In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Jen Michalski’s novel All This Can Be True is a mesmerizing story of love and loss.
The Heavy Feather Review wrote of the book:
“Written in alternating points of view, the book is as much a story of self discovery and queer coming-of-age as it is a story of love, and Michalski tells it well.”
In her own words, here is Jen Michalski’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel All This Can Be True:
I started to write All This Can Be True During the COVID-19 pandemic. Lacie’s husband initially came down with a mysterious respiratory illness that had affected a lot of people, but almost immediately the trope felt overdone for obvious reasons, and I also realized I didn’t want to write anything particularly dystopian affecting thousands of people. I’ve always been more interested in exploring interpersonal situations, which is exactly what this book became—a mixture of midlife crisis, unexpected illness, and living one’s truest life. What if you were planning a big change but then something awful or unexpected happened that made it almost nearly impossible. What do we owe that person or that situation to stay the course instead of being true to our happiness?
I love listening to music when I’m writing, and even if I don’t wind up connecting what I’m listening to the book explicitly, I like to create little Easter eggs of songs within the book that are meaningful to me. And, since this novel included a musician, how could I not?
“Say Goodbye to Hollywood” (Songs in the Attic by Billy Joel)
In the early eighties, when I was ten, my parents joined the Columbia House Record and Tape Club. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, for a single penny (that you taped to the order form and mailed to Columbia House), you could get 12 records or cassette tapes shipped to you! Sure, you had to buy a bunch more over the course of several years to meet the obligations of your contract, and Columbia House aggressively sent you the monthly selection whether you wanted it or not, at a jacked-up price (plus, the artists got zero royalties), but it was a good way to get a collection started if you were a music neophyte.
Anyway, my parents were not terribly sophisticated music fans, although my mother, surprisingly was completely—and unknowingly—a big gay and loved Queen, Blondie, Barbara Streisand, and Dolly Parton, and my dad swore allegiance to Neil Diamond (so we know the genes for my musical heritage were not passed along by him). Suffice to say, they wound up with a few empty boxes on their order form and let me choose four cassettes to round out their order. Billy Joel’s Songs in the Attic was one that I picked. I’m no Billy Joel stan (although these days I seem to own more of his vinyl—up to Glass Houses—than I care to admit). That said, ten-year-old Jennie wore her Columbia House tape of Glass Houses. Comprising mostly live versions of material released before Joel’s big breakthrough, The Stranger, in 1977, Glass Houses showcased the strength of Joel’s live performances—but also, for me, a very budding writer—his lyricism. (Thankfully, the liner notes that accompanies the cassette, a rarity, included the lyrics.) Billy Joel’s lyrics are to Long Island, Los Angeles, and NYC what Rick Moody’s prose is to NYC, suburban New Jersey, and New Canaan, Connecticut. The storytelling on Songs in the Attic is so rich—from “Captain Jack” to “Say Goodbye to Hollywood,” to the opening chiasmus of “Summer, Highland Falls” (“They say that these are not the best of times/But they’re the only times I’ve ever know.”) Is that a chiasmus? Feel free to correct—I’m no English professor. However, I owe a lot of Billy Joel’s Glass Houses, as much as I owe to Raymond Carver in my late teens and Flannery O’Connor in my twenties.
I always put one small part of myself in every character, and Lacie’s love of Billy Joel is the music snob in me giving the piano man his due:
“When Lacie was in college, she’d listened to Billy Joel and Elton John and knew they were uncool, but that was what she liked, and Derek had always tried to make her feel better, conceding that Billy Joel’s Songs in the Attic was a great live album and that he’d owned Glass Houses and Tumbleweed Connection at some point in his life.”
“Things You Say” (Dig Me Out by Sleater-Kinney)
Quinn’s band in All This Can Be True, The Clit Girls (I’m still shocked I got through that many revisions and kept the name), were definitely inspired by the whole riot grrrl movement, particularly Kathleen Hanna and Bikini Kill and their queer-positive, anti-patriarchy message. (In fact, after their breakup in the novel, members of the Clit Girls go on to form an electronic pop, sampling-based project called Girl Pants, which is my nod to Kathleen Hann’s post-Bikini Kill art project, Le Tigre.) However, The Clit Girls are much later in the musical timeline than Bikini Kill, and their emergence on the scene would’ve immediately followed Sleater-Kinney’s, so I was thinking mostly of Sleater-Kinney as I was writing the novel. In Quinn’s first appearance, she’s playing an old Clit Girls song on her guitar while at a campground:
“You were playing Heart or Head on your guitar,” he continued after a pause. “They say you gotta follow your heart or your head / One will kill you, one will make you feel like you’re dead.”
The thing was, she didn’t feel dead. She felt completely terrified. They’d gotten the lyrics all wrong, she and Cecilia. Of course, they were young and stupid then. They knew nothing about life, least how little they’d ever know.
I imagined “Heart or Head” sounding similar to Sleater-Kinney’s “Things You Say”:
You got your words
but they make you stuck
now you can’t feel
now you can’t want.
I’ve been a huge fan of Sleater-Kinney since they released Dig Me Out almost thirty years ago, and I love to throw around my street cred by showing my show stubs from as far back as 1999. It therefore feels super sweet to pay homage to Carrie and Corin and Janet in print. Maybe they’ll throw me an Easter egg in a song yet to be written.
“Drone” (Time to Go Home by Chastity Belt)
If The Clit Girls had a modern-day comparison, they would be Washington State’s Chastity Belt (descendants of fellow Washingtons Sleater-Kinney). Chastity Belt both lauds and lampoons modern feminism, particularly in regard to themselves: “I make/Choices without reason,” Julia Shapiro sings on “Drone,” a song from their second album. The song also contains a line from Sheila Heti’s feminist novel How Should a Person Be? (“He’s just another man who wants to teach me something”). In the novel, Quinn has made a lot of her own “choices without reason,” but I don’t think she’d take any of them back, because she is who she is today. (Probably true of all of us.)
“Sugar Mountain” (from Decade by Neil Young)
Neil Young’s “Sugar Mountain” was the B-side single of the much more well-known “Cinnamon Girl” and didn’t actually appear on an album until the triple-album compilation Decade, released in 1977, which is how I was introduced to it. The song is about growing up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and for me it encapsulated that sort of idyllic childhood to which we all aspire to return. Early in the novel, I use Lacie’s husband, Derek, singing “Sugar Mountain” by Neil Young as a bit of a character sketch. For all Derek’s faults (specifically his infidelity), he is the complicated, little boy inside who’s still trying to gain the validation he didn’t get in his youth, despite being a multimillionaire venture capitalist, athletic, and good-looking.
“Kentucky Woman” (by Neil Diamond)
Neil Diamond is used as a punchline in the novel, when one of Lacie and Derek’s daughters mistakes the former for Neil Young (apparently this isn’t the first time this has happened), but Neil Diamond has written a lot of great songs, including “Kentucky Woman,” which was released as a single in 1967 and, like “Sugar Mountain,” wasn’t compiled on a album until a greatest hits was released. What’s interesting to me is how much Neil Diamond in his twenties looked like a member of the Jonas Brothers. Also, there is no known connection between the Neils, to my knowledge, beyond their musicianship and sharing their first name.
“The Way We Get By” (Kill the Moonlight by Spoon)
There’s a scene in the novel in which the Clit Girls are playing a Bonnaroo, and one of the bigger acts on the ticket is Spoon. I have loved Spoon since they released “Kill the Moonlight” over twenty years ago, and I definitely wanted to name check them in the book. I feel like Brett Daniels’s lyrics “We rarely practice discern/We make love to ‘Some Weird Sin’/We seek out the taciturn” definitely encapsulate those years that the Clit Girls and the Flattery O’Connor’s are on the road and their young, impulsive, jaded mindset.
“I Feel Possessed” (Temple of Low Men by Crowded House)
When I was developing the relationship between Lacie and Quinn, I listened to this song a lot.
“I hardly know which way is up/Or which way down…I feel possessed when you come round.” There’s a particularly haunting minor key change in the chorus that approximates that butterflies in the stomach feeling you have when you’re crushing hard on someone. I love that moment, in fiction and in life, when the bottom drops out (in a good way), and you are forever changed.
“Set the Twilight Reeling” (from Set the Twilight Reeling by Lou Reed)
Although there are some rebirths in All This Can Be True, there is also a death or two (I’m not telling). Lou Reed’s “Set the Twilight Reeling” does not appear anywhere in the book, nor do several other songs of remembrance, regret, and other realizations from him, like “Halloween Parade,” “What’s Good – The Thesis,” “Ride Into the Sun,” “Dime Store Mystery.” However, they were heavy on my mind, as was the first couplet of “Set the Twilight Reeling”¾
Take me for what I am
a star newly emerging
Its bittersweet double meaning felt perfect for the figurative and literal dying and rebirth occurring in the novel—Quinn’s losses but also her newly resurging career, Lacie’s failing marriage but also her hard-earned freedom. It’s a delicate balance of good and bad we all experience in our lives, sometimes all at once. All this can be true.
Bonus tracks (songs on heavy rotation while I was working on the novel):
“Fog Lake” by Dinosaur
“Hope” by Alex G
“Letting Go” by Wild Nothing
“Bang Goes the Drum” by Blossom Dearie
“I Can’t Make You Love Me” by Bonnie Raitt
“Unsatisfied” by the Replacements
“Shut Up Kiss Me” by Angel Olsen
“Paper Bag” by Fiona Apple
“Light Years” The National
also at Largehearted Boy:
Jen Michalski’s playlist for her story collection The Company of Strangers
Jen Michalski’s playlist for her novel The Summer She Was Under Water
Jen Michalski’s playlist for her novel The Tide King
Jen Michalski’s playlist for her short fiction collection Could You Be With Her Now
Jen Michalski is the author of the novels All This Can Be True (Turner/Key Light, June 2025), You’ll Be Fine (NineStar Press, 2021), The Summer She Was Under Water (Black Lawrence Press, 2017), and The Tide King (Black Lawrence Press 2013), a couplet of novellas called Could You Be With Her Now (Dzanc Books 2013), and three collections of fiction (The Company of Strangers, 2023; From Here, 2014; and Close Encounters, 2007). Her work has appeared in more than 100 publications, including Poets & Writers, and she’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize seven times. She’s been named as “One of 50 Women to Watch” by The Baltimore Sun and “Best Writer” by Baltimore Magazine. She is editor in chief of the literary weekly jmww.