Charlotte Shane’s An Honest Woman is a brilliant memoir of love, the relationships that form us, and sex work.
New York Magazine wrote of the book:
“A rigorous and compulsively readable memoir about her career as a
sex worker and the possibilities of romantic love between men and women.
Shane excavates her relationships with her father and the boys she grew
up with, measuring the harm of inherited lessons about sex and the
value of girls’ hotness against the power and freedom sex work later
afforded her. This personal and professional investigation resonates and
entices.”
In her own words, here is Charlotte Shane’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir An Honest Woman:
I usually need to write in quiet, and struggle to get down much of anything if a song is playing, especially if its lyrics are in English. But nothing establishes mood like music, so I used certain songs to orient me while writing An Honest Woman—87 of them, according to the playlist I kept at the time. Here are some of the most crucial.
Don’t Worry Baby – Brian Wilson
This piano version was recorded when Brian was about 79 years old, at the suggestion of record execs who wanted to make money from it and probably did. Pitchfork gave the album a 5.0 and called it “bare and anonymous.” But it’s not anonymous; the songs are played by the man who wrote them, and he’s one of the most precious musical geniuses to ever live. As I’ve said elsewhere, I like to think about The Beach Boys, to remember that I was lucky enough to be born into a time with their music.
This song makes me feel safe and grateful to be alive, which is a good place to write from.
Home – Kokoroko
Listening to this song incessantly has not lessened my awe of it. The melody is so poignant, the voices so perfect. Its hushed beauty compliments the brightness of “Don’t Worry Baby.” They feel like two different ways of being comforted by someone who loves you.
Preludes/Book 2, L. 123: 5. Bruyères – Debussy
I’m very attached to Vikingur Ólafsson’s intimate “home session” recording, which puts me in mind of watching my cats sleep in the sun. I can’t get enough of being at home. Or cats.
Limerence – Yves Tumor
Sometimes I crave this song like I would a certain food and can’t rest until I hear it. It’s probably the ultimate “I’m in a movie” track if you’re doing anything semi-urban by yourself: walking in the city, looking out the window of an above ground train, etc.
1/1 – Brian Eno
I’ve loved Brian Eno’s music since I was a teenager listening to Roxy Music via the Velvet Goldmine soundtrack, and his artistic trajectory from Here Come The Warm Jets to Music for Airports is inspiring, staggering, aspirational. He went through that arc in five years! I sort of just ignore the U2 and Coldplay parts of his career.
It Never Entered My Mind – Miles Davis Quintet
There’s a quality of profound gentleness in these songs so far that I’m not sure I recognized until writing about them together here. I hope this type of tenderness made it into the book. I did my best.
No Reason to Cry – Ane Brun
This is one of the love songs in my playlist that were included for the final chapter, which is about my husband. (All the love songs I included were for writing about him.) Ironically, my reason to cry is this song, and the type of love that inspired it. It’s a Tom Petty cover that I vastly prefer to the original.
Leading a Double Life – “Blue” Gene Tyranny
This song was shared with me by someone about whom I had complicated feelings, while I was having the complicated feelings, and I listened to it a lot while traveling alone. It still feels like a very private song to me, private in that way where thinking of someone else brings on a heightened awareness of the exterior world, and an intense interior experience of your place in it.
Around the time I first heard this, I watched a white horse drink out of a pond in the mountains under a deeply blue sky and imagined (realized?) that if every person on the planet were looking at this very same scene, it would eradicate all human evil. This song, in part because of the lyric “in the blue distance”, makes me think of that.
The Harbinger – Julianna Barwick
For most of my adult life, I’ve done my writing late at night. This perfectly captures the vibe of sitting at a desk and looking out a black window, feeling lots of feelings and letting thoughts blow around inside my head until they snag each other tightly enough to become a sentence.
Door – Caroline Polachek
For a few months, I thought this song would be the book’s epigraph: “You open a door, to another door, to another door, to another door, to another door, and I’m running through.” It was a mantra that gave me a lot of strength. I’ve wept to this song in so many public places, and would—probably will—do it again, happily. My Sisyphean task is to forever attempt with words what would be better done with sound, i.e. generating overwhelming emotion, inciting catharsis, getting people to that place where they’re crying and glad to be doing it, cherishing this world, infused with the selflessness of love, feeling as if they’re watching a white horse drink out of a blue pond.
Charlotte Shane is a nonfiction author and essayist. She is the author of Prostitute Laundry and N.B., both published by TigerBee Press, which she cofounded in 2015. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Bookforum, Harper’s, Sports Illustrated, and elsewhere.