A/N: Mia Roberts is the main character in "I'll See You Soon" and the author of "Five Years of Fame"(according to the official Girl Power Galaxy lore, aka because I said so).

Before we begin our story, I want to set the scene for how this book came about. It was a very different experience from how my other biographical/autobiographical books have been written. This one feels much more like a labor of love.

It was easy enough for me to write my own stories, to give my own experiences a narrative voice. And even with Reeve Keller's book, the process was quite simple. She called me up, told me she wanted Mia Roberts to write the biography of her years in the spotlight and that was that. Thus "Five Years of Fame" was born.

This story, however, was a whole other matter.

To give you some context, I must first tell you about our main subject of this book.

For almost a decade, the name George Briggs was synonymous with number one hits and chart-topping albums. George Briggs was a name to be revered in the music industry.

However, if you stopped a hundred people on the street and asked them who George Briggs was, most would say 'Who?'. And those that did know the name would give you an answer somewhere along the lines of 'That music producer guy, you know, the forty-year-old from Sweden or wherever.' Because that's how the myth went.

George Briggs, an overnight success, a force to be reckoned with, bursting out onto the scene of the music industry only to disappear just as suddenly seven years later. Who is this forty-year-old from Sweden? Or is it Norway? Denmark? The myth never specified his point of origin.

I know George Briggs. Personally. I have for years. But most people just call her George. Her mother calls her Georgiana and her husband calls her Georgie but they are the only exceptions.

I met George when we were both still in our twenties. I was traveling with my husband's band at the time as their photographer and George went with us to help do some recording on the road. She was a few years into the whole myth-making facade that kept her out of the limelight, a facade that kept outsiders for criticizing her skill and reputation as a twenty-something-year-old female ruling the music producing industry.

The facade worked. George was able to go about her work relatively unscathed and created some of the greatest albums of our generation during her time as George Briggs.

But then she stopped. George Briggs went away forever and slowly but surely, the name Georgiana Burns started to make headway as a music producer. Georgiana Burns was older. In her late twenties. People cared less that her dad was a rockstar from the 90's and her mom the youngest of a very wealthy family from Long Island. Slowly but surely, under her own name, George gained a second wave notoriety and respect.

I thought I knew George's story. She would tell fun anecdotes when hanging out in a group. I had even heard some of the same ones multiple times. And so I figured I knew everything about  how George Briggs came to be and then suddenly wasn't anymore.

Two years ago, I was shown exactly how much I didn't even know the tip of the iceberg when it came to George Briggs.

Two years ago, in early spring, George called me up. That, in itself, was unusual as we weren't really those kind of friends. She had been holed up in her studio in Brooklyn for the better part of half a decade and I hadn't been out on the road with my husband since our kids were born. We hadn't seen each other in years.

George called me because she wanted to talk. She wanted to give a talk, to be more specific, and she wanted me to be the one to interview her.

I said yes, without a second's hesitation.

The Berkelee School of Music in Boston gratefully accepted George's offer of coming to speak for their students, for free, and accepted her condition that the talk be free and open to the public. Berkelee appreciated that one of their own local talents (me) would be hosting the event and so bent over backwards to make George feel welcomed.

George and I spent three weeks working on her talk as Berkelee prepared the event. I wrote up a list of questions and sent them to her. She sent me back her revised version. Back and forth it went until finally George could lay down the perimeters for our talk.

George only wanted to talk about her work as a music producer, nothing before, nothing after, nothing else. This was understandable given the notoriety George was born into and so I agreed. We settled on our list of questions and were ready for our conversation.

I wasn't all that surprised when George asked me to do this with her. I was surprised she asked me but I wasn't surprised that she wanted to pass along her wisdom and knowledge from her decades in the music industry down to the next generation. During my time getting to know George and learning about her career, the one thing I've heard, over and over again, (never from her but from others) was how hard George worked to take the spotlight, the opportunities, the resources she was born with and give them to someone else, someone who deserved it, wanted it, needed it. Someone who didn't have access to those kinds of opportunities or resources on their own.

The date for the talk was set and the public interest was overwhelming. The little amphitheater on campus was quickly abandoned when hundreds of people called the school to request reservations and were turned away as the event was to be first come, first serve (another one of George's conditions).

As the sports arena was going to be too big and the school's amphitheater too small, Berkelee's only option was the Symphony Hall. Which made perfect sense because this was George Briggs. If she was going to speak, it was going to be in the best venue in town.

The talk went well. The talk went great. The audience was engaged and the questions asked at the end were the best way to end the night. I only had one problem. It nagged at me the whole time I sat across from George on stage, going through our list of prepared questions.

What she was saying, every story, every piece of advice, it was all just a bare scratch at the surface with a mammoth of a story frozen beneath. I could feel it.

When we ended our talk and walked off stage, I pulled George to the side and asked her to talk. I asked her to tell me everything and more, to let me chronicle this extraordinary life she had lived. George said no, immediately.

I was disappointed but I understood. Luckily enough, that was not the last talk we did together. We were asked to speak at Julliard in New York and Mont Claire Performing Arts college in New Jersey. George didn't drag her feet on these talks. She said yes immediately and we were back on stage within two weeks.

Again, I was amazed at how much George wasn't saying. She was funny, engaging, personal and relateable. And yet, I knew, deep down in my gut, there was so much she wasn't telling us.

I asked her again to let me write her biography after our talk at Julliard. She said no. I risked our relationship by asking her a third time in New Jersey, one last time, to let me write her story.

Finally, with just the right amount of begging on my part, she said she would think about it.

I didn't hear from George for ten months after that. She fell off the map from what I could tell. Her name had long since disappeared from tabloids and online media, only to appear in liner notes. But for those months, even her liner notes got fewer and farther between.

I barely noticed. During those ten months, I was working on finishing my work for Reeve Keller's story, and deep into the final phases of getting it edited and then published. A week after it hit the shelves, George called me.

She had read the book. She loved it. And she wanted to talk.

What followed were ten sessions over the span of a year. Periodically, I would travel down to New York and spend a long weekend with George in her West Village apartment. And we would talk. For hours, all we would do is talk. I learned to bring three separate recorders with me each time to make sure I didn't miss a word.

The first time George had me over, we stayed up until three in the morning. I wanted to start at the beginning, to hear all about her childhood and how she was raised but George had had time to think about our arrangement. She gave me an overview of her childhood, enough snippets to paint a vivid enough picture but nothing more. She wanted to focus on her years as George Briggs and nothing more. It had been long enough. She wanted to share what had happened to him.

So that was what we did. She talked and talked until her voice went hoarse. She granted me the highest honor by keeping nothing back, by going down into the deepest parts of her memory, the very depths of her soul and bringing back whatever she had found and showing it to me.

In between our meetings, I couldn't stop writing. I couldn't stop bringing her words, her experiences, to life on the page. I was obsessed. I was fascinated. This person I thought I knew went so much deeper, had experienced so much more than I had ever known. And I got to be a part of that. I got to tell her story.

During our year together, I watched a weight lifted from my friend's shoulders. The talks became therapy for her. Things she hadn't been able to process in the moment as they were happening to her, she now had the space and time to do so. She could look back and put the craziest time of her life into perspective.

Every word I wrote went through George. Every story I tell here in this book, every detail, every nuisance, was approved by George. There were things she scrapped, most of the time to protect the people she loved. And there were things she told me had to go in, things I didn't think were relevant. But those moments seemed to matter the most to George. They were important to her and so in they went. This book was as equally written by George as it was by me.

What I present to you here is a collection of stories. Stories pulled from George's brain and brought to life by my hand. I have combined the transcripts of our three public talks with the transcripts of our private sessions to provide context and George's own voice where it is needed, as there are some things even I don't have the authority to say. As George starts a new chapter in her life, she has graciously provided the public with this previous one. A chapter that shaped her as a musician, a songwriter, a producer and as a human.

This book is dedicated to George Briggs, the woman who shaped a generation of musicians and music producers and never, not once, took the credit for it. This story is yours, George. Thank you for letting me be a part of it.

Mia Roberts