decades. A tune can revive the intimacy of their beginnings, make separation newly painful, or provide a shared language when illness and loss narrow the present. The songs do not simply decorate remembered scenes: they mark how the friends carry a common past into different stages of life.

Songs as a shared archive

When the girls meet on Firefly Lane, they begin to see the landscape and their possible futures through each other’s eyes. On the banks of the Pilchuck River they smoke stolen cigarettes and cry to “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero”; by summer’s end their lives have become so closely joined that people know them together as TullyandKate. The friendship lasts for more than thirty years, while the music changes around the promises they made on the lane. Song is thus both a record of particular moments and a measure of continuity: the repertoire shifts, but the shared history remains.

That archive can be painful to enter after the friendship has fractured. More than a year into life without her former best friend, Kate tries to tell herself that she can manage alone. Then the music returns: “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” “Material Girl,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and “Purple Rain” belong to the friends’ shared repertoire, and even a poor Muzak version of “You’ve Got a Friend” makes Kate cry beside the radishes in a shop. The mundane setting sharpens the contrast between her effort to carry on and the past that keeps breaking through. A song can summon the absent friend without warning, before Kate has decided what to say to her.

Music at turning points

At a party, music gives Kate and Tully a way back into one another’s company. When ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” comes through the speakers, Kate says she loves the song; Tully takes her hand and pulls her toward the dancers. Kate lets herself move with the music, and the scene ends with her breathing hard and laughing easily. The song’s function is immediate and physical: rather than explain their closeness, the friends re-enter it together through a familiar tune and a shared gesture.

The same song recurs at another party, where its opening prompts Tully to run out of the house calling for Kate. Its repetition ties separate occasions together and makes music a signal between the friends: Kate’s presence draws Tully away from the conversation inside and back toward their bond. Together, the scenes make “Dancing Queen” less a single memory than a refrain, renewed when the friends find each other in a crowd.

Music also marks separation. As Tully leaves, “American Pie” plays on the radio. Kate wonders whether she will ever hear it without remembering the moment; she follows Tully to the driveway, where they cling to each other until Officer Dan gently pulls Tully away. The song becomes inseparable from the departure, and Kate thinks of it as the day the music died. That phrase gives a public song a private meaning: the sound continues, but its association with the friends’ lost everyday closeness has changed.

Private memory and the passage of time

During the three years in which the friends live apart, their letters become more than a routine; they are a lifeline. Tully writes every Sunday evening at a white desk in her lavender-and-pink childhood room, recording small details such as a haircut or prom dress alongside sleeplessness and the dream that her mother might return and say she was proud of her. The account of their correspondence shows how memory travels even when the friends cannot share a room: ordinary details and painful disclosures reach Kate on paper, and Tully can be more fully herself with the person reading them.

Later, time itself acquires repeated markers. At college, Kate measures passing seasons by the cherry trees in the Quad; in the eighties, by a seasonal flag beneath streetlamps outside the Public Market; in the nineties, by the changing hairstyles Tully wears on television while Kate feeds and bathes Marah. These different measures join private friendship to public time. Tully’s appearance on the morning show makes her a familiar presence in Kate’s household, even as the years pass through family routines and changing fashions.

Near the end of Kate’s life, memory returns in a dream of 1974: she rides her bicycle at midnight beside her best friend on Firefly Lane, a road that once seemed to lead nowhere. The recalled landscape becomes vivid again through the friends’ shared perspective. Kate wakes in tears during a winter storm, recognizing how often she has been returning to the lane in dreams as her memories become harder to hold at a distance. The scene brings the novel’s recurring road and the friendship’s beginnings into the present, where remembrance is no longer merely nostalgic.

Keeping a story for the future

As Kate’s cancer affects her faculties, Johnny warns Tully that Kate may not know who she is. The possibility that illness could disrupt recognition makes the preservation of memory tangible. Tully gives Kate a hand-tooled, leather-bound journal, with “Katie’s story” written on its first page. Its blankness leaves room for a record that can outlast the immediate conversation: the friends’ past is not only something summoned by songs or dreams, but also something deliberately set down for the future.

On Kate’s last night in the hospital, Tully persuades Johnny to take the children home and takes his place in the room’s other bed. She pushes it across the linoleum until it nearly touches Kate’s, brings a tape of her final show, and they watch the broadcast together like schoolgirls at a sleepover. The recording is not a song, but it belongs to the same work of shared memory: a piece of Tully’s public life is replayed in the private company of the friend for whom she has left the stage. Across the novel, music and recorded or written recollection keep the friends’ common past present through separation, changing family life, and approaching death.