In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Debbie Urbanski‘s story collection Portalmania brings an impressive otherworldly perspective to everyday experience.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Quietly haunting…a sharp, off-kilter collection that uses the uncanny as a lens for deeply human concerns.”
In her own words, here is Debbie Urbanski‘s Book Notes music playlist for her story collection Portalmania:
Portalmania is a story collection about portals, of course—but it’s also a collection about women who don’t fit comfortably into their lives or this world. The women in my book are generally mothers and wives. They identify as asexual, they’re stuck in some cross-genre situation that borders on horror, and they are rubbing up against pre-existing definitions and constraints until they’re bloody and/or raw.
I was surprised to learn recently that not everyone is as into portals as I am. I’m being serious here: portals are so essential to how I experience the world that it’s hard to imagine my identity (or anyone’s) without them. Portals ask such basic questions of us that I found fascinating as a child and I continue to find fascinating: Do I belong here or there? Does this world (or this family or this relationship) want me as I am? Would another world (or another family or another relationship) want me more? Essentially, should I stay or should I go?
With this playlist, I aimed to capture the complicated emotions and relationships that are at the center of my book (though I also included a song from The Magicians soundtrack just because that was such a great portal show).
Up the Mountain by Regina Spektor
This song makes me feel anxious, panicked, and full of vague urgency and compulsive dread—all good vibes to kick off thisplaylist or my book. Though Portalmania contains a lot of portals, metaphorical and actual, the characters in my stories don’t generally get to go through them. Rather they’re trapped in their lives, in past identities, in self-performance, and in other people’s expectations of them. I get the feeling when listening to this song that something bad is happening at the borders or about to happen. At one point, Regina Spektor repeats the line Like it or not, I’m coming up the mountain over and over and over. Whatever that means, it doesn’t sound good.
Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd by Lana Del Rey
I’ve discovered while working on this playlist that there are not nearly enough portal songs out there—but here is one of them, describing a distant world to which only a few have found the door. Like any good portal story, there’s a lot of wanting and sadness here, as Lana Del Rey keeps pleading and repeating, When’s it gonna be my turn? Don’t forget me.
U Can Be Happy If U Want by Porridge Radio
This appears, on the surface, if you look at the lyrics from far away and squint, to be a love song, at least in the beginning—but soon in, it becomes clear that something is off about the relationship described here, especially when singer Dana Margolin starts screaming lines like Nothing is mine…I’ll give it all to you. I don’t need anything. But even before that, My voice is stuck to your voice / So everything I say belongs to you, or My head is stuck to your head/So everything that I think belongs to you makes love sound grotesque, dangerous, and damaging. How much of ourselves are we expected to give up for the other person in our relationships? That’s a question my narrators are asking all the time. The melodic and repeated line belongs to you sounds innocent enough and maybe even sweet until it’s heard in context with all of the song’s possessive imagery.
Love The Way You Lie by Eminem and Rihanna
I wrote Portalmania’s stories over the span of 8 or 9 years, so I don’t remember all the songs I listened to at the time, but I do remember listening to this particular song a lot. I was so taken by the contrast between the female and the male voices—how constricted the lines are that the woman gets to say. I’m pretty certain she’s not saying how she actually feels (Just gonna stand there and watch me burn? Well, that’s all right because I like the way it hurts) but rather what the guy wants her to say. She’s forced to repeat herself a lot. Versus the male voice who goes on and on and on and on, insisting several times that he loves this woman, and who knows, maybe he does. Who gets to define what love is? If someone says what they’re doing is love, is it still love? Even if what they’re doing is damaging? This couple appears to be on the edge of destruction. So is destructive love still love?
We Fucked It Up by April Snow
I need to include at least one song from Slow, the moving and beautiful Lithuanian film about an asexual male and an allosexual woman who are trying to make their mixed-orientation relationship work. I’ve never seen asexuality treated in such a way before, as serious adult realism. This particular song reminds me of the couple in my story “A Few Personal Observations on Portals,” a couple that loves each other in their own unique way as they try hard to sustain their untraditional relationship that doesn’t follow the usual scripts.
Jagwar by SHELLS
I also need to include a song from The Magicians, which started off as a good portal trilogy by Lev Grossman and ended up being a fabulous TV show that challenges a lot of the traditional portal tropes found in fantasy literature (that the portal world, for instance, is this really great place or an easily fixable place). The entire five seasons of the show had a spectacular soundtrack. “Jaguar” appeared in the season three finale, when some dark stuff is happening.
Shadow by Chromatics
I’m including this song because I love it, and I feel like Twin Peaks: The Return influenced my later writing a lot, giving me permission to do whatever I feel necessary in a story (I’m thinking in particular of “The Dirty Golden Yellow House”). But I’m also including “Shadow” because of these awesome lines, which I’ll admit I don’t totally understand at a literal level, but the feeling of them reminds me of some of the manipulation and confusion present in Portalmania:
And now you’re just a stranger’s dream
I took your picture from the frame
and now you’re nothing like you seem
and then you smell like last night’s rain
Hares on the Mountain by Fern Maddie
Beautiful, ominous, creepy, sad—I think that pretty much sums up both this song as well as the darker stories in Portalmania. Lines like
And if all the young maids were hares on the mountain
Oh if all the young maids were hares on the mountain
How many young men would take guns and go hunting?
are disturbing enough, but then, at the end of the song, the roles are flipped.
And if all the young men were hares on the mountain
Yeah if all the young men were hares on the mountain
How many young maids would take guns and go hunting?
It’s a romance of sorts, I suppose, but one in which violence seems inevitable.
You Don’t Know / I Am the One from the musical Next to Normal
I know Broadway showtunes might not fit perfectly onto this playlist, but Next To Normal contains one of the best portrayals of a complicated relationship and a complicated love that I’ve ever seen. (This musical also won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, only the eighth musical ever to do so. Usually that award is given to plays.) In “You Don’t Know,” wife Diana, struggling with bipolar disorder, on her way to an eventual suicide attempt, insists that her husband Dan has no idea of how much she’s suffering. Having struggled with mental illness myself, I have to say she’s probably right. I think it’s impossible to imagine that terrible headspace unless you’ve been there. While in “I Am The One,” Dan claims he does know his wife, hasn’t he been so supportive so far, and also he too is suffering. Doesn’t she care? Dan (I have always wanted to tell him), is now the right time to be bringing that up? And must you make this all about you? At the same time, what to do when both people in a relationship are drowning? Who is supposed to rescue whom? The husbands and wives in Portalmania are often asking these same questions.
Dumbest Girl Alive by 100 gecs
I wanted to end this playlist with an angry song because I think my book as a whole is about the gradual development of anger and rage in characters who aren’t allowed to be themselves. The narrator of “Dumbest Girl Alive” is so obviously not dumb, the music is too good for that to be remotely true, but (in my take on it) she’s more playing a part, playing along with what’s expected of her, all the while getting ready to explode. And then, at the very end of the song, there is an actual explosion, which could be an appropriate ending to any of Portalmania’s stories but particularly to “The Dirty Golden Yellow House,” my favorite in the collection—this urge to want to destroy the world and maybe oneself in the hope that something better will follow.
Debbie Urbanski is a writer, nature lover, and human whose stories and essays have been published widely in such places as The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Best American Experimental Writing, The Sun, Granta, Orion, and Junior Great Books. A recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, she can often be found hiking with her family in the hills south of Syracuse, New York. Her first novel After World comes out from Simon & Schuster 12/05/23.