The stories in Lynn Schmeidler’s collection Half-Lives are dark, funny, and amazingly absurd
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Schmeidler’s entertaining and farcical debut collection features darkly humorous stories about women’s bodies and sexuality. . . . Schmeidler’s offbeat tales are wonderfully bizarre.”
In her own words, here is Lynn Schmeidler’s Book Notes music playlist for her story collection Half-Lives:
Half-Lives centers around women’s psyches and bodies and explores the way living in a woman’s body today is like walking through a dizzying funhouse of obstacles, distortions, and surprises. The stories in the book are organized by the age of the protagonists and so move, like a concept album, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood to aging. The book depicts how women grapple emotionally with the roles they choose and the roles that are thrust upon them, with a healthy dash of humor, a pinch of Buddhism, and a few mystery ingredients thrown in. If each story had a corresponding song these are what they’d be:
Sex Was Everywhere
Combining David Gates’ sweet falsetto with an irresistible drumbeat chorus, this song taps directly into girl-fantasy lovesickness. Sex was Everywhere takes place in the 70s and, like “Everything I Own” (recorded in 1972), swells with yearning. It’s apt, too, that although this song was written to be interpreted as a love song, Gates wrote it for his father who died before he could experience his son’s musical success. So, the perfect Freudian choice—a song that a preadolescent girl might think is all about the physical connection and abandonment of self for the love object, but is in fact about a parent. Three minutes of direct-to-you emotion. You can’t not sing along.
The Wanting Beach
“Up the Mountain” by Regina Spektor
Regina Spektor’s whispery voice, the ominous opening, then the building rhythm. Like The Wanting Beach, a story about girls dealing with the onslaught of insatiable want, this evocative song is all about desire. Orchestral and allegorical, before you know it this song has pulled you into its endless climbing spiral. It’s eerie and playful, half haunted house, half roller coaster, leading you to that perfectly magical threat, “like it or not, I’m coming up the mountain.” If this isn’t an anthem for girl-want then I don’t know what is.
I You She
“People I’ve Been Sad” by Christine and the Queens
The protagonist of I You She is splintered; she tells her story in the first, second and third person. I imagine her sitting and listening to “People I’ve Been Sad” on a loop for hours not only because she, too, has been sad, but because she’s in unrequited love with a French woman whose words she hardly understands.
Corpse Pose
This tune hits multiple emotional pressure points. Just when you think it’s going to go out quietly, Merchant’s voice powers up and pulls you in deep. Beauty, voiced. Corpse Pose is a retelling of Sleeping Beauty where Beauty is a yoga teacher who dies (or falls into a coma, depending upon how you read it) and is laid out on the yoga dais of her mother’s studio. Fittingly, “Skin” is from the Ophelia album, Merchant’s second and the only one recorded out of her home studio. If she weren’t dead, the story’s narrator would sing along with Merchant: “Is it dark enough? / Can you see me?/ Do you want me?/ Can you reach me?”
The Future Was Vagina Friendly
The Future Was Vagina Friendly is “a little peculiar” like the song says, and the protagonist who lists her vagina on Airbnb is very much also “Tryin’ to get up that great big hill of hope.” In 4 Non Blondes’ biggest hit from their only album, Bigger, Better, Faster More! Linda Perry’s voice is equal parts ambition and exasperation. Moving between declaration and pleading, crying and screaming, What’s Up passionately waves its flag for open-eyed recognition of the insanity of the world. As relevant today as when it came out in the early 90s.
The Audio Guide
Here comes trouble indeed. “The devil’s got my number,” could be the beginning of this museum intern’s revenge audio guide. We feel that rumble. This song vacillates between the hopeful “Everything’s gonna be ok” and the threatening “Oh here comes trouble/ put your helmet on.” I love the catchiness of the tune and the underlying suspense. The protagonist of The Audio Guide is documenting an art exhibition inspired by a brutal double murder while making a tell-all account of her doomed affair with the museum director. As the story progresses it becomes clearer and clearer that, “All this borrowed time, it’s running out/ It’s the end of the show.” She’s slowly revealing her hurt and the trouble that it will bring and it’s only a matter of time because she and the reader know that soon, “Yeah, the whole thing’s gonna blow.”
InventEd
I adore Jane Siberry’s otherworldly sound, and this one marries the perfect combination of earthiness with ethereality. The narrator of InventEd is convinced she’s invented her husband, and the story is about the strangeness of being in a relationship with someone else along with the ways in which we manifest what we want. Like the story, this song voices irresistible desire, both spiritual and corporeal.
Joke, Deconstructed
As one commenter on YouTube said, the only thing wrong with this song is that it’s too short. Catchy, funny, weird, obsessive. There’s a loose craziness about this tune that fits the idea of taking a joke so seriously that it becomes fodder for a story where the characters are treated as real people with real secret lives. Crazy people in each other’s crazy beds. Whenever this song comes on, I stop everything and sing along.
Being Stevie
“Dreams” by, of course, Fleetwood Mac
Like the Stevie Nicks impersonator who narrates Being Stevie, I fell in love with Stevie when I heard this song at age 14 recognizing immediately that loneliness could be liquefied in a voice. Writing the story, I listened to the Rumours album on endless repeat. A Classic.
Feel Better
“Somebody Like Me” Joy Oladokun
Catchy and fun to sway to, but lyrically full of exasperation and confession. Resonant and the best kind of keep-you-company friend-in-your-ear song. Vulnerable and beautiful. What a woman like the protagonist in Feel Better who can’t stop feeling… everything…needs to listen to.
Half Lives
“Laughing at Life” by Billie Holiday
“Smile through your tears / Laughing at life”… a cheer-up song in the bluesy beautiful voice of Billie Holiday. Jaunty haunty. In the story, Half-Lives, a woman chaperones a middle school trip to a nuclear power plant with nonviable fetus of her unborn twin growing inside of her. So yes, a song that speaks of hope but sounds like sadness; something timeless to rally and cry over.
Plural Like the Universe
“Do I Move You?” by Nina Simone
Sultry, seductive, self-assured, the incomparable voice of Nina Simone. No one puts emotional depth into a song like Simone does, and this one is the perfect aggressive long song for a story about a con-woman who seduces a tourist with utmost confidence and zero regard for the consequences. Want to play this song again and again? The answer better be yes!
Tiny House
A shimmery, magical song with humor and strangeness that matches this story in playful mood while still tapping into the awe of the world. Where happy/sad, space/time aren’t opposites but twins.
Happy Birthday
I love the album Nilsson Schmilsson where this song appears. “Happy Birthday” is about a middle-aged woman who discovers she’s become literally invisible and it’s funny—full of the absurdities of being ignored. This song, too, is funny. It’s weird and catchy; playful and absurd. A novelty pairing.
Deep Hollow Close
“Everybody Knows” by Leonard Cohen
Accusatory and cantatory. Cohen’s incredible growl of a voice coupled with dark lyrics and a catchy melody. Deep Hollow Close is a story about a woman who suspects her husband is cheating with the next-door neighbor and when she breaks into her house, discovers things are even stranger. In “Everybody Knows,” as in so many of Cohen’s songs, there’s sex and death and faith and loss. This finger-pointing, doom-promising song plays in an undeniable field of threatening self-recognition.
Time Museum
“Tell Me a Tale” by Michael Kiwanuka
What does it mean to live and love and be caught in the fourth dimension where you are always you and yet everything is always changing? Time Museum explores these questions and “Tell Me a Tale” plays them. I love Kiwanuka’s voice; the music is rich and his vocals are full of feeling—longing, searching, needing love and faith and belonging. Listen to the Live at Hackney Round Chapel version to get the brilliant improvisational and haunting vibe of the band’s jamming. “Tell me a tale that always was…” Perfect song to go out on.
Lynn Schmeidler’s fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Georgia Review, KR Online, the Southern Review, and other publications, and she won the 2023 BOMB Fiction Contest for her short story “InventEd.” She has been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She is the author of the poetry book History of Gone and two poetry chapbooks, Wrack Lines and Curiouser & Curiouser. She lives in the Hudson Valley.