An account of Water Lil’s early shows reads like a found poem: “We played the Hidy-Hody Ranch Bar, and the Circle-M Saloon, the Round-Up Rodeo and the Boiler Room, the Gunshot Lounge and Gunshot Bar and Gunshot Club.” When she checks in with her manager Coy Roy via pay phone, he reminds her to sing about topics like “lost love,” which put her in a sympathetic light. “That meant: no songs about the road, about ambition, about men I tumbled into hotel beds with when I was drunk enough.”
Even as her tour stops leap off the page, Water Lil herself remains a cipher. Perhaps this is inevitable — she has spent her life dressing up in costumes and writing songs about a false persona, one created for commercial appeal and stripped of agency and messy desires. But something breaks loose when she visits Tule Lake, Calif., where the parents of Lillian’s Japanese American fiddle player, Kaori, were interned during World War II. When Kaori asks why Lillian didn’t do anything to protest the internment camps, she responds, “I didn’t know what to do.” And thinks: “I didn’t have a good answer for her. My generation didn’t protest like hers did, but I wasn’t sure if it was because we weren’t aware that we could, or because we were scared to risk what we had, or we — I — just didn’t care enough to get involved.”
In the final pages of the novel, Lillian dares to acknowledge that her beloved West is an imperfect place: “It has been flawed since Juan Pérez and Charles William Barkley thought it needed to be discovered. Since Vancouver and Gray sailed in, and Lewis and Clark came overland and started naming things in their own language, after their own people.” And so on, all the way to Kaori’s parents’ internment, to the stories of “all-Black regiments and redlined neighborhoods.”
With only two shows left, Water Lil begins to find her purpose: “I could brush the snow from the crevasses, and show how we, imperfect, broken, lost, gone, silenced, were always part of the story.” Water Lil may be saying farewell, but after she performs the song she has written about her own life, she has an epiphany: “And then I knew where I would go, what I would do. For in the end, I had sung my song.”
