Jonathan Corcoran’s No Son of Mine is a memoir as vulnerable as it is powerful.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“Skillfully weaving together emotion, memory, and geography, Corcoran creates a memorable narrative tapestry that delves into the dark complexities of love while exploring a gay man’s hard-won path to self-acceptance. A lyrical and uncompromisingly honest memoir.”
In his own words, here is Jonathan Corcoran’s Book Notes music playlist for his book No Son of Mine:
How do you write a grief memoir about the person who has both loved and hurt you the most? This was the question that I grappled with when I sat down to write this book in 2021, one year after my mother’s death. For the longest time, I was her golden child; and then on the exact date of my twentieth birthday, she found out my secret, that I was gay, and she called me and told me I was no longer her son. The love we shared for each other would pull us back together, and then we would explode violently apart. This process repeated a half dozen times for some fifteen years between that initial pronouncement and her death. Our relationship was messy, and we never fully recovered from that first separation.
My mother, Patty, was a deeply religious woman, and she battled with traditional expectations–how to be an obedient wife and mother, how to stay faithful to God. I was born and raised in a working-class family in a small, mountain town in West Virginia. Being disowned means losing more than just your blood family. For a very long time, I was disconnected from everything associated with my old home–the town itself; the mountains and streams and trees; and yes, the sounds of the music I’d grown up with. My book is about building a new life, here in New York, where I live with my husband and a supportive, chosen community; the book is also about preserving memories before they disappear. What better way to do this than with song? The list I’ve compiled represents a few things: what I felt when my mother cut me off, my desperate process of trying to hold onto the memories of those before times, and the act of rebuilding a life–how I fortified my mind and body to survive for a better future.
Undone in Sorrow – Emily Miller and Jesse Milnes
The town I grew up in, Elkins, was a major center of West Virginia’s, and maybe the whole country’s, old-time music scene. There’s an organization there called the Augusta Heritage Center, and they work on creating oral histories and recordings of old-time musicians whose work might be otherwise lost to the ether. They also hold these summer workshops where people come from all over the world to study with master fiddlers and banjo players and singers. I’m fortunate enough to know this unbelievably talented duo, Emily Miller–a singer and fiddle player who now co-directs Augusta–and her husband, the multi-instrumentalist, Jesse Milnes. When I was gone at college and my mother cut me off, I felt like West Virginia had been lost to me forever. I found solace in listening to music that reminded me of my old home–the wailing of those singers and the fiddle harmonies conjured the running creeks and mountain sunsets of my youth. On this song, originally an Ola Belle Reed song, Emily interprets the lyrics in her apt and wistful way: “Over yonder in the graveyard/Where the wild, wild flowers grow/Oh there laid my own true lover/She’s gone from me forever more.” I still can’t help but feel this sense of familiarity hearing those words, that back in the mountains, we were all always grieving the loss of something.
Smalltown Boy – Bronski Beat
In the throes of loss, comes discovery. I always remind people that queer folks don’t often grow up with queer parents. And what I mean is this: Coming of age as a queer person can feel so lonely, especially for those who have grown up with few mentors (some of us have felt this acutely growing up in small towns). Every first step into your identity feels like an invention. After my mother cut me off, I began to throw off the shackles of shame, and I was shocked to find that there was this big, vibrant, gay world out there. Listen to this song about this smalltown boy getting onto that train. What does he do as he runs away and cries? He screams in the kind of falsetto that makes the mirror ball spin. And god, it felt so good to dance and scream.
Better Version of Me – Fiona Apple
Find me a gay with some emo tendencies who doesn’t like Fiona Apple. I was a small-town kid from a working class family, a first-generation college student who’d been cut off–no family, no money, and very few support networks–and I found myself trying to survive being a student at Brown University. I didn’t mention that part yet. Class comes into this story in a big way. My body and mind were shutting down from trauma, and yet somehow, I just kept marching forward. Fiona sings: “I am likely to miss the main event/If I stop to cry or complain again/So I will keep a deliberate pace/Let the damned breeze dry my face.” Anyone who’s fought to keep their heads above water during a traumatic period in their lives will find themselves in this song.
Marry the Night – Lady Gaga
Gaga saved me, in many ways. She saved a lot of LGBTQ folks. This song is about being a dreamer and hitting rock bottom but not giving up. I wanted to be successful: to be a writer and an artist and a good lover. I wanted to be someone who lit up a room. This song is a fight for your soul. I’ve spent a lot of time looking into the mirror after midnight screeching the lyrics to this one.
This Woman’s Work – Kate Bush
My book has been referred to as a biography of my mother’s life nestled inside a memoir of my own. I think that’s accurate. In trying to grieve–in trying to heal–I needed to understand her, who she was, why she did what she did. My mother was so many things to so many people–and sometimes I think she lost her identity in the work she did for those around her. She cleaned homes for a living. She raised three children essentially on her own. She stayed faithful to her husband, my father, an absentee man who was a serial cheater. He never loved her the way she deserved to be loved. This song might ostensibly be about a dangerous birth–but the metaphor holds. My mother at times carried everyone’s burdens, and she did so at the risk of her own well-being.
Islands in the Stream – Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers
Please. Let us have some levity! There’s a love story in No Son of Mine. My husband and I are about to celebrate 20 years since our first date. My husband–then boyfriend–was with me the night my mother told me I was no longer her son. He found me slumped on the ground and picked up my shocked body off of the cold pavement. It took me a long time to learn how to love someone in a healthy way–but we grew together and learned how to rely on each other, in that same joyous way that Dolly and Kenny sing about here. And as someone whose love has been literally legislated, as someone who knows that I’ve found the kind of deep love that I’ll never be able to capture in the span of a sentence, I feel in my bones the way this song asks, “How can we be wrong?” To this day, I call my husband my lover.
Just As I Am, Without One Plea – The Hymn
I was raised in an evangelical church. We were Nazarenes. They used this song during the altar call. The organist would start piping and the choir would sing and the music would loop on and on. The pastor would summon the sinners to come up to the front of the room and bow down and confess. There’s a scene in the book. I’m young–too young, really–not even a teen. The words from the hymn burn me. I get up from my seat in the pew, and I walk down the aisle. “O Lamb of God/I come, I come.” If I don’t make right with God, I know that I’m going to hell. That’s what I’m thinking. I can still feel the pastor’s hands on my back, my knees against that seafoam green carpet, the tears dripping down my face onto the wood of the altar.
Silver Springs – Fleetwood Mac
This song plays a pivotal role at the end of the book–I reference it on a road trip with my husband when I’m finally returning home to West Virginia to grieve my mother’s passing. It’s a song about the loss of romantic love, but one of my favorite activities as a writer is to play with assumptions. Isn’t the love of a son for his mother not unlike romantic love? If you’ve heard the ending of this song, you’ll understand the visceral quality of what it feels like to hear Stevie Nicks yowl into the fade. She screams, “I know I could have loved you, but you would not let me,” and didn’t I beg, for so long, for my mother to let me into her life? This song–Stevie’s voice–provides a release, the kind we all need from time to time.
Take Me Home, Country Roads – Lana Del Rey
I’ll be shot if I don’t include “Country Roads” on this playlist. This song is guaranteed to make any West Virginian weep, especially those of who’ve had to leave. The bridge goes, “I heard her voice/In the morning hour, she calls me,” and indeed, I’ve never stopped thinking or dreaming of that land and those mountain smells that blow in on the breeze. But like anyone who leaves a place, I’ve changed. I’ve become something different–and I’m starting to make peace with this new version of me. So let’s bid adieu to John Denver and bring in Lana Del Rey–our balladeer for these modern times.
Dark Parts – Perfume Genius
Perfume Genius sings to his mother about the abuse she experienced from her own father. He says to his mother, “I will take the dark parts of your heart into my heart.” *Special mention: Watch the music video if you’re ready for an ugly cry. My mother also suffered from abuse, though she never told me the full story of what happened to her. This song is what I wanted our relationship to be. I wanted to save her, to heal her. I spent most of my adult life trying to help her break free from this abyss.
She wouldn’t let me. I had to move on in order to break the cycle.
Jonathan Corcoran is the author of The Rope Swing: Stories, which was long-listed for the Story Prize and a Lambda Literary Awards finalist. His essays and stories have been anthologized in Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia and Best Gay Stories. Corcoran teaches writing at New York University and resides in Brooklyn, New York.