Coffee at Dawn: Inside the World of Marjorie Gavan’s The Prelude Girl
The sun isn’t up yet, but Marjorie Gavan’s apartment is already humming. A mug of strong coffee steams beside her laptop, the room still dark enough that the screen casts the only light. This is when she writes — quiet dawn hours that belong to no one else.
It was in a dawn like this that she named herself the prelude girl.
From Placeholder to Prelude
Years ago, Gavan found herself in what her generation once called an MU — a mutual understanding that wasn’t quite a relationship, wasn’t quite not. In today’s vocabulary we’d call it a situationship. She didn’t realize she had been a placeholder until the ending made it plain. “I guess I was naïve; I thought it meant more,” she says now, half-smiling at the memory. The word placeholder felt clinical, dismissive. So in her notebook — really, the Notes app on her phone — she wrote a poem and searched for something gentler, something that gave the girl in the story her humanity back. The phrase prelude girl arrived, softening the blow while reclaiming agency. In Marjorie Gavan's words, she said:
“I may not have been the one, but I’m a whole person with real feelings.”
That single poem grew into a collection. The Prelude Girl gathers 26 unflinching pieces (29 in the hardcover edition) that map the terrain from clandestine hope to self-possession. The book’s heartbeat is the conviction that almost-love, too, deserves a song.
Writing as Survival
In the beginning, the poems were “unrefined, incoherent … pain in its rawest form.” Rage. Loneliness. Misery. Gavan typed them on a phone because paper wasn’t always handy, and her handwriting, she jokes, is barely legible anyway. The impulse to document was not literary — it was medicinal. “Poetry was my way to hide my suffering,” she admits, a secret folded into line breaks.
A Line That Still Stings
Ask her to choose one line that still makes her pulse jump, and she quotes a verse from This Is How I Loved You:
“It was my throne, yet I was the one afraid that you would let it go.”
She pauses after reciting it, letting the silence explain the rest. “The person you’re most afraid to lose is the one who holds the power to break you,” she says softly. The poem captures that seesaw of devotion and dread—the very fulcrum where love becomes self-betrayal.
Literary DNA
Gavan’s shelves reveal many lodestars: Sylvia Plath’s ferocity, Louise Glück’s crystalline precision, Yrsa Daley-Ward’s confessional directness, Marguerite Duras’s humid interiority. Yet The Prelude Girl doesn’t sound quite like any of them. The Filipino sensibility surfaces not in imagery — no jeepneys roll through these pages — but in emotional architecture: holding things in, enduring silently, loving past the bruise.
The Moment She Truly Moved On
For years, she mentally rewrote the past, tinkering with conversations that might have saved the relationship. Finishing the manuscript changed that. “I realized the rewrites meant I hadn’t truly moved on,” she says. Setting the last poem in place felt like closing a door — no longer hoping for a different ending, finally free to step forward.
An Embrace on Paper
Gavan hopes The Prelude Girl feels like a warm arm around the shoulders of anyone nursing fresh heartbreak. “Grief over lost love is universal,” she insists. “Some people are just meant to pass through your life, and that’s okay.” Her book is permission to hurt loudly, heal gently, and eventually cut the red thread binding you to a memory.
Quick Fire
Coffee or tea? Coffee, always.
Best writing hour? Before sunrise.
Notebook preference? Blank pages — line-ruled borders feel like fences.
What’s Next
Now that the prelude girl has walked offstage, Gavan is drafting her first novel and shaping a second poetry collection that leans into social and psychological themes. The dawns, it seems, will stay busy.
In the third quarter of 2025, The Prelude Girl will be out in Kindle eBook, paperback, and a hardcover collector’s edition with three bonus poems — little extras for readers who, like Gavan, know that even almost-love deserves something beautiful.
Attend our book launch and a meet-and-greet with the author on August 30, 2025, at Capri Art Cafe and Gallery in San Pedro, Laguna. The program starts at 2 p.m.
Find the book soon on Amazon or visit www.haribonpublishing.com for more news and upcoming events.