Alvina Chamberland’s Love the World or Get Killed Trying is one of the year’s best novels, impressive in its immediacy, urgency, and humor.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Chamberland’s spiky storytelling manages to find dark humor in her accounts of routine harassment from cis men who grope her and demand casual sex (at a bar, a man appeals her rejection by saying, “But I am the greatest!”). This thrums with life.”
In her own words, here is Alvina Chamberland’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Love the World or Get Killed Trying:
Prose, at its best, should sing. Lyrics, at their best, should read like poetry. I think… Do I listen to music while I write? Do I whistle while I work? Well, I can’t whistle at all, I never acquired that skill, but I can write while listening to a soundtrack of my own, though often that soundtrack is almost complete silence, or waves breaking on the beach, or why not the bustling buzz of a metropolitan city’s central station. Clear is however that music has always provided a backdrop for how I write, lyrics were my first introduction to poetry, iconic musicians have inspired me to become the woman I am today, they have entered my brain to stay, cemented themselves into my heart, and as for my body – why can I remember lyrics from songs I memorized when I was 9? Body memory… When it comes to my writing of Love the World or Get Killed Trying there are many songs referenced, and even more that linger in between the lines, rhythmically pulsating into the prose, building themselves into the themes… Here are some songs I think about when I think about Love the World or Get Killed Trying:
Stonemilker – Björk
I was thinking about which Björk song to include. Her music has been important to me for so long, and almost half of the book takes place in Iceland, and several of her songs are referenced. At the end of the day I realize that Love the World or Get Killed Trying is, amongst other things, a battle cry for showing trans women (and everybody else!) emotional respect, and Björk’s wails of “Show some emotional respect, I have emotional needs” fits perfect with that.
Daredevil – Fiona Apple
This song is referenced in the novel, and it also serves as a sort of manifesto on the wish for intense connection, symbiosis, and the heartbreak it too often leads to, and the daredeviledness it takes to be broken time and time again and still remain open.
Bloody Motherfucking Asshole – Martha Wainwright
This too is referenced in Love the World or Get Killed Trying and it’s another song about feeling so broken that there is no putting together, other than perhaps through Kintsugi. But more than that, it’s a refusal to pretend to be fine when you’re not, even if no one wants to hear it, to be truthful, to scream and cry, to rebel against both injustice and your own unfulfilled potential, to be a noisy victim, to find a way out by admitting that at the moment you do not see a way out.
Scream of Love – Sanni Est feat. Alvina Chamberland
Now this song actually features lyrics directly pulled from the novel, from the Cry of Love, Scream-of-Consciousness manifesto on page 225-229, a manifesto about how straight men treat trans women, how totally they lust after us and how completely they keep it secret, how they let their worst beasts and deepest insecurities out onto us, and no one but us holds them accountable for it, how white soft boys pretend to “tolerate” us, but are actually the least likely to ever date us, as macho men are much less sexually conservative. Listen to this if you want to reflect on all the things you don’t have to go through if you’re not a straight trans women.
I wanna know what love is – Julie Ruin
The novel is called Love the World or Get Killed Trying for a reason. It’s about the search for love coming from a person who has felt it denied. This song does something similar, albeit not from a trans woman’s perspective. Still, it lists so many problems in the world, and wonders what love is amongst all this… Kathleen Hanna’s lyrics are brilliant.
Lauryn Hill – Doo-Wop (That Thing)
Another brilliant lyricist is Lauryn Hill. Many experiences felt by black cis women also intersect with the experiences that trans women (regardless of skin color) have. Whether it’s about hair politics, needing to spend time and money on various enhancements to be deemed “feminine enough”, job market discrimination, or being hypersexualized and rarely protected by men – these are problems that black women and trans women both all too often encounter, and Lauryn Hill’s “Doo-Wop (That Thing)” (and her whole album “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill”) is a brilliant run through of these issues, and the line “Respect is just a minimum” is a line that always sticks with me, and is included in the novel, for all the moments I’ve been disrespected by men, and for the few moments when I’ve been respected by them, yet still not fallen in love, because… indeed, respect is just a minimum, it is not a synonym for love.
Lana del Rey – Driving in cars with boys
I sometimes wonder how much of Lana del Rey’s “I” in her songs account for what she’s actually experienced, and how much of it is a persona. Regardless, which straight trans girl HASN’T felt like this?:
They think I’m dangerous, they think I’m really bad
I’m just making up for what I never had
Go out every night whenever I feel sad
All this drive-by love got me crazy like a drug
I wear my red lipstick, got my make-up on
Stumble into trouble, siren with a sad song
They’ve all got girlfriends, but I’m the one that they want
They all got girlfriends, but I’m the one that they want
Lana del Rey – Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have
Same as the above.
Nicki Minaj – Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill)
Nicki Minaj’s verse is included in a version of Wyclef Jean’s song (Dollar Bill), which is similar in theme to the famous “what would you do if your son was at home… for you this is just a good time, but for me this is what I call life”, verse in City High’s song “What Would You Do?”, and this reminds me of another intersection – due to hypersexualization, trauma, and economic discrimination, black women and trans women, and black trans women especially, are much more likely to turn to sex work. And these lyrics just feel so true to what I wish my life wouldn’t be:
And every time I write I’m precise in my skill
It’s more to life than just ice in your grill
You wanna fuck me, blame me, fuck you, pay me
This is what you made me (where my money at?)
Said you want to drape me, turned around and raped me
Now you ain’t mistake me (where my money at?)
Where my girls at? Where my girls at?
If they frontin’ then tell ’em, “Yo, where my money at?”
Tori Amos – Cornflake Girl
Here Tori Amos sings about women letting other women down, competition between women. For me… the song has a slightly different meaning, cis women coming from a place of entitlement, frowning upon trans women, saying we aren’t “real women” if we’re uglier than them, getting jealous and hating on us and worrying that we’ll steal their men (because again, they feel the men are theirs, entitlement), if we’re prettier than them. This is just so tiring. The further I’ve come in my transition, the more beautiful I’ve become, the less cis women have been kind to me. Early in my transition they would rush to say how gorgeous I was, but I don’t think I have heard a woman tell me that in over a year… Now it’s only men, and yes… I’m afraid to say, in general, straight cis men may very well be kinder to me than straight cis women.
Nina Simone – The Other Woman
Despite cis men’s tenderness in private and cis women’s jealousy, this is the role that trans women historically, and still today in 90 % of cases, are reduced to… The exciting, hidden treasure, while the one to show off publicly is a cis woman. No matter how gorgeous and smart we are, no matter how much the man may indeed adore us and admire us (often more than his much more privileged wife).
PJ Harvey – To Bring You My Love
Away from the trans issues for a moment and back to the more general, universal question of lacking love and needing love and crying out and longing for love… This is the song for it. And Love the World or Get Killed Trying is the novel for it.
Amy Winehouse – Back to Black
Amy, Amy, Amy… In an interview she once stated: “So much music nowadays is so like: ‘You don’t know me… I don’t need you’ – and all the music then was kinda like: ‘I don’t care if you don’t love me. I will lie down in the road, pull my heart out and show it to you’ – You know what I mean?”… And I feel the same, exactly the same… Amy Winehouse and Courtney Love are two artists I hold in such high esteem, brilliant lyricists who seem to have lived a life that has a lot of affinity with trans women’s.
I’ll scream it from the rooftops: D. Smith is a fucking genius. A black trans women, who prior to her transition was a Grammy winning hiphop-producer, who experienced the downward mobility and fall from grace us trans girls often go through, becoming jobless, then losing her home and couch surfing between friend’s couches, before getting the idea to make a documentary about black trans sex workers and the men who love them. Everyone she asked said no to directing, so she did it herself, and the result, Kokomo City is beyond brilliant, both for the issues it brings up and for the craftmanship with which it was made. D. Smith is also an amazing singer and song-writer, and this song particularly sticks with me.
Dustin Michael – I Like
The former member of RNB-boy group B5, Dustin Michael, announced his relationship with D. Smith through this song. The world needs more men like this, and Love the World or Get Killed Trying is a prolonged 250-page DEMAND for this.
Nomi Ruiz – Be Your Girl
So much of Love the World or Get Killed Trying is about how straight men lust after us, yet hide us… So many of the songs on this soundtrack must relate to this. A way for us to counteract our hypersexualization in the dark, is to vulnerably showcase our need to be loved in the light. Because we are just as much women as cis women (if not more, because we fought for it and we own it!), because we are just as much human as anyone else on this planet. We shouldn’t be ashamed of this need, just as men shouldn’t be ashamed of their need for us…
Anohni – It Must Change
For all the things in this world that must change… I feel writing Love the World or Get Killed Trying was my way of exposing the injustices that I just can’t accept, finding a place where at least I can write down my protest against them, trying to find a way out of them, at least on the page, hoping, desperately and despairingly, that this will, somehow, some way, also seep into the world…
Dalida – Je Suis Malade
And though Love the World or Get Killed Trying doesn’t accept defeat, it does accept sadness and brokenness, and few songs do the same quite like this one…
Diamanda Galás and Billie Holiday – You Don’t Know What Love Is
I want to say something here, I included Love in the title of my novel, but I don’t think everyone can understand what I mean by that title unless they’ve loved their way over the edge of a cliff, preferably many times over… This song expresses the same sentiment, and I’ve listed both Diamanda Galás version and Billie Holiday’s because both versions need to be listened to.
Kaigomai Kaigomai – Sotiria Leonardou
Again – the embracing of despair, which somehow always makes it feel a bit lighter, possible to live with and within… I hope people reading my novel will get the same feeling while reading my words, a comfort to the disturbed and a disturbance to the comfortable. This Greek Rembetiko song has been sung by me many times, alone and to my Greek lovers:
turn the stab that you gave me
into laughter
I’m burning, I’m burning
throw some more oil on the fire
I’m drowning, I’m drowning
cast me into the deepest sea
Alvina Chamberland is a Swedish-US American author of predominantly literary autofiction novels. In 2015 Bokförlaget ETC published her co-authored book Allt som är Mitt: Våldtäkt, Stigmatisering och Upprättelse (English translation: All that is mine: Rape, Stigmatization and Reparation). The book received a grant from the Swedish Arts Council. In September 2018 her novel Utelåst – Uppväxt- nostalgi för freaks (Locked Out – A nostalgic account of growing up for freaks) a parody of the coming of age-genre, was published by Dockhaveri Förlag. She resides between Athens and Berlin and has no real hobbies, only intensity and serenity. Love the World or Get Killed Trying is her English language debut.