Jody Hobbs Hesler’s novel Without You Here is a moving exploration of generational trauma.
The Southern Literary Review wrote of the book:
“Achingly beautiful prose…unforgettable.”
In her own words, here is Jody Hobbs Hesler’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Without You Here:
Music is central to my writing process. If I’m drafting something new, Scarlatti piano sonatas often tune me into my imagination and keep me riveted there. When I’m tinkering—moving scenes around, scything unneeded exposition, experimenting with adding or subtracting a character—I might choose music with lyrics and insistent rhythms so I can concentrate against the disruption. Lately I’ve settled somewhere in the middle, letting YouTube spin mixes ruled by Dope Lemon, Leon Bridges, and Courtney Barnett.
While writing Without You Here, I used background music to immerse myself into the story’s different time periods. Voiced in turn by the two main characters, Nonie and her niece Noreen, the novel probes their deep connection and the complicated grief that follows Nonie’s suicide when Noreen is eight. Nonie voices sections leading up to her tragic death in 1980, and Noreen voices sections during her growing-up years afterward, with the throughline arc landing on the threshold of the year 2000 when Noreen’s troubled marriage hits a crisis. For Nonie’s sections, I compiled playlists of slightly off-mainstream, late-1970s music, hoping the atmosphere of the time period might unlock other historical and emotional associations too. Noreen’s music harked back to my late high-school, early college favorites of the late 1980s and early ‘90s.
All the music in this playlist predates the year 2000, which marks the end of my novel, and each song either reflects a prevailing mood or theme or links directly to a specific scene.
Walk Like a Camel, Southern Culture on the Skids
Loss and brutal nostalgia characterize much of this story, but Nonie and Noreen shine beyond their hardest moments. I love to picture them having fun, and I can imagine Noreen and her best friend Lizbeth strut-dancing to this song around their college apartment. If Nonie had been around when SCOTS took the stage—she would’ve loved the Richmond, VA dive bar where I first heard them—she would’ve been a fan.
Nonie strikes me as more T. Rex than Elton John. More Rolling Stones than Beatles. The singer’s ethereal warble and the song’s somber tones contrast the lyrics about dancing one’s way out of the womb, and this combination of whimsy and sorrow fits Nonie—to a T, you might say.
Driver 8 is among the songs Noreen mentions from the mix tape the “repetitive frat” plays at parties she and her friend Claudia sneak into, pretending to be college students instead of high school locals. A real frat that backed up to one of the first apartments my husband and I lived in as very young newlyweds played just such a tape—on continuous loop every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night of the noisy year that we lived there. The wide variety of artists featured on the tape lost any sense of eclecticism after about the fifth loop.
Grandma’s Feather Bed, John Denver
Oh, this is a cheesy old song. Noreen and her aunt Brynne dance in the sunroom to this one before anyone learns of Nonie’s death. Afterward the memory of their shared whimsy sours by association, filling Noreen with retroactive guilt. Very popular when I was little, this song represents the simplicity and innocence of childhood to me—all of which was lost to Noreen after that day with Brynne.
I love how the punk anger-energy here blends with a phrase from an age-old Irish blessing: May the road rise with you. The anger stems in part from frustration with failed mental health treatment, which Nonie would relate to. Nonie and Noreen aren’t big on expressing anger, which contributes to their tendencies to bottle more difficult emotions. I picture Noreen head-bobbing to some PIL as an angsty teen, not yet understanding the appeal of the music’s bald rage.
Townes’s husky twang voices Nonie’s deepest depression. The song’s narrator’s issues differ from Nonie’s, but their depths of aloneness and lostness are the same. Nonie mentions hearing Townes perform at the basement bar of a restaurant that’s still a Charlottesville classic. I don’t know if he played this particular song, but he did perform there back in Nonie’s era.
Weather and a minor car accident thwart Noreen’s attempt to hitchhike to a Femmes concert back when this song was new and in demand. Despite my own disaffected high schooler Femmes fandom and this song’s incantatory attraction, I found it hard to listen to after dating a guy who’d recently survived a suicide attempt. Noreen must have listened to this album at home, plenty loud enough for her mother to overhear this bitter, suicidal anthem. Already worried Noreen was too like her beloved sister, Ruth must have had a hard time listening to this song too.
Joan Armatrading’s clear, spectral vocals always transport me back to my late 1980s summer study program, strolling the cobbled streets of Cambridge, England, with my off-brand Walkman transforming the whole city into a living music video. But she was singing long before I fell for her, well in time for Nonie to have been drawn to her voice’s command and longing. If Nonie had lived, I don’t know if she would’ve conflated love and saving the way this song does, the way Noreen did, but I hope she would’ve found a love worth singing about.
Just Like U Said It Would B, Sinéad O’Connor
Another haunting voice from my not-Walkman Cambridge summer strolls. Sinéad’s forceful, eerie vocals shriek with the confusion, desperation, and loneliness that often harassed Nonie, then went on to characterize the lonely self-scape of Noreen’s inner voice. If my characters had been able to belt those feelings out, Sinéad-style, maybe they could’ve relieved what was swallowed down and stuck inside them.
Another song that plays in the novel—fittingly, on New Year’s Eve, 1999. Prince is pure joy here, an invitation to celebrate. The reader can decide how Noreen’s choices that night interpret the invitation.
Wild Horses, The Rolling Stones
An image of wild horses ties Noreen’s childhood imaginings of the year 2000 to the imminent crisis she faces at the dawning of that fateful year. The nostalgia in the pining chords, the somber, hope-tinged sorrow Jagger infuses into the lyrics, resonate with the emotional setting of Without You Here’s ending, which makes this song the perfect coda to this playlist.
I Can See Clearly Now, Johnny Nash
Okay, I know I said coda with the wild horses, but this is a postscript. Whatever the music terminology equivalent of a postscript is. So much hope in this song—I wish Nonie had found it, that Noreen will embrace it. I hope readers who come to my novel with the same deep, hard feelings that trouble my characters will walk away from it brimming with this song’s possibility.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Jody Hobbs Hesler is the author of the novel, WITHOUT YOU HERE (September 10, 2024; Flexible Press) and the story collection, WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO FEEL BETTER (October, 2023; Cornerstone Press). She serves as assistant fiction editor for The Los Angeles Review and A lifelong Virginia resident, she teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, VA and serves as assistant fiction editor for The Los Angeles Review. You can visit her at jodyhobbshesler.com.