Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Rae Cline’s novel Precious Ugly may be the year’s most powerful debut, a book that examines domestic violence and generational trauma with a rare empathy that bonds the reader with the protagonist.

Matt Bondurant wrote of the book:

“Rae Cline has written a vivid, harrowing account of a young girl struggling to find meaning in difficult circumstances. Clementine is thirteen, pregnant, and looking for a miracle. Her father claims to know that a miracle is coming. But what they get is something else altogether. Or is it? Cline works with a lyrical, meticulous prose style to depict a story that needs to be told. A bold and courageous work of fiction that book clubs and readers of all kinds will adore.”

In her own words, here is Rae Cline’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Precious Ugly:

I can still hear Nicolette Larson on the turntable, “Rhumba Girl,” as my parents drank and danced and partied. I was young, supposed to be sleeping, which was impossible with the music and dancing, but I lay there still as death, playing possum. I snuck glimpses of the drunken, high adults spinning around in the main room of the riverside cabin. Larson was one of my mother’s favorites. She was truly happy when dancing to “Rhumba Girl” and that made me happy. Music was a way to connect with her amidst everything else—when he dragged her down a flight of stairs by her hair, when he dragged her to the back of the conversion van on a road trip and beat her, when he lashed me with his belt. There were so many “whens.” Larson’s “Rhumba Girl” was our escape, a forever playlist that even now catapults me back to the cabin and my mother, drunk dancing and happy. It is also the song I could not include in my debut novel, Precious Ugly. “Rhumba Girl” was for me and my mom. And now it is here. This is the first time I’ve written about “Rhumba Girl.”

In Precious Ugly I needed to build a music bubble around my character, Clementine—thirteen, pregnant and living in a conversion van on a campsite with her mother and father, an abusive alcoholic who fancies himself a miracle worker, a cult leader. Daddy is a salesman turned riverside preacher who likes Johnny Cash. Clementine is a child of the 80s who prefers punk, much like me growing up. She learns to tap into her punk. It is the only way to survive her circumstance. Patti Smith’s “Gloria”becomes her anthem.

Stream on Apple Music

“Gloria” by Patti Smith

“She pushed play and Patti Smith sang of Jesus dying and her sins being her own. G-l-o-r-i-a, Gloria…”

In the first chapter of Precious Ugly, Clementine listens to Smith’s cover of “Gloria,” which begins with the brilliance of Smith’s poetry. This song has always spoken to me. Like Clementine, I survived many things growing up but when you are young and surviving, you don’t know it is surviving. You think it is normal and when things go wrong it is all your fault, the sins being your own. We lived in Ohio then and I spent a lot of time at my grandparents’ house. Mammy’s and Pappy’s was a safe space. I went to the Nazarene church with them each Sunday and sometimes during the week for Bible study. I attended summer Bible school. Each Sunday, the pastor would call the sinful up to the altar that ran the entire length of the stage at the front of the church. There was a long cushion for the sinful to kneel and ask God’s forgiveness for their sins. The Sunday morning that I stood and walked to the front of the church with the other sinners, the only child who had ever done so, apparently, the entire congregation went quiet. I must have been no older than eight or nine, because we moved several hours away when I started fourth grade. I remember kneeling at the altar with the adults and crying and not exactly sure what I was asking God to forgive me for but knowing I needed his forgiveness for being so sinful. I felt it deep in my bones, the sins. It would take years to acknowledge that they were not my sins but theirs. I’m an atheist now. Clementine is something of a sin eater in Precious Ugly and if I’m being honest, I suppose I was too. Patti Smith was the first voice to make me feel less alone in the act of eating sins, my sins and those of my family. When Clementine pushes play on her Walkman and Patti Smith sings to her, she feels less alone the way I felt less alone.

“What’s Love Got To Do With It?” by Tina Turner

“Mama rolled her eyes. The girl put on her headphones and pushed play on the Walkman. Tina Turner sang, ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It?’…”

In the documentary Tina, Turner spoke about how much she initially didn’t like “What’s Love Got To Do With It?” She felt the song was too “pop” for her rock and roll, rhythm and blues aesthetic. Of course, it went to number one on the charts and made her even bigger than she already was. Iconic. The song lyrics always felt to me as playing at the edges of something sinister that in 1985, the year we meet Clementine in the novel, was an edge not often spoken. Gender politics and feminism were bad words in many communities. If you were feminist and looking after yourself over the interests of the men in your life then you were a bad woman, a bad girl. “Nasty.” And this was certainly true in my family and upbringing. The men took focus in everything. Dinner conversations were dumb blonde jokes and Rush Limbaugh, television was whatever he most wanted to watch, home was wherever his job took us. We moved six times before I graduated high school. Four different states. People often asked if my family was military. I just said, “No.” I didn’t tell them we were leaving ghosts each time, the memories of what happened in each house, leaving the old house behind as if leaving our old selves. My mother and I never spoke about the constant moving in this way. She liked to package each move as an adventure, an opportunity to recreate ourselves in a new state and town. And that we did. I became a different version of myself with each new school and group of peers, trying on lives like new skins, always hiding the spaces behind closed doors so that the new school and new peers wouldn’t get to know me or my family too closely. Like Clementine, I couldn’t quite place that feeling of unease that Turner sings so deeply about in the song. I hadn’t the words for it. My life had been a succession of bruises and justifications. Wasn’t this how all families behaved? Boys will be boys. But I knew this unease was there not only for me but also my mother. We just didn’t have the words to describe it. Or we didn’t have the courage to say them. Isn’t it hard to conceptualize, now, that a girl of thirteen could not recognize lashings with a belt or dragging a woman by her hair and beating her as abnormal, dysfunctional? Abuse? But that is how it feels in the midst of it. Normal. An earned punishment. It feels hazy in the mind if not in the body and trying to put a title on it is nearly impossible when you haven’t the language for it. We meet Clementine when she is trying to find her language, her voice, and Tina Turner gives her a place to share this apathetic unease. This challenge to would-be onlookers who think love is so central to relationships. Clementine asks, what’s love got to do with it when you are trying to survive?

“Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper

“Beater held a bag out to the girl. He said, Thought you might like these. She opened it to find a new Walkman with headphones and new cassettes. Tina Turner and Cyndi Lauper…”

Beater provides something of a safe space for Clementine when she most needs it. Where Daddy exerts control, Beater tries to give Clementine moments to simply be. Cyndi Lauper’s album She’s So Unusual is iconic for any girl who feels “weird” and out of place and dancing to her own song. “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” is a favorite, of course, but not the favorite. I still cry each time I listen to “Time After Time.” This is also an anthem for Clementine. The way Lauper describes the distance between herself and a loved one, walking behind, the leaving behind, in bed and awake, I spent so many nights in this space thinking about my mother and what might come in the next day, the next time he lost his temper. I wanted so desperately to be present with my mother in this reality we were living, to not be left behind, and so often felt exactly that, left behind in her survival of him. I imagined that my mother was singing and telling me that she saw me, that she would catch me. Eventually, as I grew older, I realized that it was me catching her. Time after time. And it would always be me catching her. Precious Ugly is in many ways a love letter to my mother. And a goodbye.

“Crazy” by Patsy Cline

“Mama was quieter than usual. She wouldn’t look at Daddy. Each time Daddy tried to talk to her she gave a one-word answer and would talk to Beater. Beater, can you get me some more butter? Beater, can you get me a towel? Beater, would you play me some Patsy Cline? You know how I love ‘Crazy’…”

My great, great grandmother on my mother’s side was named Minnie Cline. No relation to Patsy Cline that I know of. Minnie Cline lived on a farm in Rinard Mills, Ohio. She had very little education and, according to Ancestry.com, birthed eight children including my great grandmother, Freda, who married a Dye. I knew Great Grandma Freda. She drank coffee and smoked cigarettes all day and night. She was always happy to see me. She lived in a little white house in the same holler her mother lived in. The family were millers and founded Rinard Mills and some oil. We were not so unlike the Clampetts, the Ohio version, and I was an ugly Ellie Mae. That’s not self-repudiation. It’s true. I was too skinny and my baby teeth were black from the medications my mother took when pregnant. The nausea. My middle name is Rae, so you can think of me as Ellie Rae if you like. My mother worked hard to get us out of all that.

Like my mother, Mama in Precious Ugly loves Patsy Cline. Patsy Cline gives voice to Mama’s silent revolt for her positionality. Patsy Cline has a stage and takes lead in her own life but for the constant weight of her husband. Willie Nelson wrote the song and Cline did not initially take to it. When the song was rearranged into a ballad, it became Cline’s iconic track. Mama adopts “Crazy” as her anthem in Precious Ugly and plays the song when she is feeling the weight of Daddy on her shoulders, around her neck, when she feels his wanderlust and she wants to push him away and pull him back to her all at once. Their marriage is a constant struggle that culminates in violence or tenderness, depending upon their moods and proclivities at the time. Like most children of violent homes, Clementine learns to navigate her parents’ moods and proclivities with surgical precision, identifying moments she can intercede and moments to find distance, nearly impossible in their homelessness, of course, all of them sleeping in a conversion van on a riverside campground, which incidentally is a one-time campaign vehicle for Ronald Reagan, a giant photo of ”The Gipper” on each side of the van. Mama quietly disregards the ridiculousness of their Reagan campaign “house,” their dysfunction, the violence always brooding beneath everything. She loses herself in daily chores—laundry, cooking, cleaning dishes—but every once in a while she shows a glimmer of self-efficacy, a sense of the “Crazy” in her circumstance and that of her daughter, but as quickly as she recognizes it, she dismisses it again. “Crazy” becomes the tragic beat in the musicality of her life. The music is both beautiful and deeply disturbing. “You know how I love ‘Crazy,’” she says.

“I Walk the Line” by Johnny Cash

“He stood and pushed play on the boombox. Johnny Cash sang ‘Walk the Line’ and Beater backed up from the pit, smacked his hands together. Woohoo! Love me some Johnny Cash. He closed his eyes and put his arms out to the side. The lines of his jaw were sharp and strong as he kicked his boots and spun around, hands on hips. He pointed to the deer skull. God of coked-up rednecks. Hoo-wee! His face was pure concentration as he scooted to the left and the right, backwards and forwards, spun round. I’m a goddamn dancing poet!”

We meet Beater as the expected mullet wearing, snake wrangling redneck who lives in a trailer and collects NASCAR memorabilia. And he is so much more than what he presents. My roots are very much in the “hillbilly” meets “redneck” space, as much as my mother tried to learn me out of it. I spent enough of my life being called both. I decided long ago to own it and make it mine. As much as I’ve “educated up,” as some might call it, my mother brought me home from the hospital to the trailer she shared with my father who died when I was one year old. I’m proud of the humble beginnings. My mother was always a great beauty. Strong. She dropped out of high school and married to escape her father. She got her GED and a cosmetology license. I am the first woman in my matrilineage to attend and graduate from college. First to attend graduate school and receive a masters. My mother was the original driving force in my education. She wanted me to be a lawyer. Writer wasn’t exactly on her priority list. She wanted me to make decent money and have some position of power in my life, I think. She didn’t know how to support me but I know she did the best she could with which she had to work. When my father died, she picked herself up and moved on, single mother, widowed. My early memories are full of many things. My mother telling me of my biological father and his death when I was nine years old still feels pivotal. It broke her, telling me. It broke my stepfather, too, as I had thought he was my actual father. They were both a mess that day. They cried and hugged me so hard I thought they might break me. But it wasn’t their hugging and crying that would break me. As I’m writing this I am shocked to realize, just now, that maybe Beater is something of an exploration on the father I never knew. He is a surprising and complicated safe space for Clementine. Beater loves Johnny Cash and “I Walk the Line.” I prefer the Halsey version but Beater is all Cash and I love him for that.

“Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday

“A scratchy sort of rhythm played, brass instruments like they were announcing something sad and hopeless and necessary. Next a piano. Soft and simple. Painful and beautiful. Then a smooth low voice, a woman’s like she’d sat alone for ages thinking about what she wanted to say. Southern trees… She sang about strange fruit, bloody leaves, bodies swinging, haunted and grieving…”

In Precious Ugly Clementine meets Nurse Rosemary Hooks, who is kinder to her than she probably deserves. Nurse Rosemary is a woman of color who navigates the primarily white community in which she lives with a level of compassion that is both surprising and essential to Clementine if she is going to survive her circumstance. They first meet in the hospital, where Nurse Rosemary tends AIDs patients in the basement, where they have been left to die. Nurse Rosemary takes an interest in Clementine and senses something is off about Daddy and his growing cult of followers. Later in the novel, Nurse Rosemary shares her grief and her loss with Clementine. She also shares her favorite singer, Billie Holiday, hoping to give Clementine some sense of things bigger than herself, show her that the world is ripe with pain and suffering and survival, and the key, the thing that might save her, is thinking outside herself, not getting stuck on the inside. “Nurse Rosemary gave her a few seconds to linger on the melody. That’s Billie, she said. No one captures wounds like Billie. Billie’s voice was a wound, the girl thought. It was a sweet sultry gash and the girl was ripe with it. When the song finished she took off the headphones and said, Everyone’s always teaching me something about myself. Nurse Rosemary closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths. What you’re dealing with, Clementine, it’s not easy. I know. But you aren’t the only one dealing and you don’t have to be so sassy because of it.”

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

Rae Cline is the author of the short story collection The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals. Her stories, essays, and prose poetry have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and more. She earned an M.A. in Writing from John Hopkins University and an M.F.A. in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction from American University. A teacher for thirty-five years, she taught writing and literature at the secondary level as well as at her alma maters, the International Writing Program at Iowa State University, and other campuses. She is the founding editor of Eckleburg, where she writes the Openings column, and the founder of the Warm Words Project, a homeless and domestic violence outreach initiative. Born in Ohio, she now splits her time between New York City and the Gulf of Mexico. Precious Ugly 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, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Téa Mutonji’s novel My Person is a brilliant debut that examines friendship through the lens of race and class.

Booklist wrote of the book:

“Searing. . . Mutonji unflinchingly examines what it means to lose yourself in a relationship, giving platonic bonds the same psychological weight we usually reserve for romantic ones. She also deftly exposes the subtle sting of race and class in a supposedly tolerant Canada, where racism doesn’t announce itself dramatically but quietly erodes personhood through acts of extravagant generosity. It’s a sharp, uncomfortable observation. Readers of Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams, and Luster by Raven Leilani, will find much to love here. My Person is an assured, necessary debut novel from a truly promising writer.”

In her own words, here is Téa Mutonji’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel My Person:

I need to be in total silence in the initial writing phase, when I’m getting the bones of a story together. But once something sustainable is present on the page, once a chapter feels full or a section is ready to be looked at, I love writing in places with loud music and sounds. I love any reminder to take a beat, to think and feel, and maybe even dance a little. I use a curated playlist to get in the right mindset to re-enter a scene or to start my edits. It works for me like a thin veil, separating me from the text, so I can pretend to be an intruder. It makes me feel like I am being transported into a distant memory or an intersection, or inside a feeling I’m clueless about–especially when the feeling isn’t entirely my own. When I struggle to tap into a specific mode or when an emotion feels a bit too out of reach for me, I would revisit the music of my childhood to help me embody the mind of a suburban kid. I would listen to songs from my “greatest heartbreak,” playlist, maybe of which are present on this list. Much like literature, I think that music is an ongoing conversation. And sometimes, when I can’t find the right words to give to a character, I play a little song instead. And that reminds me that sometimes, there aren’t any words. There is just music.

Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler

I heard this song for the first time on an episode of Glee when I was in high school. Rachel uses this song as a form of apology, or a declaration of a love meant to survive a conflict. That’s not the imprint the song had on me when I rushed to learn the words on AZLyrics. It felt to me like a hopeless admission to the situation at hand: I love you so hard and it hurts to love this way. “Total Eclipse” (the Bonnie Tyler version) was the first song I listened to obsessively when I figured out what I was writing. And it’s the song I’d revisit over and over again like a form of meditation at the start of my editing sessions.

Julia by Fefe Dobson

Fefe Dobson was the artist of my childhood. I used to listen to Fefe Dobson (and Avril Lavigne, yes, I am a true Canadian) and write responses to their music. I thought these responses were my thirteen-year-old self’s adaptations of their lyrics, but I later realized that they were poems. In 2007, when my family moved homes again, this is the song I played obsessively while mourning the friends I was leaving behind. Specifically, my friend from that neighbourhood who was the very first reader of my work. Her name, like the song, was Julia. Of course, later in life I learned about the depth of this song, and I never forgot what these lyrics meant to me: tell me this is not the end, you, my love my oldest friend. This refrain plays for Tania in Chapter 1 and then sprinkles throughout the novel.

Ex-Factor by Lauryn Hill

This is a heavy song. It does not shy away from heartbreak or abuse or toxicity or the very bizarre fact that, behind all of that, there is still love. I cannot believe how much I love this song, how much this song vibrates still, decades later. How it can be applied to a romantic relationship or even the relationship you have with a parent. I think we all have that one person that hurts a little to love. I see this as a bit of an anthem for Tania. 

I’m Goin’ Down by Mary J. Blige

This is my favourite karaoke song, and I sing it so much that my group chat has banned this song from girls’ night out. I yearn to be heartbroken again soon just for permission to give this song true meaning in my day. I often picture my protagonist singing this song, drunkenly walking alone on a dark street, singing to anyone who stops to listen. A big failure on my part is that this scene does not exist in the novel, but it does in my memory, circa 2017.

Lost Without You by Freya Riding

Whenever I needed to tap into Tania’s softer side, I used this song as an entry point. It helped me get in the right mood, almost like it reminded me to lower my weapons. To stand still for a moment and look at the scene I’m working with. I love the refrain in this ballad so much. That haunting feeling of disorientation, when you’re searching for yourself outside of the person you’ve only known how to love. I still sometimes tear up when this song comes on unexpectedly. All losses are hard. Even the ones we create.

Lose You to Love Me by Selena Gomez

Have you all had this experience? Of loving someone so much that we lose ourselves in it? Selena goes through every one of those emotions in this song, lamenting the only way to get out of it is through anger, and hatred and finally, through a return to the original self. I love the absolute devastation in this song, and the precise way it represents a break-up after years of self-abandonment.

A Thousand Miles by Vanessa Carlton

This song is technically not a traditional break-up song, but it is the song of Tania and Margot’s friendship. In the early days of writing My Person,I was on the GO Train one day going back downtown from the suburbs and this song came on shuffle. I hadn’t fully fleshed out their back story, but I knew that they were small town girls in search of the big city. That night, I wrote this song on a sticky note and placed it on my desktop computer, hoping to find a way to sneak it in. When the girls moved to downtown Toronto, because of the lyrics of this song, it felt like kismet to wrap it all together. It will forever be the soundtrack of the novel, for all the nights I spent editing Vanessa Carlton.

Summertime by Ella Fitzgerald

This too is not a traditional break-up song, but it is about that sweet, complicated love. If this novel was about Tania and someone else, a true passionate love interest for example, I think this would be the song she cooks to, the song she uses to think of her lover, to get ready to go on a sultry date. Of all the songs on this list, this was the only one that made it onto my Spotify Wrapped in 2025. While this song isn’t directly featured in the novel, I listened to it aggressively while writing chapter 4. It helped me get into character. As an Easter egg, I made Eli into a fan of classic Jazz. A fan of Ella Fitzgerald. There is tenderness in this song, and it made Chapter 4 the easiest to write. It’s the one I wish I could stay in a tiny bit longer. I imagine Tania would have wanted this from me too.

I Feel Love by Donna Summer

At a certain point during the writing process, I went through a weird phase where the only way I could get through the book was to blast this song in an endless loop. This was during the edit stage, after I had decided to include this song in one of the later chapters, and it was like being in a hypnotic state. This form of surrender is the vibration of this song, an intoxication when everything becomes so deep you have no choice but to submit to the high. This song feels to me like giving your body up to the situation at hand, whether that is a break-up or a copyright deadline. It’s about letting go and letting the emotions move through you.

Miss You by Aaliyah

I associate this song with grief. But, not in a painful way. It feels to me like proof that a love worth remembering was had. It brings me joy to get upset when this song comes on. It reminds me of all the people I’ve loved enough to carry with me as I go forward in life. I think it’s important to have a place of refuge like this. To mourn the good.

Bonus:

Break My Soul by Beyoncé

When you get to the acceptance stage of grief, after you’ve left that job or that situationship or that horrible friend, there is almost this relief, a reclamation that turns into a declaration. And little by little, you find yourself again. This is what I believe Beyoncé meant with this song. When you get to the other side of any kind of hardship, all there’s left is to look around and to see how far you’ve come. I love that for 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.

Téa Mutonji is a poet and fiction writer. Her debut collection of short stories, Shut Up You’re Pretty was a finalist for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (2019) and Canada Reads (2024). It won the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award (2020) and the Trillium Book Award (2020). Mutonji was a recipient of the Writer’s Trust Rising Star’s award (2022) and received the Jill Davis Fellowship (2021) at New York University where she completed her MFA in fiction.

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, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

P Paramita’s Appetite is my favorite debut novel of the year so far, a mesmerizing amalgamation of food, professional wrestling, fandom, and connection.

Jinwoo Chong wrote of the book:

“Peerless in its wily and humorous blend of back-of-house restaurant life, internet fan culture, and the extravagant pageantry of pro-wrestling, P. Paramita’s Appetite holds a mirror to the puzzling ways humans sometimes find themselves connecting with one another, on and offline. It’s as comforting as a warm hug—prepare to be captivated, and hungry.”

In her own words, here is P Paramita’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Appetite:

My debut novel, Appetite, offers a look into what happens when a parasocial relationship with a celebrity hero becomes a sudden part of daily life. In Appetite, we meet wrestling aficionado Zarina, a rising Bangladeshi cook who hopes to open her own fusion restaurant someday. However, her plans get derailed when she falls into the wrestling Twitter rabbit hole and eventually entangled in the life of her favorite wrestler, Sierra Myst. Music plays a big role in the book, and it was a big part of my journey when writing the book. As a result, here is a playlist full of songs that feature a combination of songs carrying themes of the book alongside having served as inspiration in the writing process.

I Know a Place / MUNA – “I Know a Place” is directly mentioned in the book. Zarina listens to it while planning her own restaurant, envisioning it to be a place where there is no discrimination, where everyone is free to be themselves, and anything is possible. It’s the perfect anthem for creating a safe space full of love and joy.

Pied Piper / BTS –  BTS’s “Pied Piper” is iconic. In this track, K-Pop powerhouse boyband BTS directly address the impact they have on their fans. The septet address the listener, acknowledging how their coaches and parents must hate the band for the impact they have on their fans. Although the song is primarily in Korean, the chorus ends in English with the straightforward statement, “I’m taking over you.” Sierra Myst does indeed take over Zarina’s life. Plus, Appetite leans into embracing Bangla words amidst an English novel and Pied Piper as a song is linguistically a nice fit as well.

Poth Chola / Artcell – This is a Bangla song that is so melodic it transcends language. The singer laments about his journey, wondering where his life path will take him and whether his dreams will be fulfilled. He’s full of hope, waiting for life to take him where he wants to be. The plot of Appetite is largely entails waiting for Zarina to realize her true calling and it is very much a dream-come-true novel, both for character and author.

Shrike / Hozier – A shrike is a bird that impales its prey on sharp thorns. Hozier uses this as a metaphor for a failing relationship and the subsequent regret. Zarina and Sierra have a strong start, but it slowly start to feel like this friendship might not be the best thing for Zarina. In fact, getting lost in the world of wrestling stands in the way of Zarina achieving her goals, and misdirects her. Zarina’s not the best friend to Sierra either. At a point where it feels like they are done, they do think about each other and Sierra tries to get Zarina back in her life in a number of ways. The song feels apt with this book.

Without Me / Halsey – On a similar note, perhaps this is the song from Zarina’s perspective. Zarina is influential in raising Sierra Myst’s popularity with online wrestling fans. She tweets positively about her, makes GIFs of Sierra, and organizes projects to bring fans closer to Sierra. When Zarina feels betrayed, “Without Me,” a song about putting someone on a pedestal who lets you down, rings true.

Liability / Lorde – Appetite is very much a book about loneliness—the one that comes with graduation, separation from friends, feeling lost in your early 20s, and struggling to find your people. Combining that with job and career frustration means that Zarina very much has to rely on herself and find ways to love herself, and “Liability” is the anthem for that feeling.

Din Gelo / Habib Wahid – Another artist who’s mentioned in the book! This is one of my favorite songs of all time. Din Gelo is about watching the days pass by as you wait to feel seen and waiting for a loved one to return. While not literally, is very much the emotional vibe of Appetite. Zarina has big dreams, a lot of potential, but not a lot of recognition. 

Modigliani / Lucy Dacus – Lucy Dacus was an integral part of my writing journey. I listened to her especially while I was editing Appetite. And how fitting that she has this beautiful friendship song. A prominent theme in Appetite is the importance of discerning good friends from bad. Zarina finds friends eventually who reflect the message of this song—the want to tell your friend about every little detail of your day, thinking about them when one of you is out of town, knowing all their anecdotes by heart.

Soup / Remi Wolf – I couldn’t make this list without including a song that mentions soup. Food is about community and love, food brings people together. I love listening to this song at dinner parties, in the car with friends, and while sitting home and writing. “If you give me your keys, I’ll go and pick up the soup” is such an expression of love and it is very much Zarina’s love language.

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

P. Paramita is a Bangladesh-born, New Haven-based writer, professor, and pop culture enthusiast. Paramita’s work has appeared in Teen Vogue, them, Color Bloq, Autostraddle, Southampton Review, and Dogwood Journal, where she was a finalist for the Dogwood Literary Award in Nonfiction.

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, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Devyn Defoe’s novel Burnside is a brilliant surreal and satirical debut.

The Chicago Review of Books wrote of the book:

“This Lynchian nightmare is stitched tightly with the horrors of American life and the numbness it has left us with. Strange, surreal, and inescapably intriguing, reading Burnside brings the ideal level of acidity and satire.”

In her own words, here is Devyn Defoe’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Burnside:

Burnside is a story of suspicion, paranoia, and toxic friendship during a prickly summer of fires and death in the California central valley. My playlists shift a lot through the duration of a project. Some songs were indispensable at the start, when I had only the seed of an idea; I’d listen to them on repeat walking around the Sacramento grid to sink into the right mood for a productive insomnia. Others latched on later, more firmly grounded in scene and environment. I place more importance on instrumentals and the holistic sound than lyrics, though I will go on to contradict myself by pulling out the meatier lines from the following songs as if dissecting evidence to prove a thesis; in truth their real importance is still mostly unconscious and irritatingly indescribable, a confrontation with my own deficiency to pin down with certainty a motivating force beyond reaction to a slippery category of weather. I’ve sketched outlines to the best of my awareness.

“Desire Lines” Deerhunter

I found myself returning to the sound of late aughts indie albums and those strange open chords that always feel sort of baffled, mellow and brooding, something the girls would listen to while sulking around the valley in triple digit July on the cusp of boiling alive or falling asleep. The “When you were young” refrain is a taunt; the present is a nightmare and the future will be worse. I love the stairs at the end, like an accusation with a question mark.

“Apocalypse” Cigarettes After Sex

Resigned to the collapse, but sweet; I love the lyrics, the imagery, hiding lovers (kisses?) in “hollowed out pianos,” the flooding river, an innocent and in all likelihood nonexistent love. This song makes me think of the girls in their childhood, a romanticized vision of their lives to come that can’t exclude the end of the world because it’s too realistic.

“The Suburbs” Arcade Fire

“Sometimes I can’t believe it/I’m moving past the feeling/In my dreams we’re still screaming” was an earworm throughout. I liked the image of a bored town in a civil war, this mercurial blend of grief and dread. And the chords feel like practical jokes, or slipping on a banana peel.

“Happiness is a Butterfly” Lana del Rey

“If he’s a serial killer then what’s the worst that can happen to a girl who’s already hurt?” Norman Fucking Rockwell! was the only CD I had in my car at the time I wrote the bulk of the initial draft and I had this album on repeat. I think this is what the narrator is thinking in certain parts of the book.

“The Adults Are Talking” The Strokes

I can only listen to The Strokes in the summer—they scratch a very specific seasonal itch. There’s a real misery in “Same shit, a different life/I’ll get it right sometime/Well maybe not tonight,” the agony of just fucking up over and over again, which I find relatable, and inflicted on many of the characters; if they were real I would apologize.

“Butterfly” Crazy Town

I’m not exactly sure why this song was so important in the early drafting stages, but it was. Maybe a breastaurant connection somewhere in there. I once rang in the new year listening to the beat drop on this on the roof of the Warehouse Artist Lofts and instantly the world plunged into coronavirus; for me it’s forever tinged with disaster.

“I Want You To Love Me” Fiona Apple

“I move with the trees in the breeze/I know that time is elastic” The local environment is so important to the book, and before it was rebranded the “farm to fork capital” Sacramento was the City of Trees; the lyrics speak to the narrator’s enmeshment with her surroundings, the particulars of her visual perspective, as well as her deep desire for connection. A song she would listen to medicinally, ideally to gain a more assured sense of self.

“Suga Suga” Baby Bash

Dirty, disruptively corny, garishly earnest—it’s a breastaurant song. This is on here primarily because I was listening to it a lot for a while.

“Siegfried” Frank Ocean

A song that had thematic and rhythmic importance to certain sections of the text. “Dreaming a thought that could dream about a thought” is marvelous, somehow associated with pregnancy in a short-circuiting part of my brain beyond Frank Ocean’s intentions, probably.

“Road to Joy” Bright Eyes

Conor Oberst wrote many of the great protest songs of the early 2000s; he may be the best lyricist of all time. I could throw a rock at this song and any line hit would strike a chord in Burnside (which is no surprise—Bright Eyes was the soundtrack to my impressionable college years) but if I had to pick one: “So I hope I don’t sound too ungrateful/what history gave modern man/A telephone to talk to strangers/Machine guns and a camera lens.”

“Hahaha” Death Grips

“I think I’m crazy, dog”—the narrator the entire time! As well as the psychic, who’s definitely fainted at the bins.

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

Devyn Defoe is a writer and bookseller from Sacramento, CA. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, her work has been published by Socrates on the Beach and The White Review. Burnside 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, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Miciah Bay Gault’s The Nobody Code is an unforgettable coming-of-age novel.

Booklist wrote of the book:

“Folklore, motherhood, and sins of the past collide in this multifaceted novel. . . . Gault’s plot is compelling at its core and even potentially polarizing. The questions it raises are sure to inspire conversation, making it a good choice for book groups.”

In her own words, here is Miciah Bay Gault’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Nobody Code:

“Friday I’m in Love” by Yo La Tengo

I keep a playlist going every time I’m working on a book. I play it mostly when I’m driving and the highway lulls me into a kind of waking dream where I enter the the world of the new book and exist there for a while, checking things out, waiting for the characters start talking. For The Nobody Code playlist, I looked for songs from the late ’80s or early ’90s, the decade when my characters first meet as teens and form a vigilante group in the forest of Vermont called Nobody. I added several songs by The Cure, which still feel surreal and sexy to me, and which used to fill me with a kind of romantic ferocity when I was a teenager. Because the novel is about the ways the past shows up to haunt us years in the future, I also wanted songs that I remembered from my adolescence reimagined by contemporary musicians. That’s why “Friday I’m in Love” by Yo La Tengo works so well on this playlist. There’s something perfectly adolescent about the song. The Cure’s version came out when I was a junior in high school, and back then it felt saccharine. But Georgia Hubley’s voice doesn’t feel sugary; it’s surefooted, startlingly simple, lucid. My playlist of rerecorded 1980s masterpieces also includes “When Doves Cry” by the Be Good Tanyas, and “Never Tear us Apart” by Paloma Faith.

“When We Were Young” by Red Heart the Ticker

I’m crazy about this song for a few reasons. The melody, the lyrics, all speak with such desperate yearning about the past as an expansive time of simplicity, love, longing, a time when the future has a holy glow because it hadn’t yet arrived, a sense of possibility infusing everything: “when we were young / we had a cabin / with one window and one table / we had hours, we were vandals…” The Nobody Code takes place primarily in two time periods—one in which my main character Dinah is a teenager and sees her future fanned out before her, sweet and unwritten, something to be sculpted as she ages. In the novel’s second time period, Dinah has come to understand life as something more prescribed, a daily existence full of rules and mores, a script handed to her that she’s expected to enact as an adult. The tension between the understanding of life as scripted and the view of the future as improvisational are at the heart of this song. I also love it because Red Heart the Ticker happens to be a husband-wife team comprising Tyler Gibbons and my dearest writing friend Robin MacArthur, with whom I’ve spent hours talking about girlhood, motherhood, marriage, art, authenticity, and the other themes that made their way into this book. I’m pretty sure this book grew organically out of so many conversations with Robin over the years. This song would be on my Nobody Code playlist regardless, but it’s awfully nice to have Robin’s voice on the soundtrack.

“Do You Remember” by Chance the Rapper (featuring Death Cab for Cutie)

Let me just say that nostalgia is a feeling I’ve always been utterly wrecked by. Nostalgia isn’t sweet or gentle; it shreds me. This song is pure nostalgia, in both lyrics and the easy swinging melody that somehow manages to feel like rocking in a hammock on a long summer afternoon. The layers of nostalgia in The Nobody Code are part of the motivation of the character. My main character Dinah feels attached to the deep (and complicated) enchantment of childhood, even as, decades later, she’s trying to squeeze herself into domestic life: motherhood, marriage, a nine-to-five job. For her, nostalgia is a lifeline back to the self she was as a girl.

“Why the Bright Stars Glow” by Valerie June

So many scenes in The Nobody Code take place in the middle of night. So I like the lyrics of this song on a literal level. Valerie June’s gorgeous cracked voice singing, “’Cause what would we do? / And where would we be? / If it’s not you / And if it’s not you and me,” is the soundtrack to the love story between my two main characters Dinah and Rex, who meet as teenagers and fall into a kind of dizzy, dazzled love for a very brief period. Writing young love is so hard and so much fun. The love Dinah and Rex experience is maddening, vast, intense, and exquisite.

“A Groovy Kind of Love” by Phil Collins

I’ve always been embarrassed that this is one of my favorite songs, but I happen to think it’s good for me to embrace my embarrassments. So here, picture this: I’m thirteen years old, slow dancing at the school dance with my crush whose freckled face I have imagined repeatedly declaring his love for me in various romance-movie-inspired circumstances. Maybe, I think hopefully, a hundred-year blizzard will strand us together in the school where we’ll fall in love before the plows arrive to dig us out. The middle school cafeteria is dim and dank, and that beloved boy’s sweaty hands are damp and warm on my waist, and I’m swarmed by exquisite love and its one thousand stingers. I’m sure I’ll never have such a perfect moment again. We sway and sway. The song is “Groovy Kind of Love” by Phil Collins, and when I hear it now I’m immediately transported back to sweaty hands and radiant love. My Nobody Code playlist is meant to transport me (when writing) and now you (while reading) to the dreamy green-sunlit speckled years of my youth when I first learned how to fall in love (madly, completely, painfully). The first chords of this song can still unlace me like a corset, and that’s a feeling I needed to remember in vivid detail when writing this book.

“Carousel” by James

This was an early demo of the song that was eventually released as “Say Something.” I love the plaintive chorus: “Say something, say something, anyone / Your silence is deafening.” I love the way the music in this version sounds rough, raw, unfinished. And I love the way the song is about darkness, imperfect love, distance and isolation. Half of The Nobody Code takes place when Dinah is in her thirties, married and questioning the unexpected isolation and loneliness she feels in marriage and motherhood. This song seems to call across time to a younger or older self, a plea for iterations of self to speak up for the whole self. When adult Dinah begins to discover clues related to her past vigilant actions, she knows someone is reaching out to her from the past, though she doesn’t know if they’re looking for connection or revenge. When the silence is deafening, though, even possible revenge is a thrill if it connects you to past loves, past selves.  

“Long Shadows” by Josh Ritter

I haven’t mentioned yet that a bear is a major character in The Nobody Code. And briefly Dinah can converse with the bear. I can’t think of a better song to capture the fear and delight of wild things, the fierceness of first love, the enchantment of youth. I love the cheery bouncy melody of this song and how it illuminates the contradictory lyrics (“When the sun goes down / And the dreams grow teeth / And the beasts come out / And cast their long shadows / Every time they start / I’ll be right here with you / I’m not afraid of the dark”). I’m not afraid of the dark, and neither is Dinah. 

“Animal Tracks” by Mountain Man

I’m lucky to live in Vermont (where the book is set) and though I live in town, the minute I step outside my door, I’m in close proximity to wildness. I’ve seen bears, foxes, fisher cats, owls, hawks, racoons, and skunks in my yard. Once late at night I couldn’t get home because a mama bear and baby were standing on my front walkway. This song is about the wild sweetness of hot summer days and wild spaces. It was important to me to set the book in a place that was still at least partly wild, because in many ways the book is about holding onto (or letting go of) the tracts of wilderness in us, the uninhabited, untamed desires, fears, and obsessions of our youth.

“Nothing New” by Taylor Swift with Phoebe Bridgers

This is the best song I know about the rules and regulations governing women’s lives, particularly the double standards and Catch-22s of girlhood. “They tell you when you’re young,” the song goes, “‘Girls, go out and have some fun’ / Then they hunt and slay the ones who actually do it.” The girls of my vigilante group Nobody are caught, whether they see it or not, in a system of oppression that’s normalized and even comfortable. They sense it more than understand it. I wanted one Taylor Swift song on the playlist because I love Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s assessment that what we love about Taylor Swift is her “acknowledgment of girls as people to memorialize, of who we are and who we were, all existing in the same body, on the same timeline. You are your sluttiest version, your silliest version, your most wholesome, your smartest, your dumbest, your saddest, your happiest—all at once.” Dinah and the other girls from the vigilante group Nobody, all the girls in the book really, are trying on different costumes, different masks (sometimes quite literally), looking for the right fit, the version of self that won’t be punished, but that still feels authentic.

“Wild Soul” by Langhorne Slim and the Law

This song sets up a juxtaposition between tamed cities (“cars alarms and cracked concrete”) and wild spaces (“honeysuckle breeze”). The Nobody Code sets up a similar juxtaposition between the caged animals of the zoo Dinah works in and the wild animals of the forests of Vermont. So much of the book is about the tension around the explicit and implicit rules, and Dinah’s longing for the enchantment of childhood is about preferring the wildness of childhood over the domesticated existence of adulthood/motherhood. This song feels like adult Dinah’s soundtrack. I picture her washing dishes, rocking the baby, filling out paperwork at her job with Langhorne Slim’s growl in her head: “Lord, release my wild soul.”

“The Big Day” by Chance the Rapper (featuring Francis and the Lights)

This whole playlist falls apart without this song, because this is the song that lifts the mood directly into a kind of surreal desperation. Melodic and dissonant all at once, lyrics both vulnerable and aggressive, and then completely unhinged for a moment before swerving back to philosophical and supplicant, this song musically captures the collision of feelings underlying the scenes at the end of The Nobody Code. No spoilers, but one of the final scenes of the book takes place in an underground tunnel where a bear who’s been in the book from the beginning finally gets a chance to speak. At this point in the story, Dinah is drugged, afraid, and on the cusp of understanding something huge: the identity of her tormentor—but also how moments of darkness are the times we face fears, take chances, choose boldly, follow dreams and instincts, and change our lives.

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

Miciah Bay Gault has an MFA in Fiction from Syracuse. She teaches in the MFA program at VCFA and directs the Vermont Book Award. Miciah’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, LitHub, Electric Literature, the Harvard Review, and many others. She’s been a fellow at Bread Loaf, a Visiting Writer at the Vermont Studio Center, and the recipient of a Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant.

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, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Seb Doubinsky’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Liberation Now! is as captivating as it is inventively told.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

“The heady standalone conclusion to Doubinsky’s City-States Cycle is another drug-infused dystopian fantasia, this time focused on a group of women who, after career crises and experiments with the perspective-shifting hallucinogen Synth, lead a people’s revolution. . . . This bohemian rhapsody, with its sleek details and crisp narrative structure, is sure to satisfy series fans.”

In his own words, here is Seb Doubinsky’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Liberation Now!:

There is no liberation without music, pure and simple. And both are central themes in my latest novel, Liberation Now!, as Vita, one of the main characters, worked as a manager for a rock’n’roll band while making plans for a revolution. Revolution, like oppression, have sounds — pleasant, unpleasant, mainstream, underground, loud, muffled, etc. And to find your own sound is actually really finding yourself: so many couples are created over music, so many divorce or separate for the same reason — even if both parts will often lie and find other reasons.

In my novel, all the main characters find their way not necessarily through music, but through sounds, environment, and setting. All are women, and all want the world to change. Of course, it’s a fictional world, but it’s close enough to ours, and the readers will surely relate. That’s why there’s a majority of female singers and bands in my playlist, all of them with a message to their audience, whatever their gender. This not only the soundtrack of my novel, this is the soundtrack of the structures finally cracking.

The West Coast Experimental Pop Art Band — Shifting Sand

This band was actually the spark that lit the creative drive of the novel. The main singer’s life and story, Bob Markley, inspired the character of Mark Leigh. What’s more, the fact that the band never really “made it” was a definite plus for the novel, as the question of mainstream success is also part of the deeper plot. In any case, this is a beautiful song, and I’m glad I can share it with you.

Barbara Manning –– Scissors

Barbara Manning is definitely one of the best post-punk, “indie” singers around, and also an outsider. This song is both beautiful and terrifying, as it deals with obsession and self-destruction. That’s what this society does to women, trying to mould them into conformity. Fortunately, more and more women, like Barbara Manning, just go the other way.

Throwing Muses — Bright Yellow Gun

Throwing Muses is a band I listened to a lot in the 1980s-1990s, because I found their songs raw, twisted and relevant. They gave me strength when depressed, compassion when hopeful,  ironic when happy. It was perfect, and still is today. To me, they could be the opening song of the second part of the novel, when energy is needed.

L7 — Everglade

L7’s radical feminism made them a perfect match for Liberation Now! and the lyrics of that song will give the readers a clue on how to deal with male ass*oles. I worked as a bouncer for a couple of years in my ytouth, and I’m still ready to kick some ass — for the revolution and absolute gender equality.

Grace Slick, etc. — Fat

Jefferson Airplane and their various incarnations belong to my secret love library, with bands like The Grateful Dead and CSNY. They belong to a time when revolution was actually at hand, and believed in it 100%. I was floored by Grace Slick’s autobiography, Somebody to Love? and she also has been a direct inspiration for the novel, especially for Carla. I chose “Fat” because it’s about how we deal with everyday life, for better or for worse. It’s about reality, all of it.

Babes in Toyland — We are family

Babes in Toyland belong to the same generation as L7, and I love them for the same reasons. I chose their cover of the famous Pointer Sisters’number because it sums up the final message of Liberation Now!: we’re all in this together and nothing can destroy us.

Compagnie Jolie Môme — Hymne de Femmes (Women’s anthem)

As some of you probably know, I am actually French, and I wanted to add a number that had universal significance: “Women’s Anthem”, written in the 1970s, when feminism had begun to endorse political activism as its best way of bringing about change. It’s has a beautiful melody and very powerful words, and is the best last number I could think of for Liberation Now!.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Seb Doubinsky’s playlist for his novel Paperclip

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

Seb Doubinsky is an award-winning bilingual writer born in Paris in 1963. His novels, all set in a dystopian universe revolving around competing city-states, have been published in the UK and in the USA, and translated into numerous languages. He currently lives with his family in Aarhus, Denmark, where he teaches at the university.

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, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn’s I Have This Thing for Flowers connect our humanity to flora in surprising and magnificent ways in one of the year’s most powerful essay collections.

Booklist wrote of the book:

“The temporality of flowers is used as a metaphor for the transient manifestations of love in its many forms. Sawchyn scrutinizes her past relationships as both a scientist and an art critic, identifying recurring themes and similarities. Her memoir-in-essays acts as a commentary on how writers and other artists are driven to create a cohesive narrative, wrestling chaos into something that illuminates the human condition . . . . This confessional paean to flowers succeeds as a fascinating, unique model for examining the elusive nature of love.”

In her own words, here is Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn’s Book Notes music playlist for her essay collection I Have This Thing for Flowers:

In general, my music-listening habits are seasonal and a little obsessive. As the weather starts to change, I’ll start a playlist with one or two songs I’ve been listening to on repeat and add to it slowly—something in a film score, an earworm my partner hums while doing dishes (replacing lyrics with the dog’s name), a deep cut from a band I see in concert, a song piped in at the grocery store—or, if it’s a quiet few months, tracks from another year’s season. This is what I will listen to almost every time I am in the car alone, until it gets consistently warmer or cooler or wetter outside. It’s an eclectic mix that tracks (ha-ha) my life, and sounds random and haphazard to everyone else.

As someone who writes mostly nonfiction, the skeleton of the playlist I construct for each book project are songs from particular times of my life, its muscles and sinew evoke mood. Eventually, the songs become background noise.

I Have This Thing for Flowers is about all kinds of love, and the patterns and relationships between those loves. Each chapter pairs a person from my life with a flower I’ve grown in a garden, but the book’s throughline is the narrative of my cancelled wedding and subsequent marriage to a good friend. Fittingly, I think of these songs as love songs—alternately full of longing, dissonance, rage, and humor—many of which I listened to while writing.

Talking Heads, “Nothing but Flowers”

Of course I have to start here. One of Flowers’ epigraphs is the line, “If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawnmower,” and this song’s title is the title of the book’s introduction. The song perfectly articulates the sensation of being in a place that is supposed to be wonderful but is not, presented in that recognizable upbeat Talking Heads tone.

The Magnetic Fields, “Come Back from San Francisco”

If I could mandate that readers to listen to the entire album 69 Love Songs, I absolutely would. In this particular song, Shirley Simm’s vocals are a little bit wobbly and keening and carry the whole thing.

Broken Social Scene, “Anthem for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl”

My ex-fiancé had been a musician, and we often went to shows together. I think we saw Broken Social Scene when we were both twenty-seven—the exact right age to hear this song and to think back to our tumultuous teenage years and feel surprised that we missed parts of them. Also, the memes are excellent.

Fiona Apple, “I Want You to Love Me”

The title pretty much says it all, but there’s something about the warbling vocalizations at the very end that complicates the song—it’s like the suggestion of perspective, that she’s put on an old feeling to show it to us, but it’s no longer what she carries every day.

Iggy Pop, “Gardenia”

It’s a bit on the nose, but I did first hear this song (and then obsessively listen to it) while writing the “Gardenia” essay in Flowers. Maybe I just imprinted on Train Spotting, but he does great junkie music. Iggy Pop’s voice is sleazy and grimy, and it’s the kind that I don’t mind sleeping in.

Animal Collective, “Summertime Clothes”

The lyrics from this song’s chorus do make an appearance in Flowers; I think it’s the perfect soundtrack for warm-weather early-stage love.

Hop Along, “How Simple”

I mentioned earlier that each of the book’s chapters each pair a person with a flower, and this is how they are titled: “Dicentra | The Digger,” “Magnolia | The Mothers,” etc. The one exception is the center of the collection, and this is the song for “Laurel.”

TV on the Radio, “Ambulance”

“Ambulance” sounds to me like a quintessential love song; it is slow and earnest. That it is a cappella also gives it an unembellished quality, like you’re in a movie and a group of crooning backup singers have appeared behind your partner who is singing to you.

Jimi Hendrix, “If 6 Was 9”

The opening to this song is the exact right amount of anticipation. Most of the songs on this playlist feature a “you,” but in this case, the address feels much more general. It’s peak 1960s—a case for making one’s own way and looking good while doing it, and I’ve included it on here as a long for the self.

Pavement, “Gold Soundz”

Apparently, Gen Z likes Pavement, which I find hilarious. Pitchfork voted this song the top track of the 90’s—the whole decade! I enjoy the dissonance of “Gold Soundz.” It is an upbeat breakup song, and in the music video, the band members are dressed in Santa suits and go on a scavenger hunt.

Florence + The Machine, “South London Forever”

Like “Anthem for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl,” this is another song about looking back, a love song to a place and also to misspent youth. Few people can wail and belt it out like Florence Welch, as the chorus goes, Over and over and over and over again.

Aretha Franklin, “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man”

And speaking of amazing female vocalists.

Townes Van Zandt, “Rex’s Blues”

The last chapter of Flowers is titled “Zinnia | Townes Van Zandt,” so I felt like I should also end this playlist with one of his songs. In the book, I mention “Waiting Around to Die,” but in making a playlist for the book, I think “Rex’s Blues” is a more fitting choice. It’s a complicated song of tribute to a friend—in the version on Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas, recorded in the same place that Rex used to “half-own,” you can hear Van Zandt talking about his friend during song’s the lead-in.

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

Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Bucknell University. Her essay collection A Fish Growing Lungs was a finalist for The Believer Book Awards, and her second book, I Have This Thing for Flowers, is forthcoming from Flatiron Books. Formerly the editor in chief of The Rumpus, she has received fellowships from The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. 

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, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Emily McBride’s novel Queen Mab is a brilliant debut that marries folklore to postpartum depression.

The New Yorker wrote of the book:

“The body horror of birth gives way to the fairy-tale horror of early motherhood, which McBride, a translator based in Barcelona, strews with literary Easter eggs from folktales and Victorian poetry . . . The result is an agile, unsettling novel about the unwinding of a mind, set in a world of women who view motherhood as a curious affectation.”

In her own words, here is Emily McBride’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Queen Mab:

Spooky lullabies and fairy tale songs from Queen Mab

In Queen Mab, Madeleine is a young mother who thinks her baby is not her baby, but a fairy changeling. The world seems full of menace and threat, especially at night, when she sits alone in the dark, feeding the endlessly hungry fairy child, and trying to sing it to sleep—but the words come out cracked. “I always liked the spooky lullabies best when you were a baby,” her own mother says. “The ones with a bit of menace.”

Some lullabies are written especially to sing to children, and others are just songs, sung low, sung slow. When the lyrics are dark, they hint at a world where a tired adult croons alone in the dead of night, and lets their own fears and anxieties roam over things they wouldn’t admit to in the daylit hours.

Here are the songs of forgotten babies, crab-monsters and unexpected violence that informed Queen Mab.

Highland Fairy Lullaby, Robin Hall and Jimmy MacGregor

This mournful Scottish tune is quoted outright in the novel. It’s about a mother who puts her baby down in the mountains, and never finds her again. Any parent’s nightmare. In the novel, hearing it feeds all of Madeleine’s latent anxieties that she did something wrong, left a window open, wasn’t paying enough attention. Was the baby really spirited away though, or is she just anxious about everything in the aftermath of birth?

Dodo Ti Pitit Manman, Claudette Thégat

Lullabies from all over the world will often follow a formula of “go to sleep or the crocodile/wolf/eagle/hag/insert-monster-of-choice will come and get you.” But for me, points go to this Haitian Creole take, where the bogeyman is in fact a crab.

V’là l’bon vent, Marie Laforêt

At one point in the writing of Queen Mab, I became obsessed with finding a French-Canadian folk song that would sound like a fairytale, for the novel’s final scene. I didn’t go into the song or its lyrics in detail, but this voyageur song with roots in the 17^th century was in my mind. In it, the narrator laments that a greedy prince with a silver gun has shot and killed her pure white duck. In some versions, gold and jewels fall from the dead duck’s beak. I loved the imagery of this song but also its flexibility—it can be haunting and waiflike, folksy or choral, or played as a fiercely danceable fiddle piece.

Bíum Bíum Bambaló, Sigur Rós

I didn’t know this Icelandic melody until recently, and yet I’ve always known it (by another name). It tells of a mother singing her baby to sleep in a snowstorm, while a face looks in through the window from the storm outside! Is it the face of a troll or an elf of Icelandic legend? Is it the winter itself that needs to be kept beyond the glass? Perhaps what’s most frightening is that it isn’t specified… because we never really know what the future will hold when we sing a baby to sleep.

Beyond the menacing lyrics, the song shows the strange way folk culture reinvents itself. The tune is actually a traditional Irish melody, adapted by Peter Paul and Mary as “Gone the Rainbow” in the 1960s, and only joined with the Icelandic text in 1970. Folk traditions are often more recent than we think, or the versions we know of them are. Fairytales as well as music have gone through this process, and Queen Mab fits this pattern too.

Silver Dagger, Joan Baez

“Silver Dagger” is not a lullaby, it’s more of a murder ballad, though no one dies. The two genres have surprising overlap. It’s easy to imagine crooning this song on a dark night, because of its fairy-tale imagery (the father bears a literal chain of broken hearts). It also presents a strange inversion of the mother-child role. The narrator tells her lover not to come courting because her mother is lying by her side, holding a silver dagger and “she says that I can’t be your bride.” She concludes that she has decided “to sleep alone all of my life.” The mother here has taken her protective duties, and her lying next to the child in the night, to an extreme. Precluding romance, marriage…and therefore any more babies.

Aunque es de noche, Rosalía

Rosalía exploded on the scene around the time I was doing much of my night-singing, and although I couldn’t sing this at 4 am to save my life, the flamenco/pop mashup is, appropriately, all about darkness and light. “Although it is night,” say the lyrics, based on a poem by Spanish mystic Juan de la Cruz, although it is night, there is meaning, there is faith, there is finally light. 

Spooky Spooky Spooky, Casper Babypants

These songs are all pretty intense. But then one day, the sleepless nights are passed, the baby is older, and those once-tired parents are with their kid listening to a guy called Casper Babypants. And he has a spooky song too, which is hilarious, gets stuck in everyone’s head for weeks on end—which my own adult sister with no kids added to her Spotify list. The night has departed, and comedy has returned to the world.

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

Emily McBride is a Canadian-born editor, writer, and translator living in Barcelona. Her work has been published in The Nation, The Rumpus, and The Stinging Fly. Queen Mab is her debut 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, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Emil Wilson’s debut graphic novel The Nightingales is a structurally inventive and emotionally unforgettable book.

Kirkus wrote of the book:

“This graphic novel is stunning in every way. Wilson forgoes panels in favor of a format that is part sketchbook, part journal, and part scrapbook—a choice that gives both the visuals and the narrative room to breathe. The artwork has an intimacy and immediacy that complements the text beautifully, and the vibrant color palette communicates the joy that the relationship between Lou and Jim brings them both. . . . Absolutely gorgeous, visually and emotionally.”

In his own words, here is Emil Wilson’s Book Notes music playlist for his graphic novel The Nightingales:

My debut graphic novel, The Nightingales, is based on a true story from my family’s history. In 1985, my father invited a dying stranger and his two dogs to live with us after they had been evicted from their home. The experience brought out both the best and the worst in my family. In the book, a friendship blossoms between this man and a teenage girl inspired by my sister and, in many ways, by me. At its heart, the story is about the transformative nature of kindness, a subject that feels especially relevant right now.

Music plays a part in the story, but for this playlist I wanted to gather songs that trace the coming-of-age of my main character, a small-town misfit who grows into a spirited, self-possessed young woman. They’re songs about innocence, longing, connection, grief, hope, and the messy process of growing up.

Heaven on the Seventh Floor / Paul Nicholas

As a teenager in the 1980s, there was a party game called “Seven Minutes in Heaven,” where two kids were randomly matched and had to lock themselves in a closet to make out. Most of us just sat there awkwardly until the timer went off. As a queer kid, it was torture. This song, glittery, effervescent, and absurdly upbeat, brings me back to those odd, bittersweet days before puberty tightened its grip.

Any Way You Want It / Journey

Growing up in a small Oregon town, Journey occupied the intersection of blue-collar coolness and emotional grandeur. As a high school senior, when I imagined nuzzling my face into a girl’s neck—a phase that would soon end forever—this was the music playing in the background.

Do You Want to Funk? / Sylvester

When I first moved to New York, I dated an older gentleman who had DJed at The Saint, where the early White Parties were held. He played his reel-to-reel tapes for me, and I was struck by the marathon dance tracks, many running ten or twenty minutes without a break. During the early years of AIDS, those extended mixes became a way for gay men to lose themselves in the music for a few precious hours while the world burned outside.

Left of Center / Suzanne Vega

Suzanne Vega always represented a particular kind of cool to me: intelligent, observant, and utterly herself. If there’s a soundtrack for Lou, the main character of The Nightingales, as she rides her bike through town, it’s probably this song. Listening to it always makes Lou feel utterly real to me.

Stay / Oingo Boingo

My college roommate had far more evolved musical taste than I did (he was from Portland, after all), and he played Oingo Boingo’s album, Dead Man’s Party, constantly. It took me years to appreciate that this wasn’t just a bouncy pop song but something incredibly tender. Beneath Danny Elfman’s usual eccentricity is a quiet plea not to let go. I didn’t understand it then, but I do now.

I Melt with You / Modern English

Is there a better song for dancing alone in your bedroom while overwhelmed by teenage angst? The answer is No.

Love Comes Quickly / Pet Shop Boys

So much of the Pet Shop Boys’ early music feels infused with the emotional realities of queer life in the ’80s: longing, secrecy, and fleeting connection. The lyrics never mention AIDS directly, but their fragility and inevitability feel impossible to ignore. Love arrives quickly. But so does loss.

The Ghost in You / The Psychedelic Furs

There’s a scene I cut from the book because I couldn’t make it work visually. A few days before he dies, Jim (the aforementioned dying stranger) wakes in the hospital to find Lou sitting beside his bed, reading. He watches her and realizes he will never see her grow into the woman she’s destined to become. He’s grateful that she’s there, but also knows he’ll soon have to say goodbye. As we linger on his face, we watch several emotions pass across it: anger, gratitude, love, regret, and finally acceptance. Every time I hear this song, I think of that deleted scene.

Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want / The Smiths

Sure, it’s a little on the nose, but this song speaks to what’s happening with every character in the book. Each one—father, mother, children, houseguest—wants something simple but finds themselves disappointed by circumstances beyond their control. The Nightingales is about ordinary people asking for ordinary things in extraordinary circumstances. No one is trying to change the world. They’re trying to love, protect, understand, and survive.

Cloudbusting / Kate Bush

I love this song’s blend of hope and inevitability, and the way it speaks to the people who continue to shape our lives long after they’re gone (“you’re here in my head”). The singer senses that something difficult may be on the horizon, yet she never gives up hope that something good might come of it. She’s even willing to manifest that possibility if she has to (“just saying it could even make it happen…”).

Satellites / Rickie Lee Jones

This song has always made me think about the invisible forces between people: the ways we orbit toward one another, miss one another, and occasionally connect. And sometimes the people who shape us most are the ones we know for only a short time.

Find the River / R.E.M.

This song somehow makes sadness and peace feel like the same emotion. I particularly love the lyric, Watch the road and memorize / This life that pass before my eyes. The Nightingales isn’t a story about death so much as the places that kindness can carry us. Lou leaves Oregon for a new life in New York City, but the current that Jim sets in motion continues to carry her long after he’s gone.

The Downtown Lights / The Blue Nile

“The Downtown Lights” isn’t really about a city. It’s about possibility. And the version of yourself you imagine might exist somewhere else. It captures the excitement and uncertainty that comes with your first big “adult” move. That feels true of Lou as she stands on the threshold of a new life, far from her hometown.

La Petite Fille de la Mer / Vangelis

Visually, The Nightingales is told in the form of an artist’s sketchbook because that’s how memory has always felt to me. A sketchbook is a collection of observations, experiments, abandoned ideas, and moments that seem random and unrelated (but often aren’t). When I first arrived in New York, I’d wander the city with my Sony Walkman, listening to this piece. It always set my thoughts in motion, carrying me from one memory to the next.

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

Emil Wilson is an artist living in San Fransico, California. The Nightingales is his first graphic 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, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Sam Farhi’s novel The Sapsuckers is an impressive debut, a book as inventive as it is moving and intense.

Laura Sims wrote of the book:

“Intense, raw, and haunting, The Sapsuckers takes on a young man’s obsessive search for the truth about his brother’s mysterious death. We travel down dark corridors and into the unexpected depths of a family’s history in this gripping and beautifully written debut novel.”

In his own words, here is Sam Farhi’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel The Sapsuckers:

Gym Class Heroes – “Za Intro”/ “Papercuts”

My man, Travie. First off, Upstate New York people rock together and you’re going to get that vibe throughout this playlist. We all came from those same woods where no one could see us.

These two songs – this is how hip hop Upstate really sounded. You might’ve known a band and were rapping super lyrical and spoken wordish and you put those two together.

You found each other… which also doesn’t sound right. In a small town, no one’s that hard to find. You were stuck with each other, but you didn’t know that. You jammed for hours, the band would do its improvvy stoner rock and say they hated the Grateful Dead, and you would freestyle. And sometimes, the band is grooving so hard you’re not even saying words and it doesn’t matter. You rhyme the same thing a few times. Then, in that din, your rap becomes personal, and deep, and meant for one person. Voila, literature is born. The only person you want to hear this song is the person you’re rapping about. You wish they were standing right in front of you in that basement or garage.

Travie did something very different in his music; he brought his humor, his personal shortcomings, all of that into the fold (and his flow is so unique). There’s another song on the album where Travie goes, “Thank god for Walkmans” – yeah, that’s the alienated Upstate youth.

Side note: We battled each other on the phone once and he smoked my boots; this guy can rap (I thought I could). We have a texting relationship now as he reads The Sapsuckers where he hits me with “BARS EVERYWHERE.” Stuff like that means so much to me. So yeah, tracks one and two.

El-P – “Stepfather Factory”

The album Fantastic Damage, for me, was frightening when it came out. There really was NOTHING like it. At the time that was still possible. From track one, this was some very scary unknown shit. The song is basically about an evil corporation providing the fatherless folks of the world with robot stepfathers. Pure capitalism, seeing a need in the vulnerable and filling it for profit and control (“Yeah, man!”).

In The Sapsuckers, Peg brings Oscar around the kids. He looks good on paper, he is fulfilling a need and then infects the family. So similar vibes.

Portishead – “Numb”

There’s the music critic version of this song where hey, it is trip hoppy and they made their drums like an SP or MPC and wow look at that… That’s cool.

But I think if you hear this song, and you’re a certain age, this is the make out joint. This is the hip-rocker. It just has that slow sexy vibe. I imagine this would be Rem’s fantasy, he puts this in his headphones and thinks about his crush.

X Ambassadors – “Follow the Sound of My Voice”

Sam Harris is ONE OF my best friends (Danny, did you see the modifier?). We made a little rap group together in high school and I taught him what a bar was (that’s true, don’t deny that).

Years later we wrote a movie together about starting a band in Ithaca and he came up with this beautiful title. When he brought the song in and played it for me, I wept. It’s about guiding his blind brother, Casey, through one of those dark crowded venues they’re always playing, and saying repeatedly, “Follow the sound of my voice.” Brothers. Can’t not put it here.

Maïa Vidal – “Poison”

Maïa Vidal taught me how to be an artist. We were in her basement Upstate, way back in the day, and she busts out her laptop and pulls up GarageBand. And hey, I’m from the world (as I saw myself) of MPCs and Fruity Loops (version 1) and you can’t sample certain things and no way would you use stock sounds.

But she was just having fun. She typed notes on the laptop keyboard, even a little drumbeat, all using instruments in GarageBand and made it sound completely unique. She’d delete parts with abandon, play them again with the same amount of ease. We wrote a song about robots in love and put that funny effect on our voices.

She taught me that being an artist can be (and perhaps should be) playing in a sandbox.

Of course, she also had her accordion, who didn’t? (joke). She made this Rancid cover with permission, I believe, which was already so cool and out of the ordinary. I mean rock stars and anybody even remotely ‘famous’ were so far away from all of us. (Side note: She was in a band called Kieven Rus with Sylvie and Taylor Quan (super shout-out to Taylor who’s so funny on IG and in life)). But I would listen to this song a million times a day. And if you know The Sapsuckers, you know Oscar, you know some people are poison.

Eels – Your Lucky Day in Hell

There’s a part in The Sapsuckers where this plays on the radio. We used to call into WICB, the Ithaca College station, and request stuff like this. I mean this was also on the Scream 2 soundtrack with “Red Right Hand” by Nick Cave, which is a good pairing, high rec. I still remember the ICB request line. Watch this: 274 321 (censoring last digit).

Perfect Pussy – “Driver”

I didn’t discover this until recently when I did the Offal Salon with Meredith Graves (the singer here) at Public Records in Brooklyn. I overheard her espousing the charms of Kingston, NY and I just had to add, “They have a great bookstore” (Rough Draft, shout out to you). We figured out we were both from Upstate pretty early. Needless to say, she slayed. She was heartfelt and a natural performer.

This song sounds like a really really really good version of the scene I remember. When I was in high school there were so many of these shows at internet cafes, teen centers, art galleries, rec rooms, basements and any empty space. Sometimes bars and restaurants, but that was really for old people. These were young spaces where we made our own fliers, charged five bucks, screamed and made our lives.

Nina Simone – “Sinnerman”

There’s so much said about this song that there’s not so much to say. I want to put it here for the feeling of being small, for running away, but there’s a comeuppance here that does not happen in The Sapsuckers. So don’t think too hard about this one, just feel it.

London Symphony Orchestra – “The Planets, Op. 32: VII. Neptune, the Mystic”

Writer/poet/rapper Malik Crumpler put me on to this song. We were roommates while I was working on this book and we’d put this song on repeat for hours and hours. It just became background ambience after a while and would cleanse the room for us. Later, when I write with other people on projects, I put this on because it helps the flow. If I just need to calm down, or go to sleep, it works for that as well.

In The Sapsuckers, there’s a chapter called “Downtown” where Pete and Audrey’s journey is marked by the points in the Sagan Planet Walk in Ithaca, New York (they basically built monuments to each planet and then spread them out all over Ithaca in the same ratio of distance from each other as our solar system). So hey, you could read it like that too.

Also, it’s good to end here as a palate cleanser, right?

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

Sam Farhi is a novelist and screenwriter, originally from Ithaca, New York and now based in Baltimore. His work has appeared in The Opiate, PACKET Biweekly, ThoseThatThis, Vogue Italia Online, HBO’s New York Latino Film Festival, Yale’s Paprika! and The Wall. His zines have been sold at OHWOW Bookclub and aNYthing in downtown Manhattan. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Long Island University. He is currently working on his next novel.

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