Mesha Maren’s Shae is a quiet and powerful novel masterfully crafted by one of our most talented storytellers.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“In stark, reflective prose, Maren (Perpetual West, 2022) lets Shae’s voice guide the narrative. Readers will connect with Maren’s sensitively told story of love, dependence, and the opioid epidemic.”
In her own words, here is Mesha Maren’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Shae:
Neurosis – A Sun That Never Sets
“And that’s when the song drenched us. I had no idea what it was at first. A sound like a squeaky hinge but rhythmic. It wasn’t until the guitar riff came in that I even realized it was music. Then the bass and drums surged. I had an automatic reaction to leap up and turn down the volume but Cam was smiling so big.
“The sun that never sets,” she sang, “burns on.”
She closed her eyes and her body swayed. I watched until I felt embarrassed, intruding.
Even though she was there in my house, it felt wrong for me to watch her, more wrong than all the times I’d spied into her bedroom. I closed my eyes.
Wolves in The Throne Room
Cam came to my house three more times that week and at first I thought she was just there to use the internet, which she did use—Facebook and the forums and all that—but she really seemed more than anything to want to share her music with me. When we’d made it through all the Neurosis albums, she played me Wolves in the Throne Room which was more fury than Neurosis, more building pulsing intensity. We’d turn the speakers to face the sunroom and crank it up. Cam liked to sit or lay while she listened and on the third day I joined her, letting my head rest three feet from hers on the yellow carpet.
Amenra
Cam lay down across the backseat and closed her eyes. I sat there listening to Amenra and under it the river, car tires passing and the wind in the trees.
“My mom used to talk about this park,” Cam said. “She told me she played softball here and in the summer they’d have a rubber ducky race.”
I knew her mom was dead but I didn’t know much else. Overdose, my mom had whispered, so sad. I’d forgotten that she grew up here and went to the same school we did.
“Do you miss her?” I said.
Drudkh
We sat together on the sunporch and listened to the new Drudkh album. I closed my eyes but I could still feel Silas there, an itch that made the moment less than perfect. He listened to the album just like we did, eyes closed, body soaking it in, but he took up space between me and Cam.
“Your baby’s gonna be born with black metal in her veins,” Silas said, pushing his hair behind his ear and glancing at me. My lips smiled before I could stop them.
Isis – In fiction
We had to lay close for the buds to reach. Both of us on our backs on the yellow carpet. When Cam rolled over to adjust the volume our shoulders touched. I could smell her sweat, a sweet stink. I could feel her heat through the flimsy fabric of her t-shirt, washed so many times it was almost transparent. If I lost myself in the music, I could forget about my own body but never hers. Her nipples showed through her shirt, her pulse visible in the dip of her throat. And then one afternoon, listening to Isis’s “In Fiction,” she grabbed my hand, twisted her fingers in with my own and left them there.
Neurosis – Become the ocean
We’d moved on to Through Silver in Blood when Mom got home. I heard her car pull up and I wanted to run to the computer and shut it off, not because she would punish me but because if she heard it then I would have to share this moment. But Cam was sitting between me and the computer, cross-legged on the floor, mouthing the words. I stayed where I was on the glider. I heard the sound of the kitchen door open, the jangle of it mixing with Become the Ocean.
Tool
In my version, I remember her walking into the Greenbrier East gym in her Tool t-shirt, head thrown back. Her shirt was long and baggy, almost to her knees, and under it she wore black off-brand Jnco style jeans. Her blond hair reached her shoulders and her nose and ears were pierced.
[…]
Three days later she wore her Neurosis shirt.
“What’s that?” I said, pointing at her chest as we got off the bus.
“A band,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, “but like what?”
“What’s the band like?” She tilted her head so that her hair fell away from her eyes.
I nodded.
“Like Tool if Tool was playing for God instead of for you.”
“You’re religious?” I said.
Cam laughed. “No like God in the bigger sense.”
Black Sabbath
Although the band is not directly mentioned in Shae, I had to put a little Black Sabbath in here both because they are quite possibly the best band that has ever existed and because bands like Neurosis, Wolves, Tool, Amenra, Drudkh, Isis, etc. would not exist without the influence of Black Sabbath.
Katy Perry – Dark Horse
System of A Down – Toxicity
Britney Spear – Toxic
Paula Abdul – Cold Hearted
I looked at Raven in the mirror and my eyes blew up big. I’d thought I was just coming in to practice.
“What’s your song?” she asked.
“Song?”
“Every girl’s got a song.”
“Oh.”
“Like your signature. The DJ’ll have it cued for all your stage sets.”
“Oh.”
Raven raised her eyebrows in the mirror.
“Uh. Dark Horse,” I said.
“Dark Horse?”
“Katy Perry.”
Raven turned and looked down the room. “Don’t Tara dance to that one?”
“Uh-uh, not really anymore,” a blonde girl said. “I think she likes that Paula Abdul song now. Something about a snake.”
“Alright, but if Tara claims Dark Horse, what’s your backup?”
I looked at the floor, scattered with bobby pins. “Toxicity,” I said. “System of a Down.”
“Well that’s different.” Raven laughed.
(Britney’s Toxic is not specifically mentioned in Shae but I couldn’t resist putting it in here because when I danced at a little club outside Asheville in the early 2000s the song was so ubiquitous that to this day I cannot hear it without being transported back to the blacklights and coconut perfume of The Trophy Club)
Shania Twain – That Don’t Impress Me Much
I think Mom was happy to have our routine disrupted. I think maybe she was just as bored of it as I was, though I never would of guessed. Cam turned our afternoons in the cafeteria into a party, Reba’s “That Don’t Impress Me Much” blaring across the kitchen while we mopped. With our phones and data plans we could listen to music anytime and it made my whole life start to feel like a movie.
Black Sabbath – Orchid
Every playlist can use a little more Black Sabbath and to be honest I had a hard time transitioning from Shania to The Smiths.
The Smiths – There Is a Light
“It was probably gonna happen that year anyway, with or without Cam. But with Cam, I had something to call the pain wrecking around inside my brain. I listened to The Smiths “There Is a Light” so many times that Fall it played even inside my dreams. I would put it on as soon as I got home, as I changed into my old sneakers, the ones I didn’t mind wearing in the woods. I’d let it play twice more while I peed and picked at my face, leaning over Mom’s hot roller set on the bathroom counter to get close to the mirror and inspect my pimples. This all gave Cam enough time to get inside her grandpa’s house so she wouldn’t notice me sneaking.”
Neutral Milk Hotel – King of Carrot Flowers Pts. 2&3
Cam grabbed her phone from her pocket and opened Spotify. Jeff Mangum’s voice droned out into the dark car. I Love you Jesus Christ.
“What’s that?” Mom said.
“Neutral milk hotel.”
“It’s Christian?” Mom said.
“Yeah.” We were all the time telling Mom that everything we listened to was Christian music but here was Jeff Mangum really crooning about Jesus Christ.
“Why’s he sound so weird?” Mom said.
Cat Power – I’ve Been Thinking – I lifted my left leg and almost collapsed but grabbed the couch instead.
“Anytime you gotta grab, anytime you almost fall, make it like it was planned,” Kandice said. “Like you wanted to touch them.”
Cat Power’s Handsome Boy Modeling School was playing from Kandice’s phone and behind it I could hear Winnie the Pooh.
I grabbed Kandice’s hand and leaned in towards her.
Metallica – Fade to Black
For some reason Ride the Lightning was my constant companion during the final few weeks of editing Shae so I figured we should end with a song from that album.
Mesha Maren is the author of the novels Sugar Run and Perpetual West (Algonquin Books). Her short stories and essays can be read in Tin House, The Oxford American, The Guardian, Crazyhorse, Triquarterly, The Southern Review, Ecotone, Sou’wester, Hobart, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2015 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, a 2014 Elizabeth George Foundation grant, an Appalachian Writing Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation. She was the 2018-2019 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is an Associate Professor of the Practice of English at Duke University.