In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Sarah Yahm’s debut novel Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation is a compelling family epic that spans four generations.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“Spanning four decades, their journey is one of reckoning and renewal, forcing each to balance honoring the past with finding a way forward. Yahm weaves a raw, intimate portrait of a family fractured by illness yet forever connected, exploring grief, love, and the painful beauty of letting go.”
In her own words, here is Sarah Yahm’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation:
When I write fiction, I place my imaginary characters in familiar settings and then move them around in my mind, like a kid playing with toy dinosaurs. Writing this blog post enabled me to pick them up again—Louise, Leon, and Lydia—and watch them interact with each other. I missed them so much. It’s immensely comforting to discover that while I’ve been doing other things, they’ve been carrying on unscripted, living their lives in the set pieces of my childhood—still arguing, still talking, still making each other laugh.
Ever since 7th Grade, when I was mocked mercilessly for my folky music tastes, I’ve dreaded the question, “What kind of music do you like?” because I have been and always will be hopelessly uncool. So I was nervous about pulling together this playlist. But then it occurred to me that it’s not my music taste you’ll judge, it’s my characters’. So go to town! I think you’ll find that Leon and Lydia are uncool like me, but Louise (even when she’s listening to chamber music) is very punk rock. The novel starts in 1974, a few years after Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate and a few months before Blood on the Tracks is released. It ends in 2013 and so the last few chapters are filled with the music of my 20’s: Magnetic Fields, The Mountain Goats, The National. Lydia, born in 1979, would definitely have been listening to a lot of Ani DiFranco in her teenage years, but I decided to spare you from the angst-ridden spoken word.
Summer in the City by Regina Spektor.
When Unfinished Acts opens Louise, the matriarch-to-be, is a hot mess. She’s 23, having just fled her mother’s funeral on Long Island, and she’s “lonely, lonely, lonely,” as Regina Spektor would say. She’s hostile and alienating and sweaty and sticky and unwashed and—in spite of it or because of it—kind of sexy. It’s in this state, summarized by Regina Spektor as “I feel like cumming, but I also feel like crying,” that she meets her future husband Leon and goes home with him.
She fucks it up, of course, and then walks home after a series of other self-destructive acts. Like the narrator of this song, she hallucinates her mother “in the backs of other women”—or in this case, in a bunny-slipper-wearing homeless woman in Tompkins Square Park. Oh Louise, you lovable, stinky self-hating fuck-up!
I Hope that I don’t Fall in Love with You, Tom Waits
This one’s pretty self-explanatory. Louise is just one big walking, breathing red flag, and Leon knows it. But he’s going to fall in love with her anyway, is already falling in love with her, is already feeling that all-consuming dangerous tenderness. And Tom Waits expresses dangerous tenderness better than anyone else.
Shelter from the Storm, Bob Dylan
Leon and Louise were already living together when Blood on the Tracks came out in January of 1975, and like everyone else in their demographic they listened to it nonstop. But unlike everybody else, Louise also complained about it nonstop.
“Take ‘Simple Twist of Fate,’ for instance,” she said. “It’s a simple, easy-to-understand song, right? Two people meet on the docks. They have a moment and then the moment ends. He wants to have a moment again. Straightforward, right? But then in the middle of it he throws in a one-eyed undertaker and a fucking parrot. Why? Why the parrot?”
“And then let’s talk about ‘Tangled Up in Blue.’ I’ve no idea what’s going on in this song. They’re on Montague Street—Brooklyn Heights, I’m assuming it’s Brooklyn Heights—but suddenly he’s dealing with slaves? What? Where are we in time? And then don’t even get me started on ‘Shelter from the Storm.’ He’s wearing a crown of thorns—is Bob Dylan Jesus? And then does that make the woman Mary? “When God and she were born?” But Mary wasn’t born at the same time as God. If it’s Mary, is he fucking his mother? But she’s also not his mother. I just—I don’t—sometimes I feel like he just took every archetype in the world, put them in a little cup like you use for Boggle, and then dumped it out on a scarred wooden table.” She paused. “Scarred wooden table—how poetic,” she said.
“Also,” she continued undeterred, “what is it with all of these Jews—Bobby Zimmerman being the chief culprit—running around talking about Jesus all the time and using Christian iconography? What do they know from Christian iconography?”
Leon took the bait because he was starting to get bored, and it kept him a little bit interested to keep the fight going. “Leonard Cohen uses Christian iconography in ‘Suzanne.'” Louise loved “Suzanne.” Leon always pictured Suzanne as looking like Louise, and he suspected Louise did as well.
“Sure, he uses Christian iconography because he’s studied Western literature. He uses it deliberately and carefully.”
“Oh, so you’re saying you understand what’s happening in that verse of ‘Suzanne’ about Jesus and the sailor?”
“No, but he’s creating a story and I can picture it, and I believe that he knows what’s happening.”
“So if this album drives you so crazy, why do we keep listening to it?” Leon said.
Louise ignored him. It was raining outside. “I’m making some tea,” she said. “Do you want some?”
“Sure,” he answered.
On the way into the kitchen, she put the needle back on “Shelter from the Storm” because she loved it. They both loved it. They couldn’t help it, and things were so cozy in their apartment. He couldn’t help picturing both of them in the song even though he knew it was ridiculous. Louise’s shelter was full of barbs and prickers and legitimate-but-irritating, unending critiques. But he felt cocooned anyway. No, that wasn’t quite the right word. He felt like they were creating a universe of internal references and jokes and understandings, a world unto themselves. He was starting to get a sense of the contours of her mind. She was starting to let him inside. He was hopeful, he guessed.
“I mean, seriously,” she said from the kitchen, “a one-eyed undertaker? Unnecessary.”
He laughed and closed his eyes, lying down on the slightly mildewed couch. It was a good afternoon for a nap.
Lydia, the Tattooed Lady
This is the only song Lydia would fall asleep to during the first week of her life. They tried every lullaby and every soothing song either of them knew. In a punch-drunk moment of desperation at 2:00AM Leon two-stepped around the apartment singing this raucous song off-key. And that was when Lydia finally fell asleep. “It’s a sign from Hashem!” a sleep-deprived Louise announced. Leon agreed because he had fond memories of this song. His mother would sing it on the subway out to Coney Island in the summer when his father was still alive, and she was happy.
Real World, Anais Mitchell
Even though it’s the tail end of the 70’s and, frankly, Louise and Leon should know better, they succumb to hippy utopian fantasies and move to the country. As Leon’s mother says when she hears they’re moving upstate: “What’s so great about growing your own vegetables? You know what’s even better than growing your own vegetables? Buying them in a store.”
Of course once they move upstate everything falls apart because ’70s utopian fantasies always fall apart. And also they’re neurotic Jewish Eastern Europeans. What did they think they were going to be? Contented? Happy? Live a simple life? Don’t be ridiculous!
Start Wearing Purple Now, Gogol Bordello
Thank you, Gogol Bordello, for calling us out on our bullshit.
Because their brains—Louise, Leon, and Lydia’s—growl and smash and spin just like this song. Sometimes they can find beauty in it, and sometimes they can’t. Louise has postpartum depression; Lydia is an obsessive-compulsive hand washer; Louise and Leon argue and make up and argue again. Then there’s that disease slumbering inside Louise’s blood, bones, DNA.
And one day it’s going to wake up.
Freeman Etudes: Books 1 and 2, #1, John Cage
Louise experiences the world through music. Her illness, which makes her cello-playing hands palsy and her legs drag, feels like a high-pitched squeal to her, like a constant C-sharp. When her fork rattles against her plate because she can’t hold it steady, she calls it her “knife-on-fork concerto,” and Imaginary John Cage praises her at the kitchen table while her husband and daughter pretend not to notice.
Living in her body begins to be unbearable, atonal, her limbs a clanky jumble. She can’t let her daughter see it, so she goes.
“Born on a Train” by The Magnetic Fields—I went to college in the late ’90s. Did you think I could create a playlist that didn’t have The Magnetic Fields? Of course not. I had this song stuck in my head for about three years when I was writing this book, and my daughter loved it as a lullaby. I would sing it out loud to her, and when I got to that line: “One of these days, I’m going to leave you in your sleep,” the horrible ramifications of Louise’s decision would hit me.
“Is she really going to leave her daughter?” I would think, while my daughter grabbed at my index finger. “It’s unforgivable,” I would think, in that moment in her darkened bedroom. But then on the drive back from visiting my dying mother, I would think, “I wish she’d spared me this. Louise was right to spare Lydia this.” So there you go. No answers and an impossible dilemma like all of motherhood.
Up the Wolves, Mountain Goats
Lydia’s pretty fucked up after Louise leaves. She’s furious, terrified, and addicted to extraordinary and extravagant lies. “My mother’s playing the cello for pandas in China,” she says; “She’s exhuming mass graves in Spain;” “She’s drinking coffee in Cuba.” She’s not gone, she says in all of these different lies, she’s just on a trip. The implication being she’s going to return, that “there’s going to be a party when the wolf comes home.”
Famous Blue Raincoat, Leonard Cohen
This song is the spine of the book. They talk about it all the time. Louise listens to it over and over again when she starts to get sick. She wants to build a little house deep in the desert, she wants to die there. And eventually she does.
After she dies, when Lydia sits with her body in that house deep in the desert, Louise sends her a coded message through “Famous Blue Raincoat.” Louise asks for forgiveness and Lydia sort of, sort of gives it to her.
Lydia rewrites that final stanza so it reads, “What can I tell you? My mother, my killer. What can I possibly say? I guess that I miss you. I guess I forgive you. I’m glad you stood in my way.”
Fake Empire, The National
It’s the aughts. Louise is dead, Bush is president. Lydia is trying to build a life and not think about her own mortality. Pick some apples, make some pie. But there’s a shadow lurking. She’s half awake and she knows it.
During Lydia’s second year of grad school, Simon has a conference at Brown, and so he stays with her for a long weekend. It’s fall, and after he gives his talk, he plays hooky, and they drive thirty minutes into Massachusetts and go apple picking. It’s a perfect day, the kind of perfect day that you know is a perfect day, and if you’re Lydia, you try not to think too hard about the fact that it’s a perfect day because you’re worried you’ll fuck it up.
They go back home and make an actual apple pie. Lydia shows him how to make pie crust because Louise, although she performatively rejected domesticity, was actually very good at baking.
Simon has to fly back to England the next morning. They eat pie and have sex and he falls asleep with his head smushing one of her breasts, drooling. She’s annoyed, but also filled with intense love and affection for him. Maybe I won’t get sick, she thinks. It’s possible I won’t get sick. But she knows she will.
The next morning, she’s underslept and slow, and Simon is pissed at her because he’s anxious about missing his flight. The visit ends on a sour, squabbly note. When she gets back from the airport, she closes the shades, climbs into bed, and listens to “Fake Empire” over and over again, because she’s a grad student and can get away with doing absolutely nothing for a day. And every time she listens to the song, she thinks Maybe I can have more perfect days like that, maybe there’s no scarcity. But she knew she was lying to herself.
She’d planned on making a bunch of apple pies and bringing them to her seminar, but that was too exhausting, because pie crust was actually hard to make, and she didn’t want to clean the food processor because the butter slimed up all the tiny crevices. So the apples just sat there, and then when she got fruit flies, she threw them away.
Note: I love the live version of this song. The raw grief and rage in his voice, the way it cracks open like the song cracks open, like denial cracks open.
Departure (Home), Max Richter
I rewatched “The Leftovers” recently, and I’ve been listening to Max Richter non-stop ever since. If this book were a movie, this would be playing during Lydia’s death scene. She’s high as fuck on morphine, and she thinks she’s drifting down to the bottom of a pond with water lilies in her hair.
I’m Going to Go Back There Someday, Gonzo
Unfun fact: when I was a kid, we rented a cottage for two weeks every summer on the Cape. The man who owned the house next to us was a member of the original Muppet cast. He used to do puppet shows on his porch and we would watch from across the way. It was awesome. When I was nine, he died of AIDS. Ever since, I’ve associated the Muppets with early and tragic death. Yup. The absurdity and goofiness of the Muppets is infused with pathos for me. But it makes me love them all the more. Hence, Gonzo’s bittersweet ballad (how I love that blue Semitic-nosed, chicken-loving creature!).
This song would be sentimental except it’s sung by a gravelly-voiced Muppet. I also think Lydia had the Muppet Movie record and played it over and over again when she was a kid. So it makes sense that this song would run through Leon’s head. I picture him looking out at the ocean in Santa Cruz, lonely but okay. Feeling connected to Louise and Lydia in some vague, unarticulated way, curious about the mystery of what’s next.
Sarah Yahm has worked as an educator, oral historian, documentarian, and writer. She’s taught at colleges and universities, and in public parks and elementary schools. She’s published in Slate, Bellevue Literary Review, and placed pieces on NPR and affiliates, among others. In her work as a writer and an academic, she’s focused on the lived experience and social meaning of illness and disability. She lives in the woods in Central Vermont with her family.