If This Album Were a Book: SZA's SOS

As Written by the Last Romantic on Earth

If SOS were a book, it wouldn’t be shelved under “fiction” or “memoir.” It would live in a glass case labeled Do Not Touch Unless You've Loved Too Hard or Lost Too Young.

No, darling—it wouldn’t be a book at all. It would be a glass bottle—seafoam green, sun-faded and bobbing between memory and mischief. Inside? A scroll, handwritten in loopy cursive ink smudged by saltwater tears and the aftermath of one too many almosts. It’s a time capsule of 3 AM thoughts and unfiltered truths. A relic cast from the edge of heartbreak, caught mid-tide in the ocean of your twenties, when nothing is quite anchored, and everything is beautifully, tragically afloat.

But since we’re calling it a book—fine. Let’s pretend.

The Theme: The Chaos & Clarity of Becoming

This book is a postmodern diary dressed as a psychological thriller—with a soundtrack that plays between every paragraph. It’s not about finding peace. It’s about making peace with the pieces. The fragments of girlhood that weren’t preserved in pink diaries, but survived in breakup texts and red receipts.

This is healing as performance art. Vulnerability on a velvet rope. It’s a book where rage wears perfume and forgiveness is spelled out in eyeliner.

Our Heroine(s): The Girl in All Her Versions

Meet the author, or should I say, authors? This isn't one woman. It’s seven. All sharing a body, a playlist, and a therapist on speed dial.

• The Mermaid – ethereal and elusive, she sings in moonlight and cries in the bathtub. She romanticizes everything, including her own pain.

  
  

• The Martyr – the one who stayed too long, loved too loudly, and apologized for both.

  
  

• The Manic Pixie Dream Girl (Post-Rehab Edition) – still glittering, but now with boundaries and a better relationship with carbs.

  
  

• The Siren – lures him in just to ghost him the next morning. Not for revenge—just for the thrill of being wanted.

  
  

• The Scorpio Rising – dark humor, sharper nails. She journals in blood-red ink and listens to voicemail breakups on repeat.

  
  

• The Inner Child – she’s the one who remembers what love should have felt like, before it turned transactional.

  
  

• The Grown-Ass Woman – she texts back “K.” and goes to bed before midnight. She’s not fully healed, but she’s trying.

  
  

Together, they co-write every page like a group chat you’d never want to leak.

The Aesthetic: Cracked Gloss and Oceanic Melodrama

The cover? Think deep ocean blue with edges frayed like jean shorts from summer ’08. There’s a lip-gloss stain on the inside flap and three bent pages where the plot hit too hard. The title is handwritten, gold-foiled, and underlined aggressively in eyeliner. The back cover quote reads: "Some girls write songs. Some girls light matches. Some girls do both."

Visually, it’s part The Virgin Suicides, part Euphoria, and part thrift-store poetry collection annotated by a girl who pretends not to care but memorizes everything.

The margins are chaos: Scribbles like “I still love him, unfortunately.”Doodles of sinking ships and winged hearts.Footnotes that whisper: “Healing doesn’t always look like hope. Sometimes it looks like hiding.”

The Genre: Emotional Sci-Fi Meets Poetic Realism

Imagine if Sylvia Plath co-wrote an episode of Black Mirror. Or if Lana Del Rey did a book signing at a group therapy session. That’s this book.

It’s surreal, lyrical, and just a little dangerous. Each chapter starts with a confession and ends with a cliffhanger—because she never gives it all away. She’s not that kind of girl anymore.

This book haunts. It hurts in the most necessary way—like stretching scar tissue or deleting a playlist.

The Narrative: A Girl Rescues Herself, One Page at a Time

Just when you think she’s drowning in her own despair… she floats. Hair wet. Lip gloss intact. Not because she was saved—but because she decided to swim.

And that’s the secret: SOS isn’t a cry for help. It’s a signal flare, shot from the diary of a girl who was once soft, then shattered, and is now learning how to glow in the dark.

She’s not waiting for someone to pull her from the wreckage. She is the lifeboat.

And you? You’re just lucky enough to read her story.

--

April Sheris

(as told with a martini in hand and glitter on my heels)