Ona Gritz’s memoir Everywhere I Look is a heartfelt and heartbreaking examination of sisterly love.
Lily Dancyger wrote of the book:
“Everywhere I Look is a stunningly beautiful and fearless unraveling of one family’s party line, and a testament to the deep love between sisters—still just as ardent, tender, and devoted decades beyond death”
In her own words, here is Ona Gritz’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir Everywhere I Look:
Everywhere I Look is a memoir about my sister Angie who was murdered, along with her husband and infant son, when she was twenty-five and pregnant with their second child. Long before its unspeakable end, Angie’s life had been difficult. I knew this, even as the baby of the family, but it wasn’t until thirty years after the murders that I uncovered disturbing family secrets and learned the extent of her troubles. Researching and writing this book was a painful project, though not entirely. After all, it meant spending many hours in the company of my sister. The person I remember loving before I had language for the feeling. The one I spoke my first words to. The girl who taught me the magic of make-believe and the transporting power of music. For nineteen years, I got to be her sister. Here, in her memory, are nineteen songs.
“(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone” by the Monkees
When I think of my early childhood, I picture Angie and me dancing on our twin beds to the radio. We liked to put pajama bottoms on our heads and pretend we were go-go girls with long, flowing hair. The band we loved most was the Monkees. I could fill this whole playlist with their songs and it would be a fitting tribute to my big sister. Instead, I’ve chosen her favorite, which, I have to say, holds up really well with its clever, cutting lyrics and infectious beat. My favorite at the time was the schmaltzy, rather sexist “I Wanna Be Free.” No question who had better taste.
“Build Me Up Buttercup” by the Foundations
There were songs I knew, or thought I knew, before I ever heard them on the radio. I’d notice Angie singing the refrain and copy her. “Build Me Up Buttercup” was one of those. In a way, it was like a nursery rhyme to me. I had no idea what the song meant, but I loved how the words sounded and how the tune would play in a loop in my mind. 1968, the year “Build Me Up Buttercup” came out, was a hard one for us. My sister ran away several times and was then sent to what was described to me as boarding school. During the long stretches of time when she was gone, I took comfort in my inner soundtrack of songs that I’d learned from her. It was one way to keep her near.
“My Baby Loves Lovin’” by White Plains
This is another song I first learned of by hearing my sister sing it. It was also one of the catalysts for Everywhere I Look. For most of my life, my grief over Angie and her family’s deaths was buried and inaccessible to me. I felt a lot of shame over how badly Angie had been treated in the family, so I barely let myself think about her. Then, one day, about twelve years ago, “My Baby Loves Lovin’” came on the radio. It had been a hit, so I’d heard it on oldies stations before through the years. But on this particular morning, it struck me that I was the only person in the world who knew that she used to love that song. The thought undid me. My husband rushed in, startled to find me crouched and crying on the kitchen floor. It was then that I knew I needed to write this book. I needed to give my sister a larger place to live than in my faulty, fading memory.
“Leaving On a Jet Plane” by Peter, Paul, and Mary
One afternoon in second grade, I walked home singing “Leaving On a Jet Plane” at the top of my lungs. A fan of musicals, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to me to burst into song. But then a classmate teased me about it the next morning. That year, my sister was hardly home at all and, though I had no conscious awareness of the connection, I’m sure that’s part of why I loved the song so much. I felt so leavable then. Even if I wasn’t the reason my sister ran away, I also wasn’t enough to hold her in place. No wonder I couldn’t get enough of Mary Travers singing in her warm, reassuring voice, “Oh, Babe, I hate to go.”
“Let It Be” by the Beatles
I hesitate to admit this, especially to music aficionados, but I remember saying to a friend when I was five or six, “The Beatles are okay, but they’re not the Monkees.” But in my eighth summer, I fell in love with the Fab Four. It was during a family vacation to the Catskill Mountains. We stayed in a lodge where there was a downstairs game room with a jukebox. Angie and the other teenagers spent their quarters playing pinball, and I spent mine playing D.J. It was 1971 and every song on the jukebox thrilled me. To this day, the opening chords of “Let It Be” place me right back in that dark paneled room.
“Cecilia” by Simon & Garfunkel
My early drafts of Everywhere I Look were much too long. The way I saw it, I had so few memories of my brief life with my sister, every one belonged in the book. When I finally figured out how to shape the story, the manuscript lost half its length. Here is a scene from that same family vacation in the mountains that didn’t make the cut:
That night the two of us dressed for a party. We put on our ankle-length prairie dresses, and Angie pinned her just-washed hair up in a bun, curling the loose strands by wrapping them around a pencil.
“Now do me. I want a bun too.”
“Come on, Baby. We’ll look stupid, like we’re trying to be twins.”
“Please? We’ll look cool.”
“Yeah, right,” she drawled. But she gave me a bun anyway.
In the game room, we all danced to “Cecilia.”
Jubilation! Simon and Garfunkel sang. She loves me again.
I had no idea what jubilation meant, but it’s a good word for how I felt that evening.
“This is fun,” I shouted to Angie over the music.
She smiled and nodded, no more aware than I that this would be our last family vacation together.
“Ain’t No Sunshine” by Bill Withers
I know a lot of writers who play music while they work, but I’ve never been able to do it. Maybe it’s my background as a poet, but I require silence so that I can listen closely to the words as I put them on the page. How the sound of a word changes when placed near another. The rhythm of each sentence as it unfolds. It’s before I start my writing day that music enters into it. As I made breakfast in the years I was working on Everywhere I Look, I’d ask my smart speaker to play songs from a given year to help me reenter that time. Back in 1971, I don’t remember being aware of “Ain’t No Sunshine.” But hearing it now, it speaks so directly to how I felt then. As though I wrote those lyrics as an eight-year-old child. As though that melancholy chord progression gave pace to that little girl’s pulse.
“My Ding-a-Ling” by Chuck Berry
My sister brought this silly novelty song home from the record shop and my mother made her turn around and take it back. At our house, Angie was often in trouble, but this time felt different. Lighter. No harsh punishment. No threat of reform school or actually being sent away. My sister brought home a “dirty song” and we weren’t allowed to keep it. It was funny and ordinary. The kind of thing that happened in other people’s houses or in the sitcom families we watched on TV.
“The Joker” by the Steve Miller Band
A year later and Angie’s out of the house for good. But she’s still in Queens, so I get to see her. And she still loves double entendre and innuendo, not that either of us have that language for the suggestive songs that bring out her sly grin and get her poking me and singing in my ear. This one even has a cat call in it, like the song itself is poking each of us and saying, “Get it?”
“Stuck In the Middle With You” by Stealers Wheel
The memory that links this song to Angie, to our story, is elusive. It’s summer 1973. I’m ten. Angie newly seventeen and beautiful. Frosted hair, bell-bottom jeans, and sandals with chunky wooden heels. I don’t know where we are, but the song is playing and she’s singing in my ear again. It feels affectionate, but I can’t help wondering—is she saying she’s stuck here with me? Not that she is. She hasn’t been inside our house in over a year. Even in this moment, in her presence, I can feel her slipping away.
“Killing Me Softly with His Song” by Roberta Flack
As the only child left at home, I spent a lot of time sitting cross-legged in front of the stereo, reading liner notes and lyrics as my favorite records played on repeat. I was lonely for my sister and songs kept me company. I loved lyrics that told stories or revealed a vulnerability and sorrow I could relate to. “Killing Me Softly” did both. Not only that, the lyrics were about an emotional connection to lyrics! Melancholy as it was, I felt happy listening to it because, even though the loss at its center was of romantic love, all the longing in the words, the melody, Roberta Flack’s Ohh-oh-ohh’s made me feel understood.
“Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)” by Elton John
The summer I was fourteen, my mother revealed an enormous secret. She had been married before, and two relatives we knew as distant cousins were actually our half-siblings. They lived out west, and Angie had sought them out and was there now too, living in San Francisco. Back then, Elton John albums lived on my turntable. One night, I picked up the extension in my room 3,000 miles away from the sister I used to share it with and heard her crying to my father that she’d been hit by a car. Shaken, I assumed it had just happened, and my parents were learning about it for the first time too. Later, when it came out that they’d known for days and hadn’t told me, I threw the needle down on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, turned the volume as high as it would go, and let “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)” drown out my sadness and fear for Angie and express my fury at yet another secret.
“Watching the Wheels” by John Lennon
When I was a freshman in college, living away from home for the first time, John Lennon’s album, Double Fantasy, added a soundtrack to my long, thrilling, disorienting days. When, one night during finals week, I heard he’d been shot and killed, I didn’t believe it. It has to be a mistake, I thought as I stumbled back to the dorms from the library where I’d stayed late working on a paper. My roommates were out in the quad, waiting for me. “We knew you’d be sad,” Maria said, opening her arms. I fell into them and burst into tears. Later, as I sat in a friend’s room, listening to the album, the ordinary contentment in “Watching the Wheels” made me cry all over again. “If John can die, anyone can,” I said between sobs. When, thirteen months later, Angie, her husband, and baby were murdered, I couldn’t access my grief so readily. “I took it harder when John Lennon was killed,” I admitted to a therapist. “That’s what celebrities are for,” she assured me. Maybe she was right. The famous give us a safer place to put our emotions. Still, I felt convinced there was something wrong with me. That I had a crater in my chest in place of a heart.
“Leather and Lace” by Stevie Nicks and Don Henley
January 11, 1982. That’s when they were killed. Brutally. High on the music charts that day, “Leather and Lace.” I’d always thought of my big sister as tough and cool like leather. As a girl who could handle anything, while I was the lacy, porous, vulnerable one. But, of course, her toughness was just a cover. I’m guessing everyone’s is. Give to me your leather, the song asks. Take from me my lace. And also what I wanted to ask of Angie for as long as I could remember: Stay with me. Stay.
“I’m Lucky” by Joan Armatrading
I think of the young woman I was in the early 1980s, that terrible wound fresh yet impossible to get close to. I see myself popping a cassette in the boombox I had in place of a stereo, turning the volume up and bopping to the driving beat of the song as I dressed. I liked it for its verve and confidence, imagining that to play it was to claim those qualities the way I could broaden my shoulders by slipping on a jacket with sewn-in pads. But like everything then, the song held the dangerous undercurrent of my guilt. I was lucky. I could walk under ladders. What I haven’t said is that the night before the murders, I hung out in my sister’s apartment with her killers. We watched a movie together on her small black & white TV. For whatever reason, they spared me. For whatever reason, they waited for me to leave.
“Unforgettable” by Nat King Cole and Natalie Cole
In Everywhere I Look, my mother isn’t shown in the best light, but there were lovely sides to her that Angie, heartbreakingly, never got to know. Our mom loved books and music and she nourished those passions in me. She came of age in the era of torch songs, crooners, and dances at the Roseland Ballroom. One of the singers she introduced me to was Nat King Cole. I add him to the list here to honor that side of her. And I choose this version because what Natalie Cole did here is exactly what we memoirists get to do: collaborate with our beloveds after they’re gone.
“She’s Too Good For Me” by Warren Zevon
Immersing myself in my sister’s life and writing about her changed me. I’d longed for her my entire life, but as my understanding and compassion grew, and as I reckoned with my own role in her devastating story, I longed on her behalf as well. I want her to be happy, I want her to be free, Warren Zevon sings, his voice raw with regret and sorrow as he faces his own imminent death. Every time I hear it, I send it out to Angie, my version of the Buddhist Metta Prayer of Loving Kindness. I want her to be everything she couldn’t be with me.
“Be Careful” by Patty Griffin
Learning Angie’s story was to learn of all our castaway girls. Girls called wayward, wild, and incorrigible. Girls who wind up on the streets or incarcerated for the crime of leaving neglectful and abusive homes. In Angie’s school records, her sixth-grade counselor wrote: “Needs constant love, encouragement, and praise.” My thought when I read that, my thought now, is that it’s what all children need. It’s what every child deserves. Our girls are especially vulnerable. I offer Patty Griffin’s gorgeous song as their anthem.
“Angie” by the Rolling Stones
Andrea Susan Gritz, called Andra in our childhood home, claimed the name Angie after the Rolling Stones song. The title Everywhere I Look was pulled from its lyrics. To me the song is hers. It brings her back to me every time I hear it. When I had no other means to touch my ancient, gated-up grief, this one song would let me cry.
Ona Gritz writes memoir, essays, and poetry for adults, verse novels for teens, and fiction for children. Her memoir, Everywhere I Look, will be released on April 16th from Apprentice House Press of Loyola University.
Ona’s nonfiction has appeared widely, including in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Utne Reader, Brevity, Parents, The Rumpus, and River Teeth. Among her recent honors are two Notable mentions in The Best American Essays and A Best Life Story in Salon.
Ona’s poetry collection Geode was a finalist for the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. Her poems can be found in Ploughshares, The Bellevue Literary Review, One Art, Catamaran Literary Reader, Stone Gathering, SWWIM, Literary Mama, and elsewhere. In 2020, she won The Poetry Archive Now: Wordview 2020 Project.
Ona’s 2023 novel for children, August Or Forever, was a Reader’s Choice and Wishing Shelf finalist in middle grade fiction. The Space You Left Behind, her first young adult novel, written in verse, is forthcoming from West 44 Books in June 2024.