Lisa Ko’s novel Memory Piece is a powerful and unsettling testament to art and friendship from one of our most talented writers.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“The novel serves as an archive of our past and a vision for what’s to come, hauntingly beautiful in a way that’s both nostalgic and dystopian. In essence, Memory Piece is about the power of remembering, especially when it’s painful.”
In her own words, here is Lisa Ko’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Memory Piece:
Memory Piece is a book about friendship, creativity, and ambition that moves from New Jersey in the 1980s to New York City in the late ’90s to the 2040s, and music and art play a big part in the characters’ lives. I write to music sometimes—it depends on the need to focus versus the need to subsume my critical thoughts that the writing session demands—and created several playlists while working on the book. Some of them were based on mixtapes I made in my own ‘80s/’90s youth, others a collection of songs that felt true to the book and its various settings and times, including songs that appear in it. Here are a few of them.
“Are You Receiving Me?” by XTC
Memory Piece follows three lifelong friends, Ellen, Jackie, and Giselle, who meet as kids in the early ‘80s and bond over their shared creativity and alienation. This song, its late-‘70s hyperactive pop—I had a live version on a bootleg concert tape that I bought from a vendor on St. Mark’s Place—reminds me of the analog connections of that era, the slow lag that wasn’t slow lag, it was just normal. Trying to connect to friends that live far enough away that you need a ride to see them, and you’re too young to drive. Fiddling with the radio antenna in an attempt to get reception, to hook into a distant station where you might discover music you didn’t know existed. Are you receiving me? Did you get my letter? Did you get the mixtape I sent? I called you but there was a busy signal. I called and left a message on your answering machine. I called you but you didn’t call me back.
“Silent Morning” by Noel
Freestyle was the soundtrack of Jersey in the mid-late 1980s. Once in a while I hear this song and it gets trapped in my head for days. Giselle’s dude-bro older brother Alexander “lifted weights while blasting the synthetic repeti-beat of freestyle, the helium voices of the Cover Girls, the thin monotone of Noel, tossing his dumbbells on the floor after each set.”
“Goodbye my Love” by Teresa Teng
The musical embodiment of Chinese diasporic longing. My grandma had this album on vinyl and on 8-track. Everyone always commented on how Teresa Teng died young, an unexpected tragedy. In Memory Piece, Jackie, Giselle, and Ellen were part of an extended network of families that attended “Chinese New Year parties with parents blotto and maudlin as they sang along to Teresa Teng.”
“My Favorite Place” by J Church
J Church is more ‘90s west coast pop-punk than the white boy screamo that Ellen likes in the novel, but this song speaks to a sense of boredom and entrapment that is all too relatable. R.I.P. Lance Hahn.
“Me Olvide De Vivir” by Julio Iglesias
Okay, this is truly the parents-getting-blotto-and-maudlin-at-the-house party soundtrack I grew up with—that bright melancholia that hits just right. My dad and his buddies loved drinking Johnnie Walker and singing off tune to Julio. I bet Giselle’s dad did, too.
At the mall, Jackie and Giselle “palmed tubes of lip gloss and compacts of eye shadow and slid them into the pockets of their coats. They walked calmly past the salesgirls restocking banana hair clips and body spray as ‘Baby Love’ blared on the store speakers, past the Chess King, past the Magic Eye store where Giselle could never see any of the pictures.”
“Your Woman” by White Town
It’s 1997 and this one-hit wonder is on heavy rotation at Jackie’s liberal arts school. The trumpet sample is taken from the 1930s. Jyoti Mishra recorded the song in his bedroom.
“Technova” by Towa Tei
I used to walk around the East Village at the turn of the century with this song—so catchy, so smooth, so optimistic—playing nonstop on my Discman, which would constantly skip.
“Cleo” by Built to Spill
Wiggly days, wiggly nights… Ain’t it strange that I can dream? There’s a scene where all three of the main characters find themselves at a bar in the summer of 2000. “It’s an ordinary night, a perfect night. A song is playing on the speakers and we sing along, mouthing the words.”
“Open the Door” by Magnapop
It’s the ‘90s contrast of melodic sadness that earns this song a spot on the playlist: Everything is good today, but all of my friends are dying.
“Providence” by Sonic Youth
This song is basically a collage of Thurston Moore recording piano notes on a Walkman, an answering machine message left by The Minutemen’s Mike Watt, and an overheating amp. It’s always been a favorite of mine from the album, evoking late night payphones and long distance blur, sounds traveling through space and time.
“The Night” by Morphine
At an art exhibit, many years into the future, Ellen says: ”In the main room of the exhibit an old song I recognized was playing on a low volume, deep voice, soft drums, bass, and baritone sax. A little girl lost in the woods. ’Cause I can’t make it on my own. I hummed along under my breath. It was a song of depression, bleakness, and waning sunlight, November’s one-way tunnel… It might as well have been a eulogy.”
“My Love is Your Love” by Whitney Houston
Alone in her house, Ellen plays a single record on her old turntable. “The record player slowly came to life. Whitney sang that my love was her love and her love was my love. People had been leaving for so long, and now it had finally happened: I was the only one. The house was mine to protect or watch collapse. My fear of being by myself had come true; I no longer had to dread it.”
“Always Something There to Remind Me” by Naked Eyes
One section of the novel is named after this song. So jaunty! So nostalgic! I have a soft spot for the Naked Eyes version, though the Dionne Warwick and Sandie Shaw versions are equally evocative.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Lisa Ko’s playlist for her debut novel The Leavers
Lisa Ko is the author of the nationally bestselling novel The Leavers, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Ko’s short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and her essays and nonfiction have been published in The New York Times and The Believer.