Fiona Warnick’s novel The Skunks is an inventively told and moving coming-of-age story.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“Charming and amusing…an intriguing narrative that will inspire readers to rediscover their own fondness for the strangely ordinary parts of life.”
In her own words, here is Fiona Warnick’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel The Skunks:
I’m very literal about my playlists. In high school, whenever I kissed someone new, I would go home and type their name into the Spotify search bar. From the results, I’d pick the song that best fit the kissee’s vibe, and add it to my Kiss Playlist. If I kissed someone named Sam, and they seemed goofy, I might add a version of that preschool song A Ram Sam Sam. If they seemed painfully earnest, I might add Stay With Me by Sam Smith. The Kiss Playlist no longer exists, thank goodness.
When assembling a soundtrack for The Skunks, I employed a similar strategy. I began with songs that mentioned skunks or skunk-related vocabulary. Then I broadened my search terms to include other pieces of the book: friendship, nostalgia, Pilates, gardening. The Skunks follows a girl named Isabel through her first summer after college, as she returns to her hometown and tries to be an adult. If you thought the Kiss Playlist anecdote was TMI, or revealed a concerning attachment to my high school days, don’t worry: it’s topical, because Isabel is far too attached to her high school days—especially to the people she did or did not kiss.
Dead Skunk – Loudon Wainwright III
If The Skunks was a movie, this would play over the opening titles. It’s the only song I know that’s explicitly about skunks. I associate it with my father, who used to sing it whenever we would drive by a dead skunk in the middle of the road. The Skunks is also about fathers and daughters—Isabel and her dad, and Cecelia (the girl Isabel babysits) and hers—so this is a two-birds-one-stone situation.
Boys – Charli XCX
One of the “inciting incidents” of The Skunks is Isabel’s best friend, Ellie, telling her she talks about boys too much. In this song, Charli suffers from the same problem.
Maneater – Daryl Hall & John Oates
A fun exercise is to go through this song line by line and consider if each phrase applies more to a skunk or to a woman. She’ll only come out at night? Skunks are technically crepuscular (appearing at dawn and dusk) rather than nocturnal, but I think it still works. Isabel does a lot of thinking about how being a skunk might be different or similar to being a girl, and this song is an example of the potential for overlap.
We’re Going to be Friends – The White Stripes
The WHITE STRIPES? Come on. The most skunk-coded band to ever exist. Conveniently, friendship is another theme of the book.
Groundwater – Shannon Lambert
The setting of The Skunks is left purposefully ambiguous, but in my head it takes place where I grew up—which is also where Shannon Lambert grew up. We went to high school together. Groundwater and The Skunks feel like alternate responses to the same stimulus, or even like the same response in different mediums. I don’t have Shannon’s technical knowledge of music, so I can’t articulate exactly what makes this song so lovely, but I know it’s about feeling deeply connected to the place you’re from.
SCOOP (feat. Doja Cat) – Lil Nas X, Doja Cat
Isabel gets a job in a Pilates studio. This song is a bop.
Blackberry Song – Kurt Vile
One of my favorite scenes in the book involves Isabel and her father going to pick blackberries. When I began this playlist, I typed “blackberries” into the Spotify search bar, and this came up. Now I listen to it all the time. Just yesterday it made me cry tears of joy as I walked to pick up my friend from the train station.
In the Walls (Dean’s Got a Squirrel) – Hotspur Johnny
Interspersed with Isabel’s first-person chapters are short third-person sections about the skunks. One of the skunks goes on a quest to seek her fortune, and on the way, she meets some squirrels. So this is sort of here because it mentions squirrels? But it’s also a song about trying to get up your nerve to be a grown-up while navigating other people’s expectations for you.
Pet Cemetery – Tierra Whack
Is this a spoiler? One of Isabel’s summer jobs is house-sitting, which includes pet-sitting.
The Swimming Song – Loudon Wainwright III
This is possibly my favorite song of all time. My dad’s favorite verse is the one about sometimes not wearing a swimsuit, and my favorite verse is the one about the cannonball. I don’t know if I believe characters need to—or even should—have epiphanies, but Isabel goes swimming roughly three quarters of the way through the book, and it’s vaguely revelatory.
Sunflower River Blues – John Fahey
As a consumer of music, I’m lyric-focused. I can’t listen while I write; either the words distract me or I block them out entirely. Sunflower River Blues has no lyrics. I listened to it on repeat while writing The Skunks, especially during the third-person skunk sections. When I felt like I’d lost the rhythm of the novel, either on a sentence level or a structural level, this song—combined with a few pages of Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour—helped me reset.
Fiona Warnick is the author of the debut novel The Skunks (Tin House).