In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Paula Bomer’s novel The Stalker is a brilliant and unsettling portrait of modern male toxicity.
Vogue wrote of the book:
“Brilliant, disturbing, and hilarious . . . [Doughty’s] deficiencies only make Bomer’s perverse odyssey more compelling . . . For all the obvious comparisons to Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley or Bret Easton Ellis’s Patrick Bateman, Doughty also serves as a male counterpart of Ottessa Moshfegh’s narrator in My Year of Rest and Relaxation: a blond narcissist who stares out onto a vanished Manhattan skyline through a cloud of drugs, desperation, and delusion. The final pages, as in Moshfegh’s work, will move readers with their unlikely and ultimately transcendent beauty.”
In her own words, here is Paula Bomer’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Stalker:
I can be very precious about what I am listening to while writing a first draft of a novel, or a short story, or even an essay. Historically, I mostly listened to things while warming up to sit down and tackle the work, but as I’ve gotten older I can listen to things while writing. Interestingly, once I started making the list of stalker songs, I realized – there are so many stalker songs!! That’s a subject matter that deserves more attention than I can give here, but let’s say it’s because stalking isn’t something that rarely happens. Why is that? Is it because we romanticize it? From The Great Gatsby, to many low budget romance movies, it’s portrayed as a kind of love. It is not. Or is it because it largely happens to women, and often by intimate partners, so therefore it’s no “really” a crime?
And yet the beauty and truth of so many songs on this list are because darkness made visible is its own kind of beauty. It’s truth made into a song. Starting with Marika Hackman’s gorgeous creepy interpretation of “I Follow Rivers,” moving to the gentle Swedish pop of The Concretes’ “Oh My Love” (singing, “and you’re the captain of a ship, you feel mighty, you feel big, And you swear, you swear you can control her”) and including the indie pop “Until The Morning Comes” by the Tindersticks, with straight up victim blaming (“How did you make me go, this far?”), stalking songs are as diverse as stalking itself. It’s all in the details, the arc of the song, the notes it chooses to hit. Not all of the songs are directly about stalking ,but the mood is consistent and largely ominous. Music is always a great comfort to me when I’m writing, helping make the lonely process less lonely. This novel was no different, and these songs helped validate my endeavor in writing a book about such a terrible subject matter.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Paula Bomer’s playlist for her novel Nine Months
Paula Bomer’s playlist for her story collection Baby & Other Stories
Paula Bomer “Questions I Wanted to Send Mark Kozelek But He Didn’t Want Them”
Author Paula Bomer Interviews Musician Nick Zubeck
Author Paula Bomer Interviews Musician Jimmy LaValle of The Album Leaf
Paula Bomer is the author of the novels Tante Eva and Nine Months and the story collections Inside Madeleine and Baby and Other Stories, as well as the essay collection Mystery and Mortality. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including New York Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB, Fiction, and The Mississippi Review.