Binnie Kirshenbaum’s novel Counting Backwards is a heartrending and darkly comic exploration of grief and love.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Kirshenbaum puts her lively wit to good use, tempering the sadness of her drawn-out depiction of Leo’s deterioration and Addie’s attempts to wrap her head around the ultimately lonely nature of existence. It’s a tour de force.”
In her own words, here is Binnie Kirshenbaum’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Counting Backwards:
Charlie Puth and Wiz Khalifa – “See You Again”
Laced with dark comedy, Counting Backwards is a novel of despair, grief, and variations of loss suffered by a middle-aged couple, Addie and her husband, Leo who develops early-onset Lewy Body dementia. Charlie Puth’s angelic voice opens with the lines, “It’s been a long day without you, my friend / I’ll tell you all about it when I see you again” stunningly juxtaposed with Wiz Khalifa’s rap making clear that “you” is deceased. Although Leo does eventually die, it is while he is alive, but gone, that Addie’s sorrow over his loss is most acute. She desperately wants to tell him about her days, ask his advice, do all the things they once did together, but that’s no longer possible. For me, this song encapsulates the heart of the novel and, perhaps subconsciously, inspired it.
The Ramones—“I Wanna Be Sedated”
Putting aside the fact that it’s been a favorite of mine ever since it was released, it echoes Addie’s way of coping. The daughter of an alcoholic, she drinks too much, a problem she never acknowledges. When she gets anxious or enraged, she pops Xanax. She needs Ambien to sleep, and when Leo is dying, she covets his morphine. Addie wishes she could dull her psychic pain, but she can’t.
Richard Wagner—“Ride of the Valkyries” (from the Apocalypse Now soundtrack performed by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra)
Because Leo and Addie are too young to dwell on mortality, death, and its subsequent rituals, whenever the subject does come up, it’s in the abstract. Leo, a devout atheist who firmly believes dead is dead, jokes that when he dies, Addie should toss his body in a dumpster. “No funeral,” he says. The lone exception comes when they dial up Apocalypse Now,” and “Ride of the Valkyries” causes Leo to quip that he wants that, Wagner’s battle cry, played at his funeral. She knows he’s not serious. It’s just another way to drive home his point that he believes funerals are absurd.
Tom Waits—“Tom Traubert’s Blues”
The chorus of “Tom Traubert’s Blues,” “You’ll go a-Waltzing Matilda with me” echoes the early 20th century Australian folk song and unofficial Australian national anthem, “Waltzing Matilda,” the tale of a man in the outback who stole a sheep and with the law after him, he drowned himself. “Tom Traubert’s Blues” is about being blind-drunk in Copenhagen. Neither song has any overt connection to Counting Backwards, but there are phrases in “Tom Traubert’s Blues that resonate: “Wasted and wounded”; “the ghosts that sell memories”; “No, I don’t want your sympathy,” and most of all, “and everything’s broken.” The way Waits sings, his gravelly voice, the howl, and how he sounds as if his insides are being twisted by agony is what best expresses Addie’s, often unexpressed, emotional state.
The Beatles—“Eleanor Rigby”
Over the course of the novel, Leo and Addie withdraw more and more from the world until, other than Leo’s caretaker, they are alone. They no longer have friends. Leo has a sister, but she’s agoraphobic, and so as the end nears and Leo’s death is imminent, Addie can’t help but to think of Eleanor Rigby’s funeral. “Nobody came.” Nobody would come to Leo’s funeral, either. But she is able to free herself from that excruciating image because Leo had been perfectly clear, adamant: No funeral. Later, after he has died, Addie can’t escape the line, “All the lonely people” because she is all too aware that she is one of them. In the book, as in the song, “no one was saved.
Bob Dylan—“Everything is Broken”
Because of the obvious redundancy with the line cited from “Tom Traubert’s Blues,” and because Dylan’s voice, while extraordinary, doesn’t convey the same kind of bottomless pit as Tom Waits’ does, I hesitated to include this one. But it’s here because the scope is wider, more encompassing. The things broken—bottles, plates, tools, heads, hearts, vows—are both tangible and intangible in the way Addie’s world is shattered. On a more prosaic level, Addie is a collage artist and often incorporates pieces of broken pottery, glass, scraps of fabric and ephemera into her art.
St. Vincent—”Fear the Future”
The title alone fully captures distinct and discrete aspects of the novel, as does the entirety of the song, albeit somewhat less overtly. The symptoms of Lewy body are a hodgepodge of a multitude of disorders, and erratic insofar as they come and go erratically, which makes diagnosis difficult. “Just give me the answer.” By the time Leo is diagnosed, he’s no longer cognizant that anything is wrong. “My baby’s lost to the monster.” Addie is left to deal with this nightmare alone. She is helpless, and each step of the way, new fears arise.
OTE (featuring Penny Lane)— “Just Doesn’t Feel Right”
This song about falling out of love doesn’t relate to my novel, but out of context there’s one stanza— “The sky is grey, times are changin’/ This is the end of everything / But it’s hard to say goodbye”—that is apropos, although it’s not why I chose this one. It’s the mood and tone and Penny Lane’s voice—what I call “heroin music,” plaintive, lost, and hurting—that captures the novel’s essence.
Leonard Cohen— “I Can’t Forget”
“I can’t forget, I can’t forget / I can’t forget but I don’t remember what.” Before the dementia sets in, Leo had something of a photographic memory. Over time, he comes to forget pretty much everything, but there’s an irony to this selection, too. Addie wishes she could forget not only what’s happening in the present—“I said this this can’t be me”—but also the life they had together. Except, for her, forgetting isn’t possible. “I’ve got this rig that runs on memories.” The memories of how happy they once were are a never-ending intrusion.
Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald—“Jingle Bells”
An outlier for sure, and while I’m a fan of both Sinatra and Fitzgerald, “Jingle Bells” isn’t a song I’d ever play regardless. It’s here only because there’s a moment in the novel where Addie imagines that she and Leo are singing “Jingle Bells,” scatting and snapping their fingers as if they were Sinatra and Fitzgerald. After I wrote this scene, I thought I should check if Sinatra and Fitzgerald really did do “Jingle Bells” as a duet. It turned out that they each recorded their own renditions, but they never sang it together. I decided to leave it as was because it is a product of Addie’s imagination. What’s imagined is rarely accurate. Moreover, it’s a novel. I’m free to invent whatever I think suits the work. Fiction might read as true to life, but it is not real life. It’s fiction.
Binnie Kirshenbaum is the author of the story collection History on a Personal Note and seven novels, including Rabbits for Food, On Mermaid Avenue, Hester Among the Ruins, An Almost Perfect Moment, and The Scenic Route. Her novels have been chosen as Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, NPR, TIME, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Washington Post. Her work has been translated into seven languages.