Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Ramona Ausubel’s book Unstuck will inspire writers (and everyone else) with its wisdom and humor.

Kirkus wrote of the book:

“An upbeat guide to navigating the writing process . . . Warm-hearted and practical, Ausubel emerges as trustworthy companion for a writer who’s stuck anywhere on the challenging road of creativity. Generous, empathetic, and unfailingly encouraging.”

In her own words, here is Ramona Ausubel’s Book Notes music playlist for her book Unstuck:

So much of what I want this book to be is a hype-beast for whatever it is you most want to write. If you’re starting? Get excited, get going. In that long, long middle? Here’s a whole bunch of ways to stay in it. Need some perspective? Let’s go! Ready to see this thing to the end? This book is here for that. Music is an amazing tone-setter for a writing day. Sometimes I like to listen to something that reminds me of the characters, or the setting. Sometimes I’ll make a playlist that I listen to every time I work on a particular project to drop me into the zone more quickly. This playlist is in two parts: Get Excited & Settle In.

A Side: Get Excited

The first part of this playlist is made up of high energy, makes-me-happy songs to get me pumped up before I write.

“Colors”—Black Pumas

Soulful celebration of everyday life. I’m never unhappy to have this song come on!

“Texas Hold ‘Em”—Beyonce

Writing is “taking it to the floor” in so many ways.

“Changes”—Charlie Puth

This one is thanks to my daughter, who puts this on in the car and we all sing at the top of our lungs. Writing feels quiet, but warming up with some loudness always feels good.

“Can’t Take My Eyes Off You”—Lauryn Hill

I’m 18 years old, driving my clunky old Saab around Santa Fe. It’s summer, I’m on my way to pick my friends so we can go to Allsups and get sodas and gum and then park at the plaza and play the whole album on repeat. Everything is possible.

B Side: Settle In

Now it’s time to sit down and get ready to actually put words on the page. These songs go from more energetic to more chill as my focus sharpens.

“Sound & Color”—Alabama Shakes

Bright and cheerful and open-hearted. Just how I want to be when I write (even if I’m not always—aspiration!).

“Dusty Trails”—Lucius

I like to sing along to this even though I have terrible pitch and my voice reaches nowhere near the angelic heights theirs do. It reminds me that I’m writing a messy, real emerging thing, not a pristine, finished book.

“Right Back to Me”—Waxahatchee

Feels like lying in the sun on a picnic blanket in the summer. It’s an easy day, and trying something doesn’t seem so hard.

“Ripple”—The Grateful Dead

Though I live in Boulder, I am not a Deadhead (Sorry, Dad!), but this song has always felt like home to me. It’s familiar and steady. Settles me down real nice.

“New World Coming”—Nina Simone

Nina Simone’s voice is like a whole entire universe. It feels expansive—in that depth, there is room for all things, even me. Even my weird sentences.

“San Luis”—Gregory Alan Isakov

This is my very favorite writing music. It’s lovely but not boring, textured and warm but not distracting. It’s a nice combination of sweet and sad. Plus Isakov lives a few miles from me, which makes it feel like inviting a friend over (to be clear, we are friends only my imagination). Chances are good that if I’m writing, his whole oeuvre is in the background.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Ramona Ausubel’s playlist for her novel Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

Ramona Ausubel’s playlist for her short story collection A Guide to Being Born

Ramona Ausubel’s playlist for her novel No One is Here Except All of Us

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Ramona Ausubel is the author most recently of Unstuck: 101 Doorways from the Blank Page to the Last Page (Tin House/Zando).

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Bonnie Friedman’s novel Don’t Stop is a vividly told and moving debut.

Booklist wrote of the book:

“This coming-of-middle-age story explores a woman’s obsessive affair and the unraveling of her life… A fiction debut that will appeal to fans of Miranda July’s All Fours.”

In her own words, here is Bonnie Friedman’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Don’t Stop:

Goldfinger (Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings)

Don’t Stop is a novel about a woman with an utterly divided life, who tells herself that part of it is real and important (the part with her kind husband and good job) and the other, which encompasses an increasingly dark sexual affair, is make-believe. And yet she is increasingly enthralled by the make-believe part, the part that she can’t allow herself to understand is real, even though she is taking more and more risks and discovering that what happens in the bedroom has repercussions for the entire rest of her life.

The novel begins in 1999, and Ina is sitting with her friend Janie on the Brooklyn Promenade, across from Wall Street. There’s an absolute euphoria in the city because the stock market is soaring and, unlike today, everyone seems to benefit, not just The Masters of the Universe. An atmosphere of recklessness pervades the city, and a sense that the old rules of reality might no longer apply. I chose Goldfinger from the soundtrack of The Wolf of Wall Street because I love its big louche horns and almost tawdry clamor. The song originated with the James Bond movies, which had a panache to them, a certain sardonic bordello swank just a step away from the overripe. As it happens, it is a song of warning.

Maria (Blondie)

Ina is a scholar is on a tight deadline to complete her academic book in order to keep her job, but nevertheless allows herself to be persuaded to go to a networking meeting at a bar. It’s a foggy night and she steps into this loud, throbbing, bewildering place that to her is something like the go-go party of hipsters featured in Laugh-In, a million years ago. She hates it. Something is thumping on the sound system. I chose a song I very much like, Maria, by Blondie, which was a power pop single that year. It’s about romantic obsession. Debbie Harry keeps sounding like she’s going to break into “The Tide Is High” with that sultry expansive lower register. It’s deeply hooky, this tune, with fantastic pounding drums that want to make your blood jump, and that do make Ina’s blood jump, despite herself.

It Might As Well Be Spring (Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz)

Could there be a cooler delivery that Gilberto’s? Perhaps Chet Baker’s on horn. Ina finds herself playing this song on repeat during the afternoon when she’s anticipating her first date. Gilberto sings it with her characteristic trance-y sangfroid. Delivered in a monotone and played over and over, the song is thrillingly hypnotic as it asks the question, “Why do I have spring fever / when I know it isn’t spring?” In fact, winter is coming to New York but something in Ina seems to be taking on a life of its own. “I’m starry-eyed and vaguely discontented.” “I feel so gay in a melancholy way that it might as well be spring.” Gorgeous Hammerstein lyrics set to Rogers’ insistent, driven melody about this delicious, fixated, in-between state.

I Saw the Light (Earl Scruggs)

Ina’s husband is the extremely decent, Texas-born Simon, who grew up in a fundamentalist family, and is an ace banjo player. This character was marvelously satisfying to write. I could very much imagine him playing Earl Scruggs’ version of I Saw the Light. It’s an upbeat, radiant bluegrass gospel number that reflects some of Simon’s own warm spirits and humane faith, being outward looking and open-hearted. Ina views Simon’s goodness as being somewhat childlike and simple, a limitation for which the reader knows she may pay.

Moon River (Elton John)

My mother, in her late nineties, isolated in her tiny apartment during COVID, used to sing this song with me over the telephone, only she sang “two sisters” instead of “two drifters”. Two sisters, off to see the world. In fact, she never had a sister, although she always wanted one. She had grown up in a family of boys. “Moon River” is a song all about longing and inner voices impelling one to a fateful rendezvous. Ina and Simon hold tight to one another as they dance around their living room to this tune, which Ina notices is a waltz. Elton John’s rendition, his foot heavy on the echo pedal, skirts the sentimentality that the song risks while letting us feel all the yearning.

Let’s Get It On (Marvin Gaye)

The vibe of Jack’s bedroom is summoned by this slow-burn Motown classic. I kept thinking that Barry White sang this song, as perhaps he should have at some time, with his melt-your knees bone-rumbling bass-baritone but no, this is Marvin Gaye’s slow-jam ballad, with his swoony bass and shouting tenor urging you to unstring yourself, to deliver yourself over. It’s impossible for me to hear this song without feeling the lights turn low and the heat turned up. An anthem for eroticism.

Dreams (The Cranberries)

Ina’s sister is a prickly, forbidding, domineering presence who has a difficult life, having been stricken with multiple sclerosis. She always makes Ina feel like two cents. In the background, while sister Violet and Ina are cooking together at Violet’s claustrophobic house, this catchy song comes on the radio, a missive from a distant reality, the reality in which most normal people obliviously move, with its relatable experience of first love, ringing and up tempo, full of possibilities. Violet’s experience is the opposite – has she ever been in love? —  and yet she’s a force to contend with, one of the strongest characters in the book, with her superpower being an ability to meet life open-eyed, without recourse to fantasy.

Agnus Dei from Missa in Festis Apostolmin (Palestrina)

Under protest and ill-prepared, Ina is assigned a creative-writing class to teach, to fill in for a professor who’s gone AWOL. She doesn’t know how to teach this class, and is told that the students will teach her. She has often stepped past this teacher’s classroom and noticed strange behavior: the lights out and a candle burning, Renaissance music playing, the students silently bent over their desks as if taking dictation, each from a different source. This polyphonic sacred choral piece by Palestrina, performed a capella, evokes spiritual presences as if drawing them forth from the clerestory of a cathedral, the sopranos ringing with a pure tone, and, beneath them, the rolling-forth bases smooth as sheets of water sliding in at low tide. The meditative, unhurried air invites one’s own inner truths to manifest, which may be why the original creative-writing teacher liked it. It awakens something uncomfortable in Ina, who, especially at this point in her life, wants order and control. This classroom will bring her the opposite.

Every Time We Say Goodbye (Annie Lennox)

Late in the novel, Simon and Ina dress up to hear a favorite performer of theirs, who sings in a Frank Sinatra style. This Cole Porter ballad, with its wry “how strange the change from major to minor” captures some of the beauty of the American songbook classics that allow an expansion of feeling within a contained few bars. Ina, at the end of the novel, will go with one man or the other (or neither) — and there will have to be a goodbye. My friend John Kane used to play this number at the end of a Friday evening when he lived in Milton, Massachusetts, and I’d come over to visit him and Gary, and would eat his magnificent roasted chicken and braised leeks, and drink Australian Savignon Blanc, and eat the real-vanilla-bean ice cream I’d brought. He’d step out into the snow if it was winter, and walk me to my car in his rolled-up white shirtsleeves and pressed gray office slacks, and say, “Safe home!” waving as I left. Some people when they say goodbye give you a present of their love to carry you toward home. Some people, even as they pass from this life, do the same thing. I think of John Kane when I hear this song, saying “Safe home!” and recall the love that stays even after the person is gone, and is never taken away.

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Bonnie Friedman is the author of the bestselling Writing Past Dark, named one of the Essential Books for Writers by the Center for Fiction and Poets & Writers. She is also the author of The Thief of Happiness and Surrendering Oz, a finalist for the PEN Award in the Art of the Essay. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares and numerous other literary journals, and she has been named a notable essayist four times in The Best American Essays. She has taught writing at the University of Iowa, Dartmouth, NYU, and the University of North Texas. Don’t Stop is her first novel.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Anna Dorn’s novel American Spirits is smart and entertaining and filled with characters that will haunt you long after finishing the book.

Kirkus wrote of the book:

“The music writing in this book is outstanding, including intriguing real-world references and annotated playlists that will make you grateful for your streaming service. Dorn has a profound understanding of the relationship between an artist and her work . . . Nuanced characters, lively writing, and a heaping helping of bad behavior make the pages fly.”

In her own words, here is Anna Dorn’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel American Spirits:

I am so happy to be making my fifth Largehearted Boy playlist! I was looking back at old playlists to make sure I don’t have any repeats, because I have a tendency to listen to the same five songs over and over (and there is one repeat on this list, sorry). But more importantly, I found this description below Lana Del Rey’s “Old Money” in my Vagablonde playlist: “This is perhaps a cocky thing to say but I’ve always related to Lana as a sad East Coast girl who adopted California as her home state. This track embodies that sense of Southern California Gothic I’ve always wanted my writing to capture.” This sentiment remains true, and in fact American Spirits is directly inspired by Lana Del Rey. I see my first novel Vagablonde as a younger sister to American Spirits, as both books are music-obsessed and about star musicians. Vagablonde is messier, rawer, and features an aspiring musician; American Spirits is more mature, more polished, and stars a very famous musician. Vagablonde contains a lot of music writing—fake Pitchfork reviews, academic theses, gushing fan analyses, and I loved every second of writing it. I think most artists fantasize about being another type of artist. Lana Del Rey is a musician who wants to be a poet. And I’m a novelist who wants to be a musician. This is obvious from all my books but this one in particular. Here are some of the songs that inspired the music-drenched American Spirits. 

“Shades of Cool” – Lana Del Rey

“My baby lives in shades of blue. Blue eyes and jazz and attitude.” This is the first epigraph in American Spirits. I named the main character Blue Velour in part inspired by Lana’s obsession with blue—the word appears in 43 of her released songs—and also the fact that she covered “Blue Velvet” on Born to Die (Blue Velour is the trashier version). In Lana’s music, the word blue symbolizes melancholy, darkness, jazz, the ocean, and eventually triumph—moving, as she puts it on Lust For Life, “out of the black, into the blue.” I think my heroine makes a similar progression from black to blue. 

“Back to Black”- Amy Winehouse

“You go back to her, and I go back to us” is another epigraph in this novel and one of the most heartbreaking lines of music ever delivered. As in all my novels, there are many love triangles in this one, lots of going back to her and going back to us. Amy is a precursor to Lana Del Rey in her poetic excavation of doomed romance, and a member of the 27 Club, which Blue Velour takes great lengths to avoid joining. Lana goes to the blue, but Amy keeps going back to black.

“Unusual You” – Britney Spears

Spoiler alert: the superfan character in this book goes viral for covering this extremely underrated Britney Spears song. Vulnerable admission: I am a late-in-life Britney fan. When I was younger, I avoided her mostly due to contrarianism. But then “Unusual You” came on a playlist a few years ago, and something about this peculiar electropop ballad converted me. “Didn’t anyone tell you you’re supposed to break my heart?” is another epigraph in the book. And I’ve now listened to every song Brit has ever recorded.

“American Spirits” – Cassandra Jenkins 

I stole the title of my last novel Perfume & Pain from an out-of-print lesbian pulp novel. I stole the title for this novel—I’m admitting this here for the very first time—from this lush, aching Cassandra Jenkins song inspired by “the poetic ambiguity that can arise from the struggle of searching for the words to tell someone we love exactly what has happened.” And isn’t that what all novels are about? 

“Percocet & Stripper Joint” – Future 

I warned you there was a repeat track, and of course it’s a Future one. American Spirits is an older sister to Vagablonde, so it only makes sense they share a track. In Vagablonde, this track spoke to the main character’s druggy dissociation. In American Spirits, it’s what I imagine the production of Blue Velour’s pandemic album Mood Onyx to sound like: droning 808s, gothic synths, negative space swallowing everything. 

“Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” – Nancy Sinatra

In the novel, Blue Velour’s first album is called Spirit of Sinatra as an ode to Nancy. I am not the first to make the Nancy Sinatra–Lana Del Rey connection: both wear their daddy issues on their sleeves and make love sound spooky as hell (cue “White Feather Hawk Deer Tail Hunter”). “Bang Bang” is a song about being shot dead that somehow feels like a dream. I kind of wanted this novel to feel like that, too.

“Love Buzz” – Nirvana 

In the novel, Blue Velour first captures the attention of her longtime producer by covering “Love Buzz.” The two of them later use lyrics from the song to title a future album. Lana is a huge fan of Kurt Cobain, another member of the 27 Club, and Blue Velour is too. “Love Buzz” happens to be my favorite Nirvana song as well—quelle surprise given I wrote the book!

“Mirrorball” – Taylor Swift 

Another confession: I’m a late-in-life Taylor Swift fan. I was listening to her a lot when I was writing this book, and the Folklore cabin inspired my decision to have Blue Velour make a pandemic album while holed up in the redwoods—although it sounds less like Folklore and more like Dirty Sprite 2. Blue Velour despises Taylor Swift, but her producer secretly likes her. “Mirrorball” captures how Taylor can be whatever people need her to be, and Blue needs a foil.

“Blue Motel Room” – Joni Mitchell

Like Lana Del Rey, Joni Mitchell is obsessed with the color blue. Beyond her most beloved album, Blue, the color is also in a great number of her song titles, like this blue-toned jazz track from the critical darling Hejira. She wrote most of the album while driving across the U.S. in the mid-70s, reminiscent of Blue Velour’s manic drive across the country in American Spirits. Missing her lover in L.A. on a stop in Georgia, Joni has blue on her mind: “I’ve got a blue motel room / With a blue bedspread / I’ve got the blues inside and outside my head / Will you still love me / When I get back to town?”

also at Largehearted Boy:

Anna Dorn’s playlist for her novel Perfume and Pain

Anna Dorn’s playlist for her novel Exalted

Anna Dorn’s playlist for her memoir Bad Lawyer

Anna Dorn’s playlist for her novel Vagablonde

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Anna Dorn is the author of the novels Perfume and Pain, Exalted, Vagablonde, and American Spirits. She was a Lambda Literary Fellow and Exalted was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She lives in Los Angeles.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Eric LeMay’s essay collection The First 649 Days offers breathtaking perspectives on love and loss.

Dinty W. Moore wrote of the book:

“Eric LeMay’s The First 649 Days is a work of breathtaking honesty and heart. LeMay captures life’s singular moments—the birth of a child, unexpected illness, mortality—exquisitely, revealing the precarious beauty of our world through the eyes of his young son Ro. LeMay’s inventive renderings are a brilliant reminder that our lives may harbor threat, disappointment, and grief, yet still shimmer with hope and wild beauty at every turn.”

In his own words, here is Eric LeMay’s Book Notes music playlist for his essay collection The First 649 Days:

“You’re about to get hit by a hurricane.” That’s the best advice I got about what it’s like when a baby makes landfall in your life. The First 649 Days begins there. It ends five years later, with the 649 days I spent with my son during the pandemic. In between, it tries to capture that everyday struggle we all confront: How do we become what life makes of us?  

“Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley, CeeLo Green, Danger Mouse

In the dead of winter, still in the womb, my son went from due to overdue. He had no interest in exiting. And who could blame him?  Day after day, his mother tried to dance him down the birth canal with “Crazy.” That’s how we felt, playing it again and again. When my son was old enough to talk, I played it for him. Did he remember? Nope.

“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” by Baby Music

For the first years of my son’s life, this little twinkling star was the one constant in his ever-changing bedtime. He had no interest in sleeping. And who could blame him? As he got older, he sang along with us. I don’t remember when we stopped, but I do remember, toward the end, realizing that each time we sang it might be the last, and how hard I loved him.

“Further on Up the Road” by Johnny Cash

Our first singalong. We’d go on long walks. He’d be in this backpack I wore that held him up on my shoulders. I’d sing, “Where the road is…” And he’d sing, “Dark.” And I’d sing, “And the seed is…” And he’d sing, “Sowed.” “Where the gun is…” “Cocked.” “As the bullet’s…” “Cold.” Where the miles are marked in the blood and the gold. I’ll meet you further on up the road.

“Demon Host” by Timbre Timbre

I got cancer when my son was a little over a year old. I can’t capture that in a note. I can say I felt so devastated, so distraught, I couldn’t write. And then one night I started to. I’d kiss my son on the forehead and drag myself out of our bed and into the dark. I’d listen to this song, over and over, until I could write a sentence or two about what it was like knowing I might not live.

“Metamorphosis: One” by Philip Glass

Life with a young child cycles. Every day feels like a repetition of the last one. Meals, naps, walks, baths, repeat, repeat. There’s a deep beauty to it, being on child time. The small variations magnify. Suddenly, avocados are in. Suddenly, he can say the cat’s name. “Sailor! Sailor!” I felt and feel a little of this magic in Glass’s cascading and beautiful loops.

“Ring Around the Rosie” by Toddler Tunes

And then came the pandemic, with its own repetitions, with its isolation and mass death. And amid it all, children like mine went about the work of growing up. It was then I learned the lore around “Ring Around the Rosie.” That its origins are in the bubonic plague. That a red ring was a sign of infection. That people carried posies to mask the stench of death. That all fall down.

“Roll the Woodpile Down” by The Dreadnaughts

In lockdown, sea shanties started trending. My son and I learned this one before I’d quite figured out what its lyrics described. By then, it was too late to be a good parent. Instead, I just enjoyed the oddity of a four-year-old belting out a love for 19th-century prostitutes and the bawdy ways of sailors. I played it for him this morning. “I do remember it,” he said. I do, too.

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Eric LeMay is a multimedia artist and writer currently in remission from cancer. He is on the faculty at Ohio University, where he directs the creative writing program. He is also a host on the New Books Network. He is the author of five books, and his work has appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry Daily, the Best Food Writing series, and other venues.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Written in the form of a headache journal, Zach Powers’s The Migraine Diaries is both inventive and profound in its exploration of pain and endurance.

The Brooklyn Rail wrote of the book:

“Powers understands the instant obliteration of a headache and, brilliantly, juxtaposes that with the loss of a friend. Should someone ever take up [Virginia] Woolf’s challenge and assemble a literary anthology of maladies, they should look first to Powers for his descriptions of the headache.”

In her own words, here is Zach Powers’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel The Migraine Diaries:

I do most of my writing in coffee shops, so my playlists are often selected by baristas. Right now, at Simona Cafe in Bethesda, Maryland, I have no idea what song is playing. And that’s alright by me. When I focus, the music, the chatter, and the hissing gurgle of the espresso machine all blur into an ambient background. If I’m sitting with someone, and they point out the song on the radio, I have to dredge my attention up from deep inside me before I’m aware of any sound at all.

My novel The Migraine Diaries opens as the narrator experiences his first migraine at the funeral for his best friend, KJ, and follows the narrator’s life as he navigates grief and chronic illness. A number of scenes take place in a coffee shop, a slightly fictionalized version of Gallery Espresso in Savannah, Georgia, where I wrote and/or hung out almost every day for 15 years. Despite the word “diaries” in the book’s title, let me emphasize that this is fiction. Though the narrator, like me, is a migraine sufferer who spends a lot of time in coffee shops, my default move is always to take a step away from myself when I feel things getting too autobiographical. Though there are other real settings and fictionalized versions of real experiences, none of the characters are based on single individuals. Which leads me back to the character KJ.

In 2009, one of my oldest friends, Kirk, died after enduring a brain tumor for several years. A few months later, my closest friend at the time, Jeremy, died tragically. The character KJ is neither of these friends and also sorta both of them. I mention Kirk and Jeremy here because in the absence of any specific playlist I had while writing the novel, for the playlist assembled below, I tried to think of songs that somehow existed in and around my life as I remembered and as I wrote. These are songs I associate with the friends and places that inspired my writing. And, hopefully, all arranged into a half-decent mix.

“Till My Head Falls Off” by They Might Be Giants

This was the first song to pop into my head when I started thinking about my playlist. The central pivot point of The Migraine Diaries involves ibuprofen, and these lyrics open with an Advil reference. The song’s title, of course, has obvious relevance, too. More personally, TMBG is my most-played band. In high school, I had a TMBG mixtape I made a copy of for Kirk, which I’ve previously written about in the only personal essay I’ve maybe ever published.

“So Fresh, So Clean” by OutKast

Sticking with Kirk, our friendship was maintained through the early days of the internet and the messaging platforms ICQ and AIM. One of those (maybe both?) allowed you to turn on an away message when you were, well, away from your computer. One of Kirk’s regular away messages—I have always assumed it to be for when he was taking a shower, though I never confirmed this—was, simply, “So fresh, so clean.” Bonus here for Big Boi being from Savannah.

“Purple Rain” by Prince

In 2007, Prince performed the Super Bowl XLI halftime show. For those unfamiliar, it is perhaps the greatest live performance in the history of the universe. Rain threatened the whole thing, but in the moment, it seemed more likely that Prince himself had summoned the rain. We were at my friend Chris’s house (see more on Chris below) for a Super Bowl party. Jeremy, who cared nothing for football but loved Prince absolutely, watched the halftime show standing a few feet from the TV. At one point, Chris and I glanced over, and tears were just freefalling down Jeremy’s face. In retrospect, that seems like the only right reaction.

“Peek‐A‐Boo” by Siouxsie and the Banshees

In the novel, there’s a character named Chris who works at my fictional Gallery Espresso. One of my best friends, Christopher Berinato, is manager of the real Gallery. He also happens to be a music journalist, so you can always tell when he’s working because the shop’s playlist will be on point. I asked him to pick a song to include, and this is it! He reminded me of the story of when he first heard this song when he was 12: “MTV was always on, but I was into Van Halen and Bon Jovi. When I watched that video, as I stood in the middle of the room, it immediately rewired my brain.”

“Rainfall” by Apples in Stereo

The Gallery Espresso in my novel is based on its current location, but Gallery used to be around the corner in a different location, where I first met Jeremy and Chris. At the old location, a barista played this album literally every time he worked. When he moved away, I found myself missing the album, and it became a regular in my listening rotation. Bonus: the old Gallery location is now home to The Book Lady Bookstore, where they’ve been absurdly supportive of every literary thing I’ve ever done.

“GO!!!” by Flow

The anime Naruto has a prominent place in the novel, and an even more prominent place in my real life. Kirk introduced the show to me back when you had to download the fan-subtitled torrents a few days after the Japanese release of each episode. Since then I’ve consumed more hours of Naruto than any other creative work. Me, Chris, and two other writer friends, Killsey and Gino, all watched and shared weekly recaps. For the playlist, it was a tossup whether to include “GO!!!,” the show’s fourth opening theme song, or “Wind” by Akeboshi, from the original closing credits. This one pumps me up, so it got the nod. Fighting dreamers!

“Modern Romance” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs

I spent my youth and young adulthood studying jazz, so I reached my mid-twenties with limited knowledge of other genres. One of my first returns to rock was this album that Jeremy lent me on CD, which I listened to so much that he let me keep it. I digitized and got rid of almost all my CDs years ago, but I still have this one.

“Heroin” by  The Velvet Underground & Nico

When I have a long writing project, I choose a few books to be my daily warmup reading. The warmup might be a whole chapter or story, but sometimes just a few sentences. For The Migraine Diaries, one of my warmup books was Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, which takes its title from this song. I lent my original copy of Jesus’ Son to a friend who never returned it, but I don’t remember which friend. I hope they’re enjoying their thievery.

“Meticulous Bird” by Thao & the Get Down Stay Down

While I was writing the first draft of the novel, I was introduced to Thao by my writer pal Thaddeus Gunn. I listened to this album on repeat, and Thao became a shared favorite for me and my partner, Stephanie. Bonus: Thao is from Northern Virginia, close to where I now live, and has her own book coming out, which I’m super excited for.

“Self Portrait in Three Colors” by Charles Mingus

Somewhere in the early planning for this novel, I had the thought, I wonder if I could write a book that works like “Self Portrait in Three Colors.” The song repeats its form three times, each time adding a new melodic line, so in the third iteration there’s this perfect three-part polyphony. My novel focuses on the three main surviving friends. What might each of their melodies be, and how might the melodies interact? Now, I don’t think I really followed through on that initial thought, but I do think it influenced the braiding of the novel’s sections. At least I hope so!

“Hallelujah” by The Helio Sequence

The first thing I ever published was a paragraph-long review of this album for a print publication I can no longer remember the name of. I got the gig through Kirk, who knew the editor. I don’t think it was particularly good or insightful writing, but it introduced me to this song, which I still listen to, and I find the lyrics to be an excellent thematic fit for The Migraine Diaries.

“The End of the Tour” by They Might Be Giants

I mentioned making high school mix tapes, and I tried to use this as the last song on most of the mix tapes I made. I feel a sense of melancholy here, but when the electric guitar kicks in, I always air-strum along. One time after a long road trip, I pulled into my parking spot exactly as this song ended. I can hear my characters listening to it in the car in the novel’s final scene. “And we’re never gonna tour again. No, we’re never gonna tour again…”

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Zach Powers is the author of the novel The Migraine Diaries (JackLeg 2026), the novel First Cosmic Velocity, and the story collection Gravity Changes, winner of the Boa Short Fiction Prize. His writing has been featured by American Short Fiction, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. He serves as Executive & Artistic Director for The Writer’s Center and Poet Lore, America’s oldest poetry journal. Originally from Savannah, Georgia, he now lives in Arlington, Virginia.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Pamela Ryder’s novel Daybreak Birdsong Always Wakes Him is a vivid retelling of the life of Billy the Kid.

Gordon Lish wrote of the book:

“Land-a-mercy, that scamp Billy the Kid was a hard-thinking scoundrel back in his untamed day, but scribbler Ryder―she’s a terror of beautification in this era of timified politicized pop gunning shootouts among the publicists of publishers of card-flaring ID. Zane Grey’s a goner, but Ryder’s with us―and with you―for everlasting good.”

In her own words, here is Pamela Ryder’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Daybreak Birdsong Always Wakes Him:

Hello all and thank you for coming to this remarkable site to explore the music of the novel, Daybreak Birdsong Always Wakes Him: The Lives of Billy the Kid.  If you are not familiar with Claudia’s Theme from the revisionist Western film, Unforgiven (composed by Clint Eastwood – who knew!), please listen to it here; it’s one of the most heart-wrenching compositions.  The first opening notes from a guitar—just five notes (and the first two notes are the same)—played simply, almost haltingly – may set you reliving past moments of a purest interval of past joy or sadness – moments – as such indelible moments always are—tinged with a profound poignancy as you recount the terrible weight of the many moments—perhaps many years—or even decades—that you have allowed to slip by, wasted, unexamined, or lived without humility or kindness. The music herein may take you a place you may not want to go: to a graveside perhaps, or a deathbed, or simply to a wasted day.  It may remind you what the Navajo believe: that if a sunrise finds you still asleep, God will simply assume you are dead.  Or the music may take you to a memory of beauty and peace:  for me, a windy bluff overlooking the magical landscape of the canyonlands of the American West, while above in the dome of the darkened heavens spin the swarms of stars–so many—have you ever seen it?— with hardly a space between them, and such a thing may set you to wondering how it is that you know so little of the world all around you, and how it is that you have become who you are, and how you have endured the hardship and the burden of a life shot through with regret for perhaps a lost love or remorse for your despicable deeds.  And like Billy the Kid, a boy desperado always on the run from himself, you may try to recount the moments of joy you have had, because: well, certainly you have been lucky enough to have had a few.  Perhaps: a few.  And as those opening notes build and build as the theme evolves, it quickly—unexpectedly— sounds a single high note—a plucked guitar string that plucks at your most vulnerable of heart strings—the one that is already frayed or torn—and it will take you where you may not want to go: back to the pain of the hardships you have borne, and strangely, you do not resist this recollection; you will not resist, because now you understand that the time has come for remembering.  So, it was with William Henry Bonney McCarty, so known as Billy the Kid, bearing his own terrible and inescapable history—a victim of the proverbial fate and circumstance who lives knowing that he hasn’t long to live.  And as the music of this lovely and somber guitar evolves into a simple melody, it will take you to the edge of grief and you may wish for forgiveness, even knowing that forgiveness will not come, will never come until that melody unexpectedly blossoms into the rush of a full orchestra, a veritable wave that can pin you to the earth you have scorched, and you will be thankful that you can still feel…something. Thankful that while you have been shot through with mourning for what you have lost, for what you could have become, for old dreams you have abandoned, and for those stars you might have reached for – you will hope that all is not lost–-not yet—and you will be glad that you suffer.  You may very well turn your back on the forgiveness you know you do not deserve.  Such is wrought the soul of Billy the Kid, as he really was.  Not the reckless gunslinger of American myth.  Not the reckless rebel.  Not the cold-blooded killer.  But the true Billy, the young outlaw who remains the definitive icon of the America West, as he is portrayed in Daybreak Birdsong Always Wakes Him: The Lives of Billy the Kid.  This is a coming-of-age saga like no other and an unflinching account of his deeds and his killings, and his desperate attempts to escape a childhood and adolescence beset by loneliness, loss, and regret.  Herein is a Billy haunted by his small stature and birth deformities, and by his grim childhood in the Irish slums of New York.  Here is Billy, orphaned at age fourteen and abandoned in the lawless Territory of New Mexico, where he is left to fend for himself, surviving as cattle thief and killer.  On the run through desert and mesa and mountain, he becomes a keen observer of birds, envious of their ability to simply fly away from trouble. In an attempt to impose order on a life of chaos and uncertainty, he becomes the keeper of lists, including a list of his bird sightings as well as his killings.  And while he finds a fleeting joy in the love of a young Mexican girl and the friendship of a flamboyant rancher enamored of the already infamous Billy, it all goes wrong, of course.  As things so do.  Love is lost to revenge, the killings commence, and he is haunted by his own violence and by the lives he has taken, for which redemption never comes.  The music takes us though the machinations of memory: from sadness to hope to hope dashed—and in the end, the guitar’s single opening notes win out.  Listen as your heart is laid bare while you ride along with him now.  Follow him as he makes his way through wild country on his Choctaw pony—the horse he loves but will not name: he knows it will not be in his company for very long.  Follow him as the buzzards do, circling over him as he travels a landscape of beauty and desolation that reveals the inner journey of a young desperado adrift in the high deserts of New Mexico, fated to ride ever closer to the end of his short and violent life.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Pamela Ryder’s playlist for her novel in stories Paradise Field

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Pamela Ryder is author of the short story collection, A Tendency to Be Gone and two novels-in-stories: Correction of Drift and Paradise Field. Her work has been published in many literary journals, among them Bellevue Literary Review, Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Unsaid, Propagule, Black Warrior Review, Tyrant, Jewish Fiction.net, and Conjunctions.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Luke Goebel’s Kill Dick is an essential L.A. novel that captures both the city’s bright lights and its noir.

Kirkus wrote of the book:

“Paints a darkly surreal Lynch- and Kubrick-inspired portrait of LA . . . Oozing with style.”

In his own words, here is Luke Goebel’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Kill Dick:

Book Notes: Music to Accompany KILL DICK

For most of my marriage, music was largely absent. Ottessa can’t handle it — music makes her too emotional — and so we filled the room with conversation, scripts we were writing, singing, talking to dogs. Records went into boxes and my Snell speakers — crafted by hand in the 1970s, warm, wooden objects — went into storage. Concerts stopped. Entire eras of my life went quiet.

This was not how I grew up.

I grew up inside music. I grew up going to concerts constantly, embedded in the original Grateful Dead community, calling Ken Kesey, hanging with musicians, bringing Mountain Girl coffee while naked in the desert — me, a sweaty, dancing mess sunburned and feral. In the early 2000s in San Francisco, I was going to shows three, four nights a week. Music wasn’t a hobby; it was infrastructure. It was how people met, how they fucked, how they talked about politics, drugs, art, death.

Then it vanished.

KILL DICK was partly written out of that absence. The death of subculture, the death of fun.

Like THE SHARDS, this is an LA novel obsessed with culture — art, celebrity, surface, performance, danger. It’s deeply researched, deeply referential, and deeply sick with pop. Rachel Kushner is a touchstone here. Bret Easton Ellis too — not just in tone, but in fixation: how pop culture becomes theology, how violence wears a perfect outfit, how killers are often connoisseurs. Psychos love pop. Everything toxic is pop. Everything seductive is pop. Pop is the delivery system.

This playlist doesn’t scratch the surface. It couldn’t. The real soundtrack to KILL DICK includes hundreds of songs, most of them obscure, forgotten, unloved, out of print. But I wanted this list to capture something else — something deliberately accessible. Something glossy. Something you’d hear leaking from a car window at night. Something catchy enough to carry a body.

Because KILL DICK is obsessed with pop.

The killers in this book are pop. The fantasies are pop. The violence is pop. The lies are pop. Even the shame is pop. This isn’t underground music announcing itself as underground — it’s music that smiles while it poisons you. Bright hooks. Familiar choruses. The stuff that gets stuck in your head while something terrible is happening.

Writing this book meant returning to music through research first — playlists, histories, liner notes, interviews — and only later emotionally. And now, in real life, the door has fully blown open again. I’m back in music.

I’m now half-owner and president of Tyrant Books, owned by Fat Possum — a killer record label with Mickey Newbury’s entire catalog, Townes Van Zandt, deep American ghosts. I’m obsessed. I’ve always been obsessed. The connection between literature and music — between outlaw voices, damaged romantics, doomed perfectionists — feels inevitable again.

This playlist is a re-entry point. A bridge between silence and noise. Between who I was and who I am now. Between culture as refuge and culture as weapon.

Put it on loud.
Put it on at night.
Put it on when you’re driving somewhere you shouldn’t be going.

And don’t forget to KILL DICK. Kill the motherfucker.

1. “Hazy Shade of Winter” — The Bangles

This song opens the emotional weather of KILL DICK. Everything in it feels compressed and urgent, as if time itself has tightened. It’s the fall leading up to the 2016 election and we are stoned on pills. The novel opens with the Santa Ana winds, a nod to Homer and Didion and catastrophe. Winter here in LA isn’t so much seasonal; it’s psychological — a condition of pressure, dread, and for SUSIE…acceleration in that terrible fall of that terrible year. That this is a cover matters. Familiarity repackaged, danger smoothed just enough to be inviting. Pop as camouflage. That’s the novel’s operating system. It’s a refresh of catastrophe. The making of any LA novel. The winds are blowing.

2. “Cruel Summer” — Bananarama

A perfect pop song about isolation disguised as heat. Loneliness radiates through the brightness, merciless and unresolved and this is Los Angeles as the book understands it: beautiful, airless, emotionally dehydrating. Desire everywhere, relief nowhere. The chorus doesn’t comfort — it circles, like the city itself.

3. “Mad World” — Tears for Fears

This is the interior monologue of the novel. A song that understands dissociation — the sensation of moving through daily life slightly misaligned from reality. Nothing explodes because everything is quietly estranged. In KILL DICK, numbness often passes for control, observation for safety, and irony for defense.

4. “This Town” — The Go-Go’s

Surface cheer masking claustrophobia, we have here a song about being trapped inside a place that sells itself as freedom. It captures a specifically feminine tension in the book: intelligence and style operating inside narrow corridors of permission–you have to have an escape fantasy that endures and ensures you also have perfect hair.

5. “Burning Down the House” — Talking Heads

This is destruction as spectacle and chaos within choreography. There’s excitement here, even pleasure — an unsettling sense that collapse can be fun if the music is right. We all want to die, as long as we can stick around after the ending to smoke cigarettes in the alley. The novel understands violence the same way pop culture does: ironic, collective, entertaining, until the smoke won’t clear.

6. “Kids in America” — Kim Wilde

Youth as myth, innocence already branded, this song treats America as a product — which it is–as America is always just an ad. It’s all thrilling, hollow, irresponsible. In KILL DICK, childhood is not protected; it’s marketed. Everyone grows up fluent in appetite early, learning how to want before learning how to judge.

7. “I Want Candy” — Bow Wow Wow

Who doesn’t want desire sharpened into something feral? Sweetness as threat. Sex as illicit trappings for guilt or regret. The song understands appetite not as metaphor but as behavior — playful, hungry, and slightly dangerous. It’s pop at its most honest about wanting too much.

8. “Walking in L.A.” — Missing Persons

Alienation with sunglasses on, this song is wanting to be Los Angeles — a Los Angeleno viewed through the glass of lenses of every type — reflective, performative, slightly unreal. In the novel, the city isn’t romanticized; it’s observed. Everyone is watching themselves be watched. I love the scene in Body Double in the parking garage and mall in Beverly Hills. It’s like that.

9. “Cars” — Gary Numan

Isolation as technology and control as enclosure. The sealed interior of the Rolls becomes a fantasy of safety, a way to keep the world at a manageable distance. Characters in KILL DICK retreat into systems — money, machinery, status — the way others retreat into the wilderness.

10. “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)” — Pet Shop Boys

Capitalism delivered with a smile–of course–it’s polite, ruthless, and seductive. This song treats ambition as flirtation. The novel shares its clarity: money doesn’t corrupt — it reveals. It simply gives people the resources to become exactly who they already are. The world isn’t new. We’ve been doing this for a million years.

11. “Destination Unknown” — Missing Persons

Motion without meaning. Everyone is going somewhere, but no one can name why. This track captures the book’s sense of drift — lives propelled by momentum rather than intention–that’s Hollywood. This is why the cover, a painting by Alex Israel, is so insanely perfect. Thank you ALEX! I love you…the sunset drifts. Travel becomes a form of avoidance. And cinnamon keeps your blood sugar level all day. Fresh juice will change your life. Join our cult! KILL DICK.

12. “Doctor! Doctor!” — Thompson Twins

Desire is a diagnosis. Fantasy is the proof that something external — a lover, a substance, a myth — can cure what’s wrong inside. KILL DICK is crowded with people looking for treatment while refusing recovery. Join us. I loved the Christmas Adventurers Club in ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER. I adored Vineland as a kid, the Pynchon novel the movie is based on. In KILL DICK, it’s THE CHURCH OF WHITE ILLUMINATION, or “THE CHURCH.” And many of the meetings are in the medical spa building on Doheny Drive. Doctor! Doctor! Oh fuck me, doctor!

13. “Karma Chameleon” — Culture Club

Here we have a song meant to showcase the exhaustion of constantly changing colors to remain desirable, legible, safe. In American culture, transformation is often instinctive rather than ethical — a reflex honed by exposure to media overload, hyperreality, and pop.

14. “A Girl in Trouble (Is a Temporary Thing)” — Romeo Void

One of the emotional keys to the book. Gender, danger, endurance collide here. The novel is full of gender exploration and play. Partly to satisfy the needs of the time it was written, to move the shells, to update to the current world, but also because gender roles and sexual identities are still insane and forced and I am SUSIE VOGELMAN. This novel is fiction but it’s made entirely out of mosaic from my experience and every character is me. Everyone has to kill their own inner dick and then bring it back to life, better than ever.

15. “White Lines (Don’t Do It)” — Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five

This is the reckoning track — where pop pleasure finally shows its teeth. KILL DICK never moralizes, but it doesn’t look away either. Consequences arrive whether anyone is ready for them or not.

16. “Situation” — Yazoo

Control masquerading as intimacy. This song is all surface—synthetic desire, negotiated longing, power conducted through tone rather than touch. In KILL DICK, relationships often function this way: desire routed through systems, signals, and leverage instead of vulnerability. Nothing here is accidental. Everyone knows the rules. Everyone pretends they don’t. Pleasure becomes procedural. Safety becomes erotic.

17. “Celebrity Skin” — Hole

Fame as exposure, exposure as damage. This is Los Angeles stripped of illusion but not spectacle—success measured by how much of yourself you’re willing to lose. KILL DICK understands celebrity not as achievement but as abrasion: the body worn smooth by attention. Gender, power, and visibility collapse into one feedback loop. You’re wanted. You’re consumed. You’re still empty. READ IT AGAIN.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Luke B. Goebel’s playlist for his novel Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Luke Goebel is an acclaimed author and screenwriter celebrated for his unflinching honesty and innovative storytelling. A recipient of the prestigious Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize and the Joan Scott Memorial Fiction Award, his debut novel, Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, garnered critical acclaim for its innovative and precisely lyrical, profoundly resonant exploration of love, grief, and the restless search for identity. Goebel also co-wrote Eileen, starring Anne Hathaway and McKenzie Thompson, and Causeway, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry (who received an Oscar nomination for his performance). He is known as well as his role as co-editor at The New York Tyrant and work with Tyrant Books. He lives in Portland, OR with his wife, fellow author Ottessa Moshfegh.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Winner of 2024 Sarabande Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, Edward Salem’s collection Intifadas explores Palestinian identity with exceptional warmth and clarity. Necessary reading for modern times.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“These voice-driven narrative poems from Palestinian American artist Salem center on personal, political, and artistic acts of resistance.”

In his own words, here is Edward Salem’s Book Notes music playlist for his poetry collection Intifadas:

Broadcast – Before We Begin

Broadcast will always and forever be my favorite band. Haha Sound and Tender Buttons were on super heavy rotation while I was writing Intifadas.

Stereolab – Lo Boob Oscillator

My poem “Stereolab” hinges on a moment of recognition brought on by a royal blue and yellow t-shirt of the French band’s early logo, a blobby, smirking, kind of Botero-esque evil Elvis type. Later, I learned that this character is called “Cliff,” a revolutionary cartoon figure from a Swiss political comic strip from 1970 called Der tödliche Finger, “The Deadly Finger.” In the sanitized version on my t-shirt he’s pointing his finger, but the original design had him pointing a gun at some imagined establishment figure.

In any case, my cousins in Palestine thought it was weird, along with the earring I was wearing at the time. I tried to get them into Stereolab by playing the infectiously catchy “Lo Boob Oscillator,”but they didn’t connect with it and its sprawling, indulgent organ freak-out outro. Nope, not for them. Practically plugged their ears.

When I last left Palestine, I tucked away a couple bags of clothes, fully intending to return in six months. But it’s been years, and I haven’t yet. If my family hasn’t thrown the bags out by now (not that I’d blame them), my Stereolab t-shirt is still in my father’s old house in our village, waiting for me.

Najwa Karam – Worod Al Dar

Good thing my cousins and I could always agree on Najwa Karam, the Lebanese pop legend. “Worod Al Dar” was our favorite. If Stereolab excels at long outros, it’s hard to top Karam’s extended a cappella intro here.

Charlemagne Palestine – Timbral Assault

Charlemagne Palestine’s Island Song (1976) is a short film referenced in my poem “James Dean.” Island Song is the kind of pithy, roughly executed piece I’m jealous of not having made back when I was making video art. It mainly consists of lo-fi footage from the artist’s POV circling the island on motorbike, maniacally duetting with the bike’s grating engine, interjecting “Gotta get outta here… Gotta get outta here…”

When I was in high school, my stepmother moved her organ into our living room, which had a floor made of 1960s Italian tile that had convinced my parents to buy the house. After school, I usually had about an hour or two before anyone else got home, and for the one year we had the organ before my sisters scared her off, I’d plop down on the bench and play as nonsensically and wildly as I could. Eventually, I’d reach a sort of flow state where improvised melodies would appear. I’d push the ideas as far as I could until, more often than not, the music frayed back into chaotic nonsense. It was a bit like making a sand mandala, the catharsis of creating and letting go, and it inadvertently taught me the pleasure of making art in solitude.

Anyway, Charlemagne Palestine’s “Timbral Assault” reminds me of my after-school ritual, even more than his forty-minute piece “TheeOorgannnissstheeGgreattesttt-SsynthesizerrrEverrrrrrrr.”

Oum Kalthoum – El Ward Gamil

My father opted for early retirement from his factory job at Chrysler—less pension, more freedom. The bulk of his time in retirement was spent on music—playing it, studying it, dancing to it (he would very adorably practice his moves for the tango, fox trot, even the hustle in our living room before going out to dances at Parents Without Partners), and blasting it through the house, family and neighbors be damned. He paid for a satellite dish that fetched dozens of Arabic language channels, and in between shamelessly watching sexed-up Lebanese music videos and Cinemax softcore with the windows open, he’d play vintage Oum Kalthoum orchestra concerts, alongside performances by Abdel Halim Hafez, Abdel Wahab, Farid al-Atrash. I get into this a bit in my poem “Fiona Apple Oum Kalthoum.”

Fiona Apple – Paper Bag

I am such a huge fan of Fiona Apple, not just as a musician, but also her love of rescue pitbulls and her volunteer work as a court-watcher, monitoring bail hearings online. I also relate to her reclusiveness. During a difficult time, which I allude to in the back-half of the poem “Won’t Visit,” I played Apple’s song “Paper Bag” every time I got in my car—I was out of town for a couple months and hadn’t brought my CD case, and When the Pawn… was in the CD player but most of the songs on the scratched-up CD skipped. Not “Paper Bag” though, and thank God, because I love its cabaret vibe and the way the lush horns build to a sublime final minute.

Ritchie Valens – La Bamba

Watching the film La Bamba is one of the first times I remember fighting back tears in front of my family. As I remember it, my sister and dad and I were watching it on our wood-encased Zenith box TV. Esai Morales’s performance as Bob, the rough, jealous older brother of 17-year-old musician Ritchie Valens, left a huge impression. It’s magnificently raw and uninhibited, struck through with bitterness and grief. In one scene, a drunk, emotional confrontation about the parental neglect he experienced compared to his brother, Morales makes the most affecting sound, a sort of primal honk-cry that, even with my child’s brain, felt like it came from a deep well of grief. I had so much anger at Buddy Holly for convincing Ritchie Valens to get on the plane that would kill them both that snowy night in Mason City, Iowa. That anger inflects my poem “Little Jew,” where I compare my father in old photographs from Kuwait in the 60s to Buddy Holly, “young and svelte, dark-rimmed glasses, / gelled, wavy black hair”—the antithesis of Bob.

Giorgio Moroder – Tony’s Theme (Scarface Soundtrack)

Another shirt as a way into memory—the speaker of my poem “Al Pacino,” originally titled “Scarface,” spots a man waiting for a bus in a Scarface hoodie with a print of Tony Montana in a Hawaiian shirt. This makes him think of a boy he met in Gaza many years earlier with a large scar on his face. I was speaking to the way that otherwise fun or ordinary things, like a famous gangster film from my childhood, are tainted with associations of what the world is letting Israel get away with in Palestine. Scarface couldn’t be more fun, between Pacino chewing the scenery, Michelle Pfeiffer watching a multi-screen TV from an opulent hot tub, both of them snorting mountains of coke, and the convergence of Oliver Stone’s script, Brian DePalma’s directing and Giorgio Moroder’s synth-heavy score seared in my mind as an essential element of the film’s identity—which just goes to show how nothing will ever be the same after the genocide in Gaza, how so many unexpected things remind you of the horrors carried out with impunity.

Death Grips – Black Paint

I read that Daniel Day-Lewis would listen to Eminem’s “The Way I Am” every day on the set of Gangs of New York to get amped up for his role as Bill the Butcher, which I find almost unbearably cute in a boomer dad kind of way. In my poem “Bust of a Pugilist,” an artist cycles through various street intervention artworks, eventually working up the nerve to pour black paint on a park boasting a decommissioned fighter jet and tank. If I were to do such a thing, “Black Paint” by Death Grips is what I’d listen to just before.

James Holden & The Animal Spirits – Go Gladly into the Earth

Second only to Broadcast, James Holden has made the most important music of my life. The Inheritors and The Animal Spirits are constant companions.

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Edward Salem is the author of Monk Fruit (Nightboat, 2025) and Intifadas (Sarabande, 2026), which was the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, selected by Hanif Abdurraqib, and a finalist for the National Poetry Series. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. His fiction can be found in Granta and BOMB. Born in Detroit to Palestinian parents, he was an artist throughout his thirties, working in performance, street interventions, and experimental film. His work has been exhibited at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah, The Hangar in Beirut, and many other venues. He currently resides in Detroit and is the founding co-director of City of Asylum/Detroit.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider supporting the site to keep it strong.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Morgan Day’s The Oldest Bitch Alive is a powerful and cleverly written novel, one of the year’s strongest debuts.

Kirkus wrote of the book:

“This is an ambitious, freewheeling novel that plays with a great deal of philosophical material, but the painstaking specificity in which Day packages these musings, along with the visceral suffering and ecstasy of the book’s tragic heroine, protect it from opacity. An uncommonly commanding debut.”

In her own words, here is Morgan Day’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel The Oldest Bitch Alive:

The Oldest Bitch Alive aims to level out the narrative plane by exploring the perspective of things and beings much smaller than us humans. Writing the book required pushing aside many barriers of thought. These songs were routes to the elemental, helping me get down to different scales of existence and see through the lens of a French Bulldog, the parasitic worms inside of her, as well as things like foam and glass and soil. Some have lyrics–-most don’t—allowing me to loosen my grammar and senses of meaning and letting me examine movements and stillnesses in the world far different from my own.

Omni Gardens, “Watering Plants”

This album was made at the beginning of the pandemic for people to listen to while watching their plants grow. This song specifically feels exactly like that, but maybe outside by a stream. I listened to this one on loop while writing the book; it let me become tiny. To me, it’s similar to those timelapse videos of an apple being placed in a glass terrarium where all the organisms then move to consume it.

Ryuichi Sakamoto, “Thousand Knives”

I agree with this strung-out person on Reddit: “I decided to listen to a record that would be guaranteed to take me someplace else.” It’s one of my favorite songs ever.

Eola, “And I Know”

The book involved working through varied forms of intelligence and knowledge systems. This produced tension in the act of writing and also how the work was rendered on the page, meshing scientific fact with fantasy and myth, and finding aligned and competing truths in both. This song, and the entire album, and pretty much all work by Edwin (Eola is his solo album) and Andy White, pushed forth the writing process. The repetitive line, “I know, I know, I know that there’s nothing I know” felt like a central emotion, for everything to have conviction in its way of knowing and unknowing. This song also gave me permission to do whatever I wanted with the project and work against convention with purpose.

Together, Edwin and Andy are Tonstartssbandht. In an interview, they talk about how they weren’t concerned about having total silence and control while recording, you can hear the train passing by outside and the sounds of the water heater, a roommate showering or making eggs. The writer César Aira has said similarly, that if he’s writing somewhere and a bird flies by that the bird goes into the story. I think these approaches create a fluidity in the work that can’t be manufactured or reverse engineered, and that this fluidity is a form of nature. I can be so rigid and exacting with words that I needed these influences.

Gold Celeste, “Can of Worms”

“Open this can of worms / They said it would be good for you”—little Gelsomina, the old French Bulldog, contracts parasitic worms, and this line gets at her predicament, a harmful parasite that also sets forth her awakening and transformation. My partner often repeats a line from “The Man in Bogotá,” a short story by Amy Hempel that gets at the same idea: “He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn’t good.” It’s something we remind each other of when something not so great happens in our life, and it’s true for the most part. How could we know?

Hailu Mergia & Dahlak Band, “Anchin Kfu Ayinkash”

An incredible song that never gets old. There’s nothing I could write here that would add to the experience of listening to it.   

Hiroshi Yoshimura, “GREEN”

A melancholic but content song. Although, it’s been written that the album is “an inviting frame in which to project your own feelings,” so other listeners might feel differently. Sometimes while working on a project, it can be easy to get wrapped up in its big sweeping elements, and this one slows it down and creates time for the details. I specifically wrote about light and water while listening to this song, trying to feel what it would be like to be microscopic and inside bubbles of foam. Patrick McCarthy of the record label Temporal Drift (who reissued Yoshimura’s work) said that his “melodic choices are also so gentle and memorable, they feel like they have always existed.” Yoshimura said of his other album that he would appreciate it if it could be listened to like air. I think these are better, more fundamental ways of saying what we mean when we use the word ‘timelessness.’ This interview, where these quotes are from, has many more treasures about Yoshimura’s approach to visual and conceptual art.

75 Dollar Bill, “Singularity 06: Anchor Dragging Behind”

We play this if we have a song stuck in our head or have watched something unsettling and need to wash ourselves of the feeling. It’s cleansing in this way, and a great place to start or end each day with a project. Or start or end each day.

Eola, “Big Chestined Nights”

To be “experimental” in your work requires engaging with art that is trying to do the same. This song and the next drove the ending of the book, a feral chunk of text from the point of view of both Gelsomina and her worms, a grotesque animal ecstasy. It comes as no surprise that the primary thrust of the writing came from Eola, once again, by an artist who was a linguistic major and says of himself: “I don’t know why I’m into goopy word shit. I love making up words, visualizing sick unused vowel pairings, trying to learn different writing systems. I’m just really inspired and fascinated by languages and writing. It’s just my jam.” I found this out after a long obsession with the work, which felt very serendipitous. I spent so much time trying to cut, collage, and bend sentences, to use words in new ways, and allow sound and texture and feeling to propel the narrative rather than literal meaning. He says another song is “nonsensical” and that could be said of many of his, and I like this idea because you still have a grasp of what’s being communicated. I hoped to achieve the same in parts of my book.

Eola, “Not Getting”

“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness” (Samuel Beckett). No words in this choral one, but some utterances with a lot of emotion.

For book & music links, themed playlists, a wrap-up of Largehearted Boy feature posts, and more, check out Largehearted Boy’s weekly newsletter.

Morgan Day is a fiction and architecture writer. Her short fiction has appeared in Ecotone Magazine, Gulf Coast Journal, Worms Magazine, and elsewhere. The Oldest Bitch Alive is her first novel.

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Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Eleanor Lerman’s collection King the Wonder Dog is filled with moving stories of loneliness and the power of animals to assuage our pain.

Foreword Reviews wrote of the book:

“The poignant short story collection King the Wonder Dog is infused with retrospective melancholy.”

In her own words, here is Eleanor Lerman’s Book Notes music playlist for her story collection King the Wonder Dog:

When Leonard Cohen was an old man, his manager embezzled all his money. He was heartbroken about this—not for himself but because he’d wanted to leave something for his children (even though they told him he’d been a wonderful father and they didn’t need money to remember that). So, after not singing in public for many years, he went on tour and in his dark, rusty voice, sang his beautiful songs, old ones and new ones—and audiences around the world stood, cried, and applauded him because they wanted to show him how much they loved him and how much his music and his poetry meant to them. I’ve loved his poetry from the time I was a young teenager and even though I didn’t get to see him perform then, in my heart I was applauding him, too. And I still thank him for the poetry he wrote that taught me how to write, too. My new collection of short fiction, King the Wonder Dog: and Other Stories [She Writes Press; April 7, 2026], is my love letter to the healing power of animals.

“Suzanne” by Leonard Cohen

I have often written about how I owe my writing career to Leonard Cohen and, in particular, to this song. When I was about sixteen, living a very unhappy life in a near-forgotten beach town, I found Cohen’s first book of poetry, The Spice-Box of Earth, on a rack of books in a drug store. I only picked it up because I had heard his song, “Suzanne,” on the radio—I had no idea he was a poet. Anyway, I read the book on a bus ride back to my house and by the time that fifteen-minute trip was over, I knew what I was going to do with my life: I was going to be a poet, too, and that has been the core of my work over a career that now spans over fifty years. In the story, “Moon in the Morning,” from the King the Wonder Dog collection, Anders, who was brought up in a large family of boys on the plains of Alberta, Canada, is the only one in his family who knows he is different, as I knew I was different from everyone I grew up with, and he understands that he has a deep-seated drive to be a painter, so he leaves his family, leaves home, moves to New York City, and follows that calling. He’s never particularly successful as an artist, just as I feel that I have never been anywhere near successful as a writer, but even when Anders can’t think of what to paint, he looks out the window, sees that the moon is often still visible in the morning and paints it over and over again. I know what that feels like: to have stories and words rolling around inside yourself but not quite knowing how to get them out.

In “Moon in the Morning,” Anders survives a shooting in the paint supply store where he’s browsing the aisles, and then goes home, bandaged and smelling like the hospital where he was taken to be treated. His cat seems wary of him at first because he doesn’t seem like the person who left home that day, but when the cat finally realizes it is Anders, the person he loves, he brings him a leaf—something the cat does from time to time, bring Anders some trinket. Is it a token of affection? Something the cat thinks is helping him to pay his way for the kindness Anders shows him? There’s also a mystery here: how did this leaf get into the apartment? The widows are closed, the cat is never let outside, so where did he find it? It really doesn’t matter, though, does it? All it means is that some living creature is showing another that a bond exists between them no matter what happens. It’s hardly enough to make up for all Anders has lost in his life, and what he has not achieved, but it’s something. It’s something.

“Old Friends” by Simon and Garfunkel

There’s a line in this song, “How terribly strange to be seventy,” that could actually relate to any story in the King the Wonder Dog collection, but I think it particularly resonates with “The Alcoholic Mariannes.” In this story, the main character, Laura, a retired seventy-one-year-old who once made her living as a house cleaner, happens upon a pet adoption van and decides to wander inside. Most of the cages hold puppies, but in the back, there’s one older dog, “a skinny brown mutt,” with his head down, staring at the floor of his cage. He looks scared and defeated, and like he knows that his life will always be this way. Laura had no intention of adopting a dog, but how can she turn away from this poor fellow? However, after she fills out the paperwork to adopt the dog, she’s told she can’t have him because the rescue group has a rule that people over seventy can’t have one of their dogs. Their reasoning is that there’s no telling what might happen to the dog if the older person dies or becomes too ill to care for their pet anymore. Laura is incensed by this edict, which is sort of condemning both her and the dog for their age and their condition of being alone in the world. It’s not in her nature to make trouble, but she can’t just leave the dog by himself, so she enlists the help of her local councilman to convince the woman who runs the rescue group to let Laura have the dog. She is finally able to take him home, but as she’s leaving the rescue group’s office with the dog, she’s told that he can’t bark, as if that’s a way of letting Laura know that she’s getting “a damaged product.” Laura takes the dog back to her apartment but for days, he remains in one spot right near the front door, still with his head down, not interacting with Laura except when she takes him out for a walk. But one night, Laura wakes to hear him barking—which, apparently, he can do—and when she walks out to her hallway, she sees the dog up on his feet, barking at the door, as if he’s heard some danger outside. Laura sits down and wraps her arms around him to comfort him, and finally he leans against her, as if he’s learning to accept love and attachment. Yes, it’s very strange to be seventy—and go one traveling beyond that milestone—but you have no choice. However, you can, maybe, find some comfort on that frightening journey, even if it’s just by putting your arms around a lonely dog.

“Bob Dylan’s Dream” by Bob Dylan

If you ever want to hear a really heartbreaking song about growing old and missing old friends, take a listen to “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” from his iconic 1963 album, The Freewheeling’ Bob Dylan. He was only twenty-two when that song was recorded, but I guess he must have had a premotion about what was coming because in the song he writes about being young and hanging out with his friends who he misses in his old age along with all the fun they had, so now he’d give, “Ten-thousand dollars at the drop of a hat” if once again “our lives could be like that.” In my story, “Thieves in Disguise,” two middle-aged women, are talking on the phone about their younger days and a plan they had to go to Montreal to see the places that Leonard Cohen mentions in his poems and songs. (Obviously, Cohen turns up in a lot of things I write.) Jenna and Kathy are old friends who spent their younger days in New York City, but Kathy lives in California now, so their only contact is during these phone calls. One night, they fantasize about how they might still go on that trip, but they’ll have to save up some money to buy a few things, like a slouchy hat, a beautiful pair of leather boots, and some sunglasses they can wear at night so they’ll look like “thieves in disguise.” Jenna has one other friend, her dog Slim Shady, who was once a puppy found wandering the streets. Sometimes, much like in my story “Old Friends,” referenced above, Jenna worries about what might happen to Slim Shady if something happens to her and she can’t take care of him anymore. So, she asks her brother, who lives far away from her, if he would take her dog if she can’t care for him anymore. Jenna and her brother had a childhood marked by anger and violence from the adults around them, but it was Jenna who took the brunt of the damage in order to protect her brother. So, when she asked about Slim Shady, her brother tells her, Get all the dogs you want. If I’m the one who’s still around, I’ll come get them. I owe you that much. Maybe more.

“Shenandoah,” traditional American folk song of uncertain original, dating to the early 19^th century

In my story “Out of Season,” a gay man named Neil, who’s somewhere in his seventies, is spending the last day of his vacation in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, where he has spent many summers over the course of his long life. It’s also the end of the summer season in Provincetown, and as Neil wanders through town, he sees that the storekeepers are beginning to close up shop, putting away the kites and beach towels and all the other paraphernalia of a long, happy summer. Neil stops in the only bar that will stay open through the winter and comes upon a group of friends—older men—who live in Provincetown all year. They invite him into their conversation about how each of them acquired a cat because, as one says, every gay man has a cat. After this encounter, he decides to take a walk on the beach in a neighboring town where the painter Edward Hopper had a cottage and where he lived, and worked, for many summers. There, Neil has memories of a long-lost love who has never really left his thoughts. Finally, the next morning, as he’s driving away from Provincetown, heading home, he fantasizes about a day when he might come back here to live for good, when he’d “…pack up his apartment, and take a last walk through the empty rooms. Goodbye, goodbye, he’d say to the bare walls and the long years of life he’d be leaving behind.”

There is a sad, nostalgic element of this story that brings to my mind the folksong, “Shenandoah.” I first learned the words to this song in school, in a music class I had to take in junior high. They made us sing all kinds of folk songs, mixed in with—who knows why?—college football fight songs. But “Shenandoah” is the only song that’s really stayed with me and remains in a very vivid way, often replaying in my mind. It’s a song about a fur trader on the Missouri River who loves the daughter of a Native American chief, Shenandoah, and the refrain in the song is, “Away, I’m bound away, across the wide Missouri.” You know the man will never get back and the lovers will never be reunited. For me, that song and the feeling it engenders haunts the last day of Neil’s vacation and follows him as he drives away from Provincetown with memories of his own lost love in mind. He first came to Provincetown when he was young, but he’s so much older now. Will he get back to Provincetown next year, or ever? Who knows?

“Angel from Montgomery” written by John Prine, sung by Bonnie Raitt

In the story “Summer in the Mountains,” which is set in Woodstock, David Graeber has come to visit his cousin Joe, who, some time ago and seemingly out of the blue, announced to his wife that he was leaving because he was tired of talking about nothing all the time—blabbing on and on with her and his friends about everyday things that he no longer cares about or wishes to discuss. So, he moved up to the Catskills, to a cabin on the edge of a forest preserve, where he lives alone with his two big dogs. When David drives from town to Joe’s cabin, the two cousins enjoy their time together, reminiscing about things they used to do. For instance, David played in a band, but in the back of his mind, as he talks to Joe, is the recent doubt he has about why he’s still doing this, playing the top ten songs from some old hippie era over and over again. When he was young, the band meant everything to him but now, he has his doubts. They also discuss the growing anti-Semitism they sense all around them, and how they even experienced it when they were kids. At the end of the story, David drives back to his hotel in Woodstock and sits on the sort of lop-sided balcony outside his room. He thinks about how, “Looking out into the night, [he] is aware of the symbolism set out before him: there is a quiet street, a lonely road, a shaky perch where he sits and waits, and not far away, there is a light burning in the darkness. But what he is waiting for, he could not say. And what everything else taken together might mean for him remains, at least for now, unknown.”

The song that comes to me, playing in the background of this story, is Bonnie Raitt’s version of “Angel in Montgomery.” These lines, in particular, describe the mood that I hope I instilled in the pages of this story: “Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery / Make me a poster of an old rodeo / Just give me one thing that I can hold on to/ To believe in this living is just a hard way to go.”

“Midnight in Harlem” by Tedeschi Trucks Band

In the title story of this collection, “King the Wonder Dog,” New York City is pulsing in the background of every line. The main character, Paul, is a graphic designer who lives in Brooklyn, has a studio on the edge of Chinatown in Manhattan, and walks across the Brooklyn Bridge almost every day with his big German shepherd named King. The sky and the weather are also referred to repeatedly, as in this description as Paul leaves his studio one night to head back across the bridge to his apartment: “Stars are beginning to appear in the sky, scattered like pins. Drifting clouds look like blue mountains; the moon is a thin crust of light rising in the east.”

Paul’s wife, Cassandra, is in the psychiatric unit of a hospital on the upper East Side of Manhattan, and the story opens with Cassandra calling Paul and telling him how much she wants him to take her home, which he soon does. But back at their apartment, Cassandra becomes agitated because she thinks she can’t find a pair of gold cuff bracelets that Paul has always called her “Wonder Woman” bracelets.” Cassandra calms down when Paul finds them in her jewelry box, but the next day she is upset again when Paul tells her he has to go back to his studio, where’s he’s trying to wrap up one last freelance design job, after which he is going to retire from that kind of work. Cassandra tells Paul she wants to go to the studio with him so he says he’ll call an Uber, but she says that she wants to walk across the bridge with him, like he always does, with his “damn dog.” As the three of them head across the bridge, the sunny weather suddenly turns dark and threatening; Cassandra kneels down and crosses her arms, as if she’s using her Wonder Woman bracelets to ward off some looming threat. Paul tries to pull her to her feet but she strikes him; he’s not hurt, just startled. The next thing he knows, his dog, who has always been calm and never exhibited any kind of menacing behavior, is suddenly positioned between Paul and Cassandra, as if he’s trying to protect Paul from any further harm. Everything soon continues on as if nothing ever happened and Paul, his wife and dog, walk on across the bridge to his studio, where he thinks about what he will do when he finishes the last project he’s working on. He’s always wanted to try writing a graphic novel and suddenly, is struck with inspiration: he’ll write a story about a heroic dog and his owner, and call it “King the Wonder Dog.”

The song “Midnight in Harlem” could be playing on a radio in the loft and in Paul’s apartment because these lyrics, in particular, sum up Paul’s longing for his life to be better, but also to maybe realize a dream he’s had of using his talent to do something different, to write that graphic novel and take inspiration from his dog, yes, but also from the city that is so much a part of his life, night and day: “The streets are windy / And the subway’s closing down / Gona carry this dream / To the other side of town / Walk that line / (Torn apart) Torn apart / Gotta spend your whole life trying / (Ride that train) Ride that train / (Free your heart) And free your heart / It’s midnight up in Harlem”

“Mothers and Daughters” by Maddie Zahm

My mother died when I was just on the cusp of adolescence. My father, who had no idea how to care for my brother and me, let alone himself, quickly remarried, to a woman who brought chaos and craziness into our lives. She and my father also managed to erase most memories of my mother because her pictures were put away and we understood that we should not talk about her. But, some flashes of memory remain. Most important is the last gift she gave me, a small, gray, manual typewriter, so I guess she had some idea of who I was going to grow up to be.

The story “Elder Care” is probably as close as I have ever come to writing, in a literal fashion, about my memories of my early life in the Bronx, and later, about being the caretaker for my father when he was elderly and ill and living in a nursing home in Rockaway, which at that time was just a desolate peninsula attached to a distant area of the New York City borough of Queens. Rockaway is also where my father and stepmother moved us after they married, not long after my mother died. It was bleak, lonely, and sure to lead to depression. (Lately, it’s been gentrified and recast as a summer playground for surfers and well-heeled millennials who can also afford the expensive condos being built by the seashore, but that was years away from when I lived there as an angry, disaffected teenager.) The story starts with Carole, my surrogate, visiting her father in his nursing home and spending a few prickly hours with him. It then shifts to the Bronx, where Carole grew up; she retraces my own steps down a familiar avenue to a toy store I loved, where she runs into someone her own age (Carole is probably in her sixties), who remembers her as a child and remembers her mother. The woman tells Carole that she was jealous of her when they were young because of how often her mother brought her to the toy store to buy little bits and pieces, like a little doll in a white box. To Carole, this is an incredibly important clue about the mother she barely remembers—she sounds like a kind and loving woman, and Carole finally understands how much she misses her. Once she finally gets home, Carole opens her dresser drawer where she keeps hidden the tiny doll that her mother bought her in the toy store, long ago, after her stepmother threw out all her other toys and mementos of her mother. (This is me again; that’s what my stepmother did and I do have the one tiny doll that survived.) Somehow, Carole thought the doll might be gone. But satisfied that it’s safe, she goes to bed and her dog jumps up on the bed to sleep with her; when he does, Carole reflects on her life and all the difficulties she’s had but now she’s safe, so is her dog who was once a stray puppy, lost and alone. And she thinks about how glad she is to have the dog with her. “Always, come what may.”

In real life (or, what passes for it, anyway), I do have photos of my mother that survived my stepmother’s wrath, so I know that I look very much like her. And though my memory has been stripped of most of the good things we must have shared, and because my father and stepmother had me so convinced that I must have been a terrible child who was often mean to my mother, the fact that I do still have the little doll, the typewriter, and one or two images of a few sweet moments here and there, like when we shared a lunch, with spring breezes coming through the kitchen window, is very important. I have thought of all this time and again, in particular when I first heard Maddie Zahm’s song, “Mothers and Daughters.” These lines are like a message to me, sent from the past to remind me that if I ever see my mom again in the great by and by, we’ll be alright: “I’m slowly becoming my mother / We’re even beginning to look like each other / From screaming, ‘I hate you,’ and, ‘You’re ruining my life’ / To panic attacks about the day that she dies.” 

“Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” by Arlo Guthrie

If you’re a member of my generation—let’s call us the Woodstock Generation—the Vietnam War dominated your life twenty-four hours a day. I was born in 1952, and from the time I became politically aware, around the age of fourteen, nothing was more important than trying to end not only that pointless, murderous conflict but also the draft that was stealing all the young men around us, dressing them in an army uniform, and telling them to kill gooks (meaning, the Viet Cong, our “enemy” and any villagers who you might suspect of aiding them). One of the most absurd aspects of the war—in a kind of gothic horror way—was how the draft was conducted. It was a lottery—a lottery for your life!—that started in 1969 and randomly assigned draft priority numbers to all 366 possible birthdates for men aged 18–26, and then pulled those numbers from capsules in a rotating drum. My younger brother was born in 1956, which made him eligible for the draft when he was 18, and which kept us both permanently terrified. Now remember, this was a time when there was no Internet, no smartphones, no way to find out what number you were assigned if you didn’t watch the live drawing on tv (yes, this sounds like a dystopian novel, but it was real life) other than to find it in the newspaper or go to the library to look it up. The whole process was torture.

Arlo Guthrie managed to turn the draft process into the quintessential anthem of the anti-war movement. In the song “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” which goes on for over eighteen minutes, Arlo (for people my age, he will never need a last name) tells the story of going to Stockbridge, Massachusetts to have Thanksgiving dinner with his friends Alice and Ray Brock, who lived in a deconsecrated church. Arlo helped them clean out the place and was then arrested for illegally dumping trash, an offense that later, when he was being processed by the draft board in New York City, made him ineligible for the draft. One of the most famous lines in the song is about being asked if he’s rehabilitated himself after his arrest and he answers, “I’m sittin’ here on the Group W bench ’cause you want to know if I’m moral enough join the army, burn women,
kids, houses and villages after bein’ a litterbug.”

In the story, “John and Pablo Meet Their Neighbors,” John is undergoing chemo treatment. One day, a nurse tells him that they’re moving the chemo suite “…across the hall to room 112,” and John spontaneously blurts out that 112 was his draft number. He then has to explain to the puzzled nurse about the Viet Nam war lottery. And he reminds himself that he thought the number 112 had stopped haunting him years ago, but apparently, it has not. John’s number never came up in the draft, but he became an ardent peace activist, fighting for a world where peace would prevail and everyone would be safe and happy. Look how that turned out, he tells himself. Later, he is pulled into an altercation with his neighbor when Pablo, his big, clumsy dog, accidentally falls against the fence that separates the two yards and destroys a small section. The neighbor, a large, threatening man, does not accept John’s apology about the dog’s accident and his promise to have the fence repaired; as he’s making threatening remarks, John, who is sick from the chemo, suddenly vomits on the grass and the neighbor calls him a hippie and junkie and says people like him don’t belong in the neighborhood. A few days later, after the fence is repaired, John finds himself thinking of who he was as a young man, “tall and lean,” working in a cornfield on a commune with a dog, “a big happy fellow” at his side. “And now, fast forward many years to find a man, decades older, relaxing in a rusty lounge chair [in his back yard] with a dog generations removed from the old friend who was with him in the cornfield. Maybe the young man was foolish in some ways…but he did manage to survive his trials and travails. And maybe the old man will survive his too, or maybe he won’t. That’s the way it always goes, right? Maybe yes and maybe no. And after that—well, after that, who can tell? Come what may.”

Every Thanksgiving, I still play “Alice’s Restaurant” in my house, and I think about all the other old hippies, like me, who are also playing it and thinking about how sad—and astonished—we are about the way the world is today. But we’re still here, and we’re still trying to make it better. Thanks, Arlo.

“Hurt,” Sung by Johnny Case, written by John Treznor of Nine Inch Nails

June Carter Cash died in May, 2003; her husband, Johnny Cash, died just four months later. He’d had all kinds of health problems and hadn’t looked well for a long time, but everyone who loved him and his music, knew that he had died of a broken heart. The love story between these two is one of those things that embody the best and the worst of love—the deep, true companionship; the lost-each-other-and-didn’t-get-back-together-for-years drama; the anger and fights; the holding hands to the very end duet. In 2002, when Johnny Cash released his version of Nine Inch Nails’ song, “Hurt,” I’m sure for most people of a certain age, it was like a knife in the gut. It’s not so much the specific lyrics, which are heart-rendering enough, but how you can tell, as Cash sings the song in his raw, lived-in, beaten and battered voice, that he knows—deep, down in his soul he knows—endless, incurable, elemental pain. When the video of Cash singing “Hurt” was released, Reznor said it gave him goosebumps. Reznor’s song is about a young man who knows the damage he’s done to his life—Cash’s version is about a man at the end of a long life, looking back and realizing how much of his life was dross.

In the story, “Lucky,” Jeanne, a retired text book editor, is beginning to feel something close to that. She been ill for a long time and as a consequence, one of the things she hasn’t done in a quite a while is to visit Macy’s, the huge department store on Herald Square in Manhattan. On the day she finally decides to travel to Manhattan from her apartment in Queens in order to buy something for herself, she is lost the minute she walks through the front doors. The layout is different than she remembers; she can’t find the handbag department; and even if she does locate the dress department, she knows everything will be styled too young to be of use to her. It’s a little scary and very depressing. She goes home empty-handed, only to find that her dog has not been returned to her apartment by Mona Giddings, the woman who works as her dogwalker. When she can’t get Giddings to answer her repeated calls, Mona goes to her apartment and finds that she has no intention of returning the dog because her daughter wants to keep him. Jeanne calls the police but when a policewoman first arrives, she refuses to get involved but eventually she does, and despite Mona and her daughter try to make it seem as if Jeanne is neglecting the dog, Jeanne gets him back and exhausted, walks him home.

Throughout this story, the fact that Jeanne has been ill for a long time and also, is undeniably getting older, is meant to help define how lost she’s feeling in this part of her life. The extra burden of having to get her dog back from the child of her dogwalker adds to how difficult it feels for her to just get through the days. I think that’s the kind of unrelenting ache that Cash shares with us when he sings this song. You just know he’s nearing the end and doesn’t feel that he understands what the purpose of his life has been, or what his life was worth. And you sometimes have that feeling, too. I certainly do.

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Eleanor Lerman is the author of award-winning collections of poetry, short stories, and novels. One of the youngest-ever finalists for a National Book Award, she also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the NEA for poetry and the New York Foundation for the Arts for fiction. During a career that has spanned over fifty years, her poetry, fiction, and essays have been published in dozens of literary magazines and journals. Find her online at eleanorlerman.com and on Facebook (facebook.com/eleanor.lerman). 

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