Zackary Vernon’s novel Our Bodies Electric is a compelling debut, a coming-of-age story filled with unforgettable characters.
Ron Rash wrote of the book:
“In this spirited coming-of-age novel, Zack Vernon vividly renders Josh and his fellow middle-school misfits as they seek understanding and acceptance in a world that wishes only to trap them into a stifling conformity. Our Bodies Electric is poignant and comic, and Vernon’s linking Walt Whitman’s celebration of individuality to the characters adds to the novel’s pleasures.”
In his own words, here is Zackary Vernon’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Our Bodies Electric:
Set in my hometown of Pawleys Island, South Carolina, during the early to mid 1990s, my debut novel Our Bodies Electric tells the story a teenager named Josh who struggles against the pressure to conform to the puritanical standards placed on him by his religious community. He and a band of other outcasts get up to all kinds of hijinks as they seek to understand their genders and sexualities. The novel is episodic, consisting of a series of short chapters that provide snapshots of Josh’s adolescence, including his fixation on David Bowie in the film Labyrinth, his fumbling attempts at making homemade thongs, and the titillating potential of games like Marco Polo and Powderpuff.
These misfit teens get no help from their families or institutions like church and school. So initially Josh sets out on a journey of self-discovery on his own. But as he embarks on his high school years, he finds comfort in the writings of Walt Whitman and support from a cast of small-town eccentrics. The young characters are also obsessed with music, often finding in it solace, excitement, and subversive potential.
“Girls & Boys,” Blur
Our Bodies Electric follows a group of teenagers from the sixth to the ninth grade. This is a period of fluidity in which we experiment with our emerging identities and orientations, including gender and sexuality. My novel examines that period and celebrates the characters as they try to find their true selves. The novel also critiques the ways in which families and friends, especially in small, religious communities, police adolescents’ behavior and inevitably and tragically stamp out any identities that differ from so-called normative ones.
The chorus of Blur’s “Girls & Boys” is dizzying in terms who identifies with which gender or who desires which gender. The confusion, I’m sure, is purposeful, as indicated by the final line: “Always should be someone you really love.” I like to read this line unironically. Love is the important part here, not the narrow lanes of identity most tend to travel down.
“Bodyheat,” James Brown
Growing up, my parents restricted the music I consumed. Occasionally, I would sneakily tune in to a classic rock station out of Myrtle Beach. But for the most part I had to listen to Christian music. One exception to this ban was what my parents referred to as “Oldies.” This could mean several things: beach music (“Shag music,” they called it, after the dance), doo-wop, Motown, and soul. Occasionally, something inappropriate for our young virgin ears would slip through—Al Green or Marvin Gaye, for instance. I remember hearing James Brown once, while I was sitting with my mother. I turned pink as a Christmas ham before Brown even made it through the first sexy verse of “Bodyheat.”
“Body Electric,” Lana Del Rey
Lana Del Rey’s ode to the body and Walt Whitman is a must for this list. About halfway through my novel, my protagonist Josh meets an aging couple that used to operate South Carolina’s premier nudist resort. They go by the names Jaybird and Birthdaysuit, and they live in the crumbling remains of the resort, even though it’s been closed for decades. They become fast friends with Josh, take him under their wing, and eventually give him a book containing Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” It is through reading Whitman’s poetic manifesto of individual liberation that Josh begins to understand his own sexuality.
I’ve been a massive fan of Whitman since my high school English teacher Mary Ginny DuBose introduced me to him over two and a half decades ago. His ideas have been rattling around in my head ever since.
The year that I started working earnestly on my novel was the year that I turned 37, and Whitman in “Song of Myself”—or the Whitman-esque persona that narrates the poem—is also 37. The first section contains these lines: “I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, / Hoping to cease not till death.” So I decided that during my 37th year of life, I would read Whitman every day. And I didn’t miss a single one. I read various portions of Leaves of Grass for 365 consecutive days. Some days I’d only read a few lines, and other days I’d really dig in. That year steeped me in Whitman’s language and ideas and helped a lot as I thought about what I wanted to say in my own book.
“Hey Sandy,” Polaris
When I was young, my friends and I were obsessed with the show The Adventures of Pete & Pete, the theme song of which is Polaris’s “Hey Sandy.” I’m not sure that the content of the show was subversive in any kind of progressive way. But the show was undoubtedly weird, and it played a large role in the development of my sense of humor. Our Bodies Electric is like a wilder, R-rated version of Pete & Pete, full of the humor and heartbreak and the strangeness of puberty.
“Rainbowland,” Miley Cyrus & Dolly Parton
As a southern writer, I believe it’s vital to have Dolly Parton on this list. She represents the best of the region, unburdened by the problematic facets that sometimes poison it for progressives, both those from here and those born elsewhere.
My relationship with my hometown and more broadly the South is complicated and even contradictory. Its geography is where I feel most at home, and yet throughout middle and high school I felt at best like a black sheep and at worst like a social pariah. Pretty much all my work explores this love/hate relationship. My chief aim is to craft young adult characters who learn to live authentically, despite sometimes being surrounded by narrow-minded views. My vision for the South, then, is one that embraces diversity and the full range of human potential.
Like Whitman, Dolly gives youth, especially southern youth, permission to be themselves. For Josh, a “Rainbowland” is what he experiences after reading “Song of Myself.”
“Blew,” Nirvana
This is far from original, but Nirvana captured the mood of ’90s adolescents. I like Nevermind, of course, as well as the MTV Unplugged album. But to me Nirvana’s first album Bleach is a better distillation of all the angst and disaffection of that era. “Blew,” the opening track, is raw and messy, unlike the songs on Nevermind, which are more polished and have a more palatable, commercial appeal. With Bleach, Nirvana was throwing down the gauntlet, and the album seemed to scream, “We can’t be bothered about the hair-sprayed glam of bands like Mötley Crüe or the fast-paced fury of Metallica.”
Nirvana was fitting for a generation that felt lost, but also was too indifferent to make a big fuss about it. “Blew” put sound to the way I felt long before I knew what I was feeling or why.
“Beercan,” Beck
Beck remains mystifying to me. He’s wildly popular, and yet he and especially his lyrics remain enigmatic. Listening to Beck’s Mellow Gold, which I did constantly by the time I was in high school and had learned to hide tapes and CDs from my parents, taught me that art can be difficult to decipher and at times even absurd; despite this, though, it can perfectly capture a time and place. Beck’s songs became the soundtrack to my turning away from the values of my family, church, and community. Back then I didn’t know what I’d replace those values with, but that didn’t matter. I knew only that there might be other aesthetics and other beliefs out there for me. And if not, I was convinced I could create them for myself.
“Mother,” Danzig
This song is about stepping out of the confines of your childhood in order to experience the world, both the good and bad that it offers. The singer is a sort of guide, calling us to break free from our parents’ carefully cultivated and restricted way of life.
My high school English teacher Mary Ginny DuBose was a similar sort of guide. She taught the outcasts of Pawleys Island that there was a great big world out there, and in it people thought in ways that were very different from our parents and church leaders. That’s not to say that local folks were wrong all of the time. But our world was limited in high school, and then Miss DuBose came along and started opening doors. It’s cliché perhaps—very Dead Poets Society—but Miss DuBose expanded our minds.
“Dance Magic,” David Bowie, from the film Labyrinth
During the period from sixth to ninth grade, people change very rapidly. We go from being kids to being hormonal teenagers who all the sudden possess very adult ideas and desires. During these years, the seemingly innocent often becomes subversive.
My best friend and I watched Labyrinth about a thousand times when we were young. But throughout puberty, our way of seeing the familiar changed. There’s a key scene in my novel in which Josh and his friends are watching the film, and they start obsessing over the codpieces that David Bowie wears. The boys are drawn both to Bowie and Jennifer Connelly, who plays the other lead role. It’s confusing but also thrilling for them to consider whom they’re more attracted to onscreen.
“In Between Days,” The Cure
God, I love the dark, goth-y side of the ’80s and ’90s. When “emo pop” later emerged as a genre with bands like My Chemical Romance, I remember thinking, “But why? We’ve already got The Cure and The Smiths.” As he gets further into high school, I imagine my character Josh would be drawn more and more to those kinds of bands. In that way, he’s probably a bit like Charlie in Stephen Chbosky’s novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower, who loves The Smiths. Reading that book was life changing for me, as it was for so many in my generation. Although I didn’t set out to do so, it was inevitable that much of my novel ended up being in conversation with Chbosky.
“Kiss Off,” Violent Femmes
The music of the Violent Femmes is probably imprinted on my DNA at this point. I first heard them when “Blister in the Sun” was featured in the show My So-Called Life. For me, though, “Kiss Off” better captures the ethos of the ’90s. It’s somehow both apathetic to and angry about mainstream culture. This characterizes Josh’s journey, particularly as he gains confidence and learns to repudiate the restrictive teachings of Christianity that he internalized in childhood.
I’m part of a unique micro-generation between Gen X and Millennials, who had a fully analogue childhood and a digital adulthood. There are many terrible things that go along with the internet for teenagers these days. But one good thing is that the internet enables young people to research communities far outside their own, especially if they’ve been made to feel ostracized for some reason. That’s a powerful tool in figuring out who you are and why you don’t need to be ashamed by that. In my novel, the characters don’t have that tool, and when their frustration bubbles over, they want to tell everyone around them that they can “all just kiss off into the air.”
“King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. One,” Neutral Milk Hotel
The lyrics to the songs of Neutral Milk Hotel embody the longing and sadness of adolescence. But they’re also punctuated by moments of joy, often as a result of making significant connections with others, sometimes romantic and sometimes not. By high school, I’d largely graduated from grunge to whatever genre Neutral Milk Hotel is, and much of that had to do with the lyrics. Long before I attempted to analyze the poetry of T. S. Eliot or Natasha Trethewey in graduate school, my friends and I rode around in our clunkers, smoking endless cigarettes and speculating about who the king of carrot flowers was. I listened to Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea on repeat while writing Our Bodies Electric. The line “As we would lay and learn what each other’s bodies were for” encapsulates the allure of those halcyon days of youth.
“In or Out,” Ani DiFranco
Listening to Ani DiFranco was just the jolt I needed as a teen; the music itself was electric and her lyrics inspiring. She led me to understand the activist potential of music. This gave me a new sense of belonging in a world seemingly hellbent on casting me out of the fold. And, at the risk of sounding dramatic, therein lies the power of art. Regardless of what you’re struggling with, someone else has struggled with that same thing. So if you hear about someone else’s experience, you realize that you’re not alone or wrong.
Additionally, agitators like DiFranco inspire empathy. Hearing about characters who are different from us can teach us to understand and accept others.
“Nightswimming,” R.E.M.
I won’t spoil the details, but the last scene of my novel features a moment when two characters go night swimming in the ocean. When I think back on my hometown and especially when I’m trying to recall positive experiences, I always land on night swimming. I did this often, most of the time alone but sometimes with others. I wonder if it would seem as magical if I tried to recreate that experience now.
This reminds me of the idea highlighted by the North Carolina writer Thomas Wolfe in the title of his 1934 novel You Can’t Go Home Again. Lots of ink has been spilled over the question of whether one can ever truly go home. I think the answer is no. Or at least it’s not possible to go home again if you have left and become a different person. It’s about psychology, in other words, not geography. Trying to return home seems paramount to seeking to recreate a lost chapter of one’s life, and that is ultimately futile. You’re different, the people whom you used to live with are different, and the wider world is different. The best hope is that all those changes have not rendered reconciliation impossible. And if reconciliation is possible, it would be less like going home again and more like building a new home from the ground up.
“Body Was Made,” Ezra Furman
Ezra Furman ends the song “Body Was Made” with this declaration: “Your body is yours at the end of the day / And don’t let the hateful try and take it away / We want to be free, yeah, we go our own way.” This resonates perfectly with my novel’s message about accepting ourselves and others. I think one could read the book as being a harsh critique of Pawleys Island. But it’s not. It’s a critique of the stultifying impulse to conform that is often thrust onto kids and teenagers in religious communities. This exists everywhere. It’s not unique to Pawleys or even the South, although it does feel particularly intense there sometimes.
Our Bodies Electric is not mean spirited or tragic. It’s a humorous coming-of-age story, and it makes a plea to celebrate the exuberant experimentation of youth. Yes, the protagonist feels tortured by his conservative southern community. But it is also locals who reveal to him that there are different ways of being in the world. In other words, the South, like all places, contains good and bad, problematic issues but also the better angels of our nature. Josh doesn’t have to flee to find himself. He does that there, with the help of his teachers, several small-town eccentrics, and the literature and music he consumes and through which finds liberation.
Zackary Vernon is a writer and scholar based in Boone, North Carolina. His work has appeared in a range of magazines and journals, including The Bitter Southerner, Carolina Quarterly, and Southern Cultures, and he received the Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize from the North Carolina Literary Review. He is currently an Associate Professor of English at Appalachian State University.