The linked stories in Sejal Shah’s collection How to Make Your Mother Cry brilliantly leverage its hybrid form to create one of the year’s most fascinating books.
The San Francisco Chronicle wrote of the book:
“Avant-garde and emotionally resonant, this collection is a shining reflection of Shah’s many talents as a writer and interdisciplinary artist.”
In her own words, here is Sejal Shah’s Book Notes music playlist for her story collection How to Make Your Mother Cry:
Music was so important to me in composing How to Make Your Mother Cry that I actually included a soundtrack / playlist at the beginning of the book. The songs below are on that soundtrack in the order they are listed.
- “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God),” Kate Bush
After writing my story collection, I divided my book, How to Make Your Mother Cry, into three sections. Each part has a subheading and they are:
I. a girl walks into the forest
II. a girl is lost in the woods
III. a girl claws her way out
Kate Bush’s dramatic song and lyrics (“tearing you asunder” and “do you want to feel how it feels”) felt like it was creating a soundscape of sorts for the whole book. A kind of lyric opera, lost in the woods, and my book explores how the protagonist, V., finds her way out of the woods. Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” to me seems to be a place in the fairy tale where we are in the woods, bargaining with ourselves and God to get us out.
- “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” The Everly Brothers
I’ve always loved this song and the lyrics. At one time (before I knew how much it cost to get permission for song lyrics), I did have some of these lyrics in my opening story, “The Girl with Two Brothers.” Some of those lyrics: “Whenever I want you, all I have to do is dream. Dream, dream, dream, dream…the only trouble is, gee whiz, I’m dreaming my life away….” And that’s true for the protagonist of my story who is stuck on a guy and sense of the world she can’t shake. There’s something plaintive and sad yet beautiful and simple about the lyrics, melody, and harmony that has always appealed to me.
- “When Doves Cry,” Prince
An eighties song I really loved, also the drama of a biopic I’ve actually never seen. And the lyrics, “Why do we scream at each other?…How can you just leave me standing?…Maybe you’re just like my mother–she’s never satisfied.” It’s also, simply, a song I loved and still love to dance to. I did a lot of dancing during the time period I worked on How to Make Your Mother Cry. One of the stories that has a lot of dancing in it is “Mary, Staring at Me,” in which V. and her friend Angela are taking dance classes and going dancing outside of class.
- “Left of Center,” Suzanne Vega
My friend, the writer K.E. Semmel, who interviewed me about my book noted that the main character in How to Make Your Mother Cry, V., is always an outsider – a Gujarati (American) girl in the US, a Rochesterian in New York City, a single person in a bunch of couples, and nothing invokes this stance more for me than this Suzanne Vega song, “Left of Center,” from the Pretty in Pink motion picture soundtrack. I can see Ducky on his kid’s bike riding around and circling waiting for Andie to see him as a romantic prospect. “I think they think I must be out of touch, But I’m only / on the outskirts / and in the fringes / on the edge / and off the avenue. If you want me, you can find me left of center wondering about you.” The lyrics and the song echo all these different ways characters are outsiders in my book.
5. ”Blue Monday,” New Order
I could have chosen “True Faith” too– these lyrics, “I feel so extraordinary, something’s got a hold of me….” also resonated with me. For both songs, it was the inside feeling of a song. I’ve felt something of the 80s- again and the heightened drama in my book. “How does it feel, to treat me like you do? Tell me, how do I feel? Tell me, now how do I feel?” There’s a lot of questioning, which my stories and their narrator do as well.
6. “Cruel Summer,” Bananarama
Speaking of outsiders, I first heard this song when watching the 1984 film, The Karate Kid. The Karate Kid is the consummate outsider, a working class kid from New Jersey trying to figure out a way to survive high school in a more upper class community in California. Again, for me it is the drama of the lyrics and music. “The city is crowded, my friends are away and I’m on my own.” There’s a lot of feeling on one’s own in my book, and trying to find the space and oomph to speak up.
7. “Message in a Bottle,” The Police
Another classic 80s song. The Police were everywhere in the 80s–and so suited to teen angst. “Sending out an S.O.S.”…I danced to this song during the pandemic, alone in my house, between working on these stories. This song and this vibe goes with the earliest stories, which are closest to girlhood and adolescence in the opening section, “A Girl Walks into the Forest”: these stories are “Mary, Staring at Me,” “Dicot, Monocot,” and “Mandala.”
8. “Interlude” india.arie
In “Interlude” india.arie pays homage to her influences ranging from John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis to Karen Carpenter, Billie Holiday, to Ella Fitzgerald. She sings with acoustic guitar, “This is a song for you…your memory lives on in me.” My book is dedicated to five people who have passed away and whose memory lives on in me: my uncle, Kirit N. Shah; journalist James W. Foley, writer and editor Valerie Boyd; activist Urvashi Vaid; and writer and educator Rana Zoe Mungin. In my book I also have a section at the end called “Companion Texts,” and in this section I list books and writers who have kept me company. In Living a Feminist Life, queer theorist and scholar Sara Ahmed defines a companion text as “a text whose company enabled you to proceed on a path less trodden.” I read india.arie’s “Interlude” as citation, companion text, ancestor homage and I love it. It’s just under one minute and 45 seconds, but when I listen to her album, I always have to play it more than once.
9. “First Try” Tracy Chapman
The harmony with singer/songwriter Emmylou Harris here and the plaintive sound of this song makes it one I return to on Tracy Chapman’s Telling Stories album from 2000. This is a song that I associate with Part II of my book: “A Girl Is Lost in the Woods.” It reminds me, has a similar tone or timbre to the stories in my book titled “Climate, Man, Vegetation,” “Watch Over Me; Turn a Blind Eye”; and “Ithaca Is Never Far.” V. here is trying to find her way through a landscape of lost loves and difficult moments in life. Lyrics that resonate for me are “I’m struggling with the limits / Of this ordinary life.”
10. “Spring Street”
Dar Williams is an iconic singer/songwriter and this song takes me back to when I was living in Amherst, not far from a Spring Street. The feel of this song hearkens back for me to the opening story in my book, “The Girl with Two Brothers,” and also “Climate, Man, Vegetation,” as well as the closing story, “Skeleton, Rock, Shell.” The opening lyrics are: “I’m sorry that I left you / With your questions all alone / But I was too happy driving / And too angry to drive home.” I still love to listen to that song in the car and it gets at being young, and being at a specific time in one’s life. “Oh, I was thinking about the easy courage / Of my distant friends / They said I could let this bridge wash out / And never make amends.” Distant friends, easy courage, making amends. It all brings me back to being in my late twenties, the age of the narrator in these stories. Leaving someone, being left, trying to make sense of it after all.
11. “Fantasy,” Earth, Wind, & Fire
“Fantasy” by Earth, Wind, & Fire has a bit of Afrofuturism and fairytale-ism in it. And again, I found myself drawn to the world this song conjures with its lyrics, some of which are: “Every thought is a dream / Rushing by in a stream / Bringing life to the kingdom of doing / Take a ride in the sky / On our ship, fantasize / All your dreams will come true miles away.” I love this original song as well as the cover by Black Box. There is a joy and optimism in this song that carries me along, makes me feel as if I am floating by on a stream and that life is moving in the right direction. I’m glad to have a joyful song in my playlist!
12. “Temperamental”
This title song from 1999’s Everything but the Girl’s album Temperamental is for me one of the most important songs in this playlist. It’s a dance song and also both happy and sad. What do I mean by that? It’s a sad song, maybe melancholic is more accurate, that makes me happy when I am listening to it. Tracey Thorn’s ethereal voice floats and dances and tethers the listener to her song. I associate “Temperamental” with both the opening story in How to Make Your Mother Cry, “The Girl with Two Brothers,” and the penultimate story, “The Half King.” One of the repeating lyrics in “Temperamental” is “I don’t want you to love me,” but the way that Thorn sings it also makes it sound like “I want you to love me”…and both of these stories of mine have these competing wishes.
13. “Walking with a Ghost”
This Tegan and Sara song from 2004 has a haunting quality to it–”I was walking with a ghost / I said please, please don’t insist.” I have no idea what is being insisted, but the song has a propulsive, insistent quality to it–a kind of obsessiveness that resonates with me and with the themes in several of my stories, in which there is also a kind of haunting, ghostliness.
14. “Hanuman Chalisa,” Morari Bapu
“Hanuman Chalisa” is a Hindu devotional hymn in praise of the god Hanuman as well as a timeless ode to devotion. According to Google, Lord Hanuman is known for his devotion to Lord Ram and is considered to be the embodiment of faith, surrender, and devotion. It’s an important prayer for my family and I listened to this chanting while working on my book–especially when I was at a difficult moment or feeling a sense of defeat with the uphill battle of various tasks that need to get done when you’re writing a book. There’s something incredibly soothing about “Hanuman Chalisa” and I always listen to Morari Bapu’s version of it (Morari Bapu is my family’s guru); you can find his chanting of the “Hanuman Chalisa” on YouTube. Even if you don’t understand the words (they are not in English), it’s worth listening to “Hanuman Chalisa.”
15. “Peace,” Paul Kelly
“Peace” is a song I could, can, and did listen to many times on repeat. I could say that about all of the songs on this playlist/soundtrack. I’d say that’s one reason they made it onto this playlist. I can’t recall how I came to know of this song, but I think it was played during savasana in a yoga class I took at some point. There’s something poignant, plaintive, and peaceful in the simplicity of the song and its chords. No lyrics or words at all. Though there’s tension in any narrative and there’s certainly narrative tension in How to Make Your Mother Cry, in the end I hope there’s also a sense of peace. The closing lines of the final story, “Skeleton, Rock, Shell” end on a hopeful, peaceful note: “A rock is a girl–rising from the earth–.” I can imagine these chords at the end of the book, after some of the tumultuous journeys V. has been on.
Sejal Shah is the author of the debut short story collection How to Make Your Mother Cry: Fictions and the award-winning debut essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance, an NPR Best Book of 2020. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, Conjunctions, Guernica, the Kenyon Review, and Literary Hub. In 2021, she was named an influential AAPI Leader by Good Morning America and ABC News. Sejal lives in Rochester, New York.