Alex DiFrancesco’s memoir Breaking the Curse is spellbindingly inventive and visceral in its path from trauma to healing.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Spells, devotions, pro/con lists, and fill-in-the-blank sections are woven into the text, immersing readers in the author’s nonlinear thought process and blurring the lines between memoir, self-help, and spiritual guide. The results are singular and—for open-minded readers—potentially transformative.”
In their own words, here is Alex DiFrancesco’s Book Notes music playlist for their memoir Breaking the Curse:
My new memoir, Breaking the Curse, is a book about some of the most difficult years of my life. After splitting up with my longterm ex in 2015, I went to visit my best friend in Ohio, where I ended up applying to graduate school, and got in. Heartbroken and depressed, I tried to adjust to life in the Midwest, but never really did. I faced an increased amount of transphobia and violence, and was sexually assaulted. My life-long depression grew worse, and I finally hit a point with it and addiction where I knew I had to get better somehow, or die. Through a combination of addiction rehab, mental health counseling, and learning about Italian witchcraft, I began to weave together a life that felt worth living again. This book tells that story.
The songs below were constant companions in my Ohio years (don’t worry, I’m not in Ohio anymore!). A lot of them are dark, and not a few of them have hope woven into that darkness like a silver thread. That’s kinda a theme for me.
Bella Ciao – Chumbawamba
If you only know Chumbawamba from their one hit, “Tubthumping,” you are missing out. They are an anarchist band, and their version of “Bello Ciao” is one of my favorites. Originally a song sung by Italian partisans while fighting fascism in WWII, the traditonal lyrics are about a man who is leaving his lover to go fight, and asking her to please bury him under the shadow of a bellflower when he dies so people will know he was a partisan who died for freedom. The Chumbawamba version is updated, but still as powerful as the original.
Leaving the Table – Leonard Cohen
This song is the fourth track on Leonard Cohen’s final album, released just a few months before he died in 2016. Cohen had an image as a gentleman, and this song seems so much like a resigned gentleman taking his leave of the world – a world that he once knew, that has moved on without him. During my years of suicidal ideation, this song was so significant to me. It took years to realize that the sort of quiet resign for an approaching death that Cohen embodies in these lyrics comes after a long life lived well.
Look at Ms. Ohio – Gillian Welch
It only makes sense to have a few Ohio songs on a playlist about a collection that takes place largely in Cleveland. And, as the youths say, when Gillian Welch sang, “I wanna do right, but not right now,” I felt that.
Wild Thing – The Troggs
Another Cleveland song – at least to me. This song will forever, in my head, be connected to the old movie Major League, in which I remember it playing more than once. Also a great song for karaoke, which I did a not-insignificant amount of living across the street from a 7-day-a-week karaoke bar in the western suburbs of Cleveland.
Not Dark Yet – Bob Dylan
This song off of Dylan’s 1997 album Time Out of Mind has a (probably now familiar, no?) sense of resign to it. The narrator of the song has been all over the world, he has seen too much, and he’s not looking for anything anymore. The narrator has a bit of hope (“it’s not dark yet”), but that hope is rapidly slipping away (“but it’s getting there”).
Pancho & Lefty – Townes Van Zandt
Back to Ohio, at least in part. Pancho and Lefty start as bandits in Mexico, but by the end of the song, Lefty has betrayed Pancho to his death, taken the reward money, and left for a cheap motel in Cleveland, Ohio. Many a snowy day in Cleveland made me sing out loud, “The desert’s quiet, and Cleveland’s cold/ So the story ends, we’re told.”
I See a Darkness – Bonnie Prince Billy
I’ve alway thought of this as a hopeful song. The chorus is heavy, the opening chords are gloomy, and the darkness is certainly there. But so are the lines, “You know I have a love for everyone I know/ You know I have this drive to live – I won’t let go.” This is a song, ultimately, about hanging on despite all the darkness.
God is Alive Magic is Afoot – Buffy Sainte-Marie
Okay, maybe this list is a little Leonard Cohen-heavy, since this song by Canada’s Buffy Sainte-Marie was actually a chapter in Cohen’s second novel, Beautiful Losers. Much of the book is written as a prayer to St. Kateri Tekakwitha, and, in my memoir, the chapter called “Prayer at the Shrine of St. Rita in Philadelphia” is partly inspired by this. This rendition, full of vibrato and feedback, is an eerie, beautiful, prayerful interpretation of Cohen’s words.
It’s All Over Now Baby Blue – Marianne Faithfull
This song, written by Bob Dylan and covered by Marianne Faithfull, is all about saying goodbye. In typical Dylan fashion, it has seemingly random lyrics with sailors, armies, painters, lovers, vagabonds, dead to leave behind – but it all ends up being a song that’s simply and finally about leaving somewhere that doesn’t serve you anymore. Getting out of Cleveland felt a lot like this. “Strike another match, go start anew.”
If I Didn’t Have Your Love – Leonard Cohen
This song paints a world that’s devoid of sunlight, where the oceans have dried, where flowers aren’t soft, but stone-like, where stars don’t glimmer in the night. For a long, long time, when I listened to it, I could only hear what a horrible world it was, exemplified by the line, “And no one that you hurt could ever heal.” But those who have been hurt do heal. And the world described in this song is not the real world, but a world without love. I’m grateful for the love of the people who got me through the times written about in Breaking the Curse. The world of the song (and the world we live is) is not a world where no one who’s hurt can never heal, because love exists there and here.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Alex DiFrancesco’s Playlist for their story collection Transmutation
Alex DiFrancesco’s Playlist for their novel All City
Alex DiFrancesco’s Playlist for their essay collection Psychopomps
LEX DIFRANCESCO is a multi-genre writer and transmasc person who is the author of Transmutation, All City, and Psychopomps. Their work has appeared in New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Tin House, Pacific Standard, Eater, Brevity, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and more. They are the recipient of grants and fellowships from PEN America, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and the winner of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for 2022.
Alex DiFrancesco’s Transmutation: Stories (2021), a collection of short fiction about trans people in a mostly non-trans world, was lauded as “eclectic, absorbing” in the New York Times Book Review. Their novel All City (2019), a masterful envisioning of a near-future, underwater New York, was praised by Publishers Weekly as a “loving, grieving warning [that] thoughtfully traces the resilience, fragility, and joy of precarious communities in an immediate, compassionate voice.” It was also a first awards finalist by a transgender author in over 80 years of the Ohioana Book Awards.
They formerly served as an assistant editor for Sundress Publications in Tennessee, and currently edit LGBTQIA+ non-fiction for Jessica Kingsley Publishers. DiFrancesco lives in Philadelphia and is the human companion of a middle-aged, ill-mannered Westie named Roxy Music, Dog of Doom.