Arrangements in Blue by Amy Key: a very personal review

I finished reading Amy Key’s Arrangements in Blue last Sunday and it’s stayed with me this last week. The book is a reflection of her own life through Joni Mitchell’s 1971 album ‘Blue’, the album I am listening to as I write these notes.

Key first encountered ‘Blue’ as a teenager, but I encountered the song ‘A Case of You’ from the album much later. It was the most haunting of the songs from the soundtrack to the movie ‘Practical Magic’ and that spurred me on to buy ‘Blue’ in July 2007, at the age of 25.

The search for romantic love

Key grew up looking for romantic love and the album was a part of her romanticism growing up, but at the time I discovered ‘Blue’ I had just moved in with my first real boyfriend. In the months where Joni’s wider range of songs were starting to hit me, said boyfriend didn’t even clear a draw for me where we were living together. Key yearned for the romantic love of the men she met and I yearned for thoughtfulness from the man I loved. Comparisons in our lives don’t draw similar melodies, but the use of ‘Blue’ as a grounding mechanism for this book is remarkably shrewd as she ponders different chapters in her life, alongside the lyrics that head up the chapters.

What is remarkable is Key’s willingness to explore her lack of love, her loneliness and all the let-downs of expectations, growth in her independence (what she calls glamour) and the lows she’s experienced over the years. The book is a true reflection of her thoughts and feelings.

A poet’s memoir

In a way, it may be that this book couldn’t have been written by someone who is not a poet, not a philosopher of life as poets are. Her reflections are expressed beautifully and don’t sway into the realms of the ‘he said she said’ narrative. This isn’t a biography of Joni or an autobiography of herself. After all, what biographer can reintroduce the concept of a soul to me? A concept I had brashly pushed away some years ago in the face of my own Paganism. Can I really have a soul? Does my unborn child have a soul already? Will it come to him when he is born? Will it be generated from him, then, or will my own soul be split? There are few professions in the world of writing that can evoke such a set of thoughts, Key is a true poet in that sense, even when she is writing memoir.

But then, I have identified with Key’s search for romantic love. Strange because I was in a relationship for 16 years, years where I was so lonely I cried myself to sleep. She and I both wanted to take romantic holidays for two, have romantic meals by the beach, and not feel like we didn’t deserve it. My relationship was a let-down in romance. Key’s loneliness reflects her lack of romantic love but she is also buoyed by friends, she is able to take holidays with friends and on her own, and took courses in poetry and art. Outside of romantic love, she had and seemingly has, a full and wonderful life. She has a writing career now, of which I can only dream. And so while I identify with her loneliness and need for romantic love, I am also enviousness of her life’s success outside of that.

Joni Mitchell’s impact on the lives of women

‘Blue’s’ lyrics are often what Key is trying to apply to her life and her search for romantic love. ‘Blue’ is the only CD I now own, having sold, donated or dumped hundreds over the last 10 years. I knew the placement of each lyric in each song immediately. When Key’s considering the impact on her life she’s picking different ones from what I would choose. Amy’s not ‘constant in the darkness’, she’s filled with the hope of a return to California, a place she visits during the writing of this book and stares up at Joni’s old home: emotional, vulnerable. It was wonderful to read another woman’s perspective on the lyrics and feel the hope and strength in them, particularly when for me, it’s a sad album, poetry of what one doesn’t have, cannot have. Or at least it used to be.

‘Blue’ clutches at my soul too, and has evolved with me. I may occasionally feel proud to be ‘constant in the darkness’, but sometimes these days, sometimes I am simply grateful. Listening to ‘Little Green’, written about Joni adopting away her child, now makes me feel so secure in my life with my husband, our baby on the way into a settled and loving home, that I cannot bear the sadness of Mitchell’s voice and lyrics as her child is lost to her. Key’s talks openly about the abortion she had when she was in university and her more recent desire to have a baby. Her yearning for a baby in later years is another note we share. But her journey involved scouting for sperm donors as a single woman who was happy to become a single parent, with a wish that she would eventually need to confront as a ‘scrap of magical thought’ that might never happen. As a woman who has mourned the loss of an imaginary child, prior to meeting my husband, this is a profound and confusing time that we have briefly shared though 200 miles apart, and whilst listening to the same song. Her book brings our two separate experiences together. It is comforting to know that other women are reaching back to ‘Blue’ to search their feelings. It’s not just me.

I enjoyed Arrangements in Blue. I cried in mourning for her friend, I felt her despair at herself for the poor decisions with men and I feel her continued hope, not just for romantic love, but for the completion of experience for which she yearns. At some point I must seek out her poetry, to find what other elegance she can bring to my reading.

Arrangements in Blue is published by Jonathan Cape and was released in Spring 2023