Amy Lee Lillard’s story collection “Exile in Guyville” shares striking portraits of women’s identities. Her memoir “A Grotesque Animal” inventively examines autism in women, queerness, and disability in a series of essays.
Melissa Faliveno wrote of the book:
“Amy Lee Lillard’s A Grotesque Animal is a book that bares both teeth and soul. A bold and unabashed call to name our stories and ourselves, to take off the masks we’ve been taught to wear and to live without shame. In a collection of essays both searching and searing, Lillard explores the possibilities of womanhood, weirdness, selfhood, and home, interrogating the stories and silences we inherit, those we tell ourselves, and those we cast off. This is a book for the weird women—the queer women, the disabled women, the childfree and witchy women, who resist and refuse the narratives they’re given about what their bodies should be, who write their own stories, and who claim a new language for their lives.”
In her own words, here is Amy Lee Lillard’s Book Notes music playlist for her story collection “Exile in Guyville” and memoir “A Grotesque Animal”:
Sometimes it starts with the song. I’m listening to the Pixies, or Nina Simone, or Sleater-Kinney, and I get an idea for a story or essay. Sometimes the song comes later, after the story or essay is started, when I realize that Liz Phair song I’m listening to echoes some of the themes and words. No matter what, music is part of my writing process and product. And with my new books, that’s front and center. Exile in Guyville is a story collection of surreal, speculative stories that show us who we are. A Grotesque Animal is a memoir of class, anger, sex, and bodies, sparked by my late diagnosis of autism at age 43. Both are driven by music. Together, along with the songs from my first collection, Dig Me Out, they make for a kick and punch of a mixtape.
Fuck and Run, Liz Phair
The aftermath of a disappointing sexual encounter is awkward, gross, even despairing. And Liz Phair captures it all in a few short lines and a catchy, off-kilter chord progression. I love this song for its complicated feelings about being slutty, and its truthful admission that she’s as much to blame for the mess as the partner. And, of course, this song is a highlight of the fuck-you of an album, Exile in Guyville. That album title was the perfect title for the first story in my collection, about young women across time stolen to live in a future museum. They’re objects of adoration and desire, for a short while anyway. Then they have to throw their lot in with men, or find another equally dubious next step.
As I assembled my collection, full of dark and speculative stories like this one, and full of the negotiations and collaborations women make with patriarchy, Liz Phair’s album title also jumped out as the natural choice for the book’s title. We’re all adrift, in exile, in a world of guys.
Typical Girls, The Slits
With a discordant sound, and lyrics about not fitting in with the “typical” that the world demands of girls, this song was a natural complement and title for my story about a future of life apps. A young hotel concierge is pressured to get the new implant, the Female Automation and Education (FAE) system, and enters a world where she can say the perfect thing, do the perfect act, to succeed in the cutthroat world of Republicans’ dreams. But trying to be typical is a dangerous trap.
Corporeal, Broadcast
I miss this band and their quiet, powerful despair and triumph. And that word, “corporeal.” Hard and soft at once, speaking of what a body, particularly a woman’s body, must endure. For my story about a former literary star who has become a recluse, only to start dreaming vivid, wild dreams of bizarre afterlife filled with her doppelgangers, “corporeal” was a perfect title. What makes a body real…and how do we trust that our body is ours?
Blackbird, Nina Simone
A song that’s both spare and driving, with lyrics that repeat a gut-wrenching question – why you wanna fly, blackbird? My story named for this song features a future where Illinois is an arid wasteland, with internment camps for unwanted women. In the camps, women live in a society of hard dirt, hard rules, and hard cuts. But our main character’s sister, she wants something different. The only way to protect her and see if there is something else is to run a race for survival. It’s a test of flying without wings.
Wintersong, Blake Mills featuring Jesca Hoop
In my story named for this song, two partnered people have an affair. That’s it. It’s set in the future, where bodies have become an analog drag. But it’s the simple story of the self-destruction and discovery that can come when you love someone you’re not supposed to. This song is haunting and ethereal, and to me evokes this sort of line crossing. “It’s the worst way to put you in a song,” they sing. You’re not supposed to make love songs about affairs; it’s an unacceptable love. Or is it?
Feels Blind, Bikini Kill
Things You Say, Sleater-Kinney
My final story in the collection features middle-aged women who were Riot Grrrls in the early ‘90s. They were angry punks who became feminist revolutionaries. For a short while, anyway, until the world spit and shit on the movement as childish girlish nonsense. But in the near future, something magical has happened, and these older women are given the power of song. Literally – they open their mouths, Riot Grrl punk songs come out, and they can use it to capture victims. Like the sirens of myth. With that power, they say fuck responsibility: let’s get vengeance.
The Past is a Grotesque Animal, Of Montreal
This 11+ minute song feels like a dream, like a rave, like a confession, like a misshapen comfort blanket. As I wrote the essays that would become my memoir, looking at the past with new eyes after my late autism diagnosis, I wrote about human animals. Grotesque actions. Hidden stories. Mousy girls screaming “violence, violence!” This song had the elements of my exploration, and had the feel I wanted for my book. And the phrase “grotesque animal” felt like an apt self-descriptor and book title, capturing my difference and disability but also the ways I’m just like everyone else.
Only, Nine Inch Nails
Head Down, Nine Inch Nails
When you struggle with depression, really struggle, for years, there may come moments when you think practically about options. About endings. About taking your life in your hands and making a choice. The third essay in my book is about that moment, and the ones before and after. The feeling of being real and unreal, of being hopeful and despairing; the feeling of having others to talk to and the feeling that “There is No You.” Both of these songs by Nine Inch Nails evoke that feeling, and helped give me a structure and title for the story.
Dead Souls, Joy Division
That title. Such cold and contradictory words. In one essay in my memoir, I actually return to the story I named “Wintersong” in my short story collection. I present it here in slightly different form, with annotations and footnotes that explore the nature of truth and fiction. Because ultimately it’s a true story, one filled with falseness. And that pairing, along with the devastation after an unacceptable relationship, was one of dead souls.
Bonus: Ghosts I-VI, Nine Inch Nails
Since the first four Ghosts albums came out in 2008, they’ve been the soundtrack to my writing. Instrumental, driven by piano, guitar, drones and feedback, these 36 songs are my unlocking mechanism, the way to get at both the darkness and sheer joy inside me. I listen to many other instrumental soundtracks and songs when writing, from classical cello performances to TV and film scores to Beastie Boys and Fugazi b-sides. But the best is always these albums. And because NIN is remarkable, the first four albums were released through a Creative Commons license, allowing other creators to use the music. I did that in my fiction podcast, Wyrd Woman, to create mood and define character. Two additional Ghosts albums were released in 2020, and they are just as special and powerful.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Amy Lee Lillard’s playlist for her story collection Dig Me Out
Amy Lee Lillard is the author of Exile in Guyville, winner of the 2022 BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize; A Grotesque Animal from University of Iowa Press; and Dig Me Out from Atelier26 Books. Her fiction and nonfiction appears in Electric Literature, LitHub, Vox, Barrelhouse, Foglifter, Epiphany, Off Assignment, Autostraddle, and more. She received an Iowa Author Award in 2023, and was named one of Epiphany’s Breakout 8 Writers in 2018. She is the co-creator of Broads and Books Productions, creating podcasts, publications, and presses. Productions include Midwest Weird audio literary magazine, Fuzzy Memories Podcast, and the Wyrd Woman audio drama.