Author newsletter: She refused to give up on “Rebel Yell”

May 26, 2018 by Jeffrey Bruner

Aimee Malloy's thriller The Perfect Mother takes the premise of a group of young mothers finally getting a night out and asks the morbid question: What if one of them came home to find her baby missing?

Malloy got inspiration from, of all things, Billy Idol's song "Rebel Yell." She told The New York Times: “The lyrics — in the midnight hour, she wants more, more, more / Oh yeah little baby, she wants more more more — I immediately saw as representative of the demands an infant makes on a mother. I listened to the song incessantly while writing the early scenes, leading up to the night the women go out and drink too much and dance to the song, declaring it the ‘anthem of motherhood.’”

Her editor said it would be too expensive to license the lyrics, but Malloy refused to give up. She tracked down the singer's manager.

Billy said yes.

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