In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Jennifer Hope Choi’s memoir The Wanderer’s Curse is an engaging look at identity and the personal meaning of “home.”
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Interweaving childhood anecdotes that characterize her mother as a hard-nosed, eccentric matriarch with bits of Korean folklore, including an explanation of yeokmasal, the ‘curse’ of the book’s title, Choi delivers a funny and relatable ode to the pleasures and pitfalls of calling many places home.”
In her own words, here is Jennifer Hope Choi’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir The Wanderer’s Curse:
When I first started writing The Wanderer’s Curse more than a decade ago, I thought the premise was about finding home in a literal sense, based on my mother’s itinerant tendencies and how I’d come to embrace a roving lifestyle in adulthood, too, while chasing a career in writing. When I completed the book, I thought it was about my Four Pillars of Destiny and the alleged curse that led me to become an artist; finding a home in artmaking; and learning to live in residence with uncertainty. Lately, I’ve landed on the idea that it’s about the paths and offshoots of life we take and pass up, and how all these possibilities can furnish us with a kind of faith.
That’s the wild thing about this book (or maybe any book…I’ll have to write another one and get back to you). I’m still learning what the whole thing, and I suppose in turn my own life, is about.
In the same spirit of the book’s title, my taste in music tends to meander. For example, my most recent year-end “wrapped” summary featured two top songs: something by Chopin, because I like to write listening to Chopin, and Alphaville’s “Forever Young.” This chaotic combination (any other Chopin/Alphaville fans out there, drop me a line) is an apt encapsulation of the way my brain works on and off the page. I tend to connect seemingly disparate ideas with a sound logic that just makes sense through my looking glass.
The playlist I created functions almost like a soundtrack of putting The Wanderer’s Curse together. Some songs are mentioned outright in the text (“Have You Seen Her?” by the Chi-Lites, “Immortality” by Celine Dion featuring the Bee Gees) and others evoke a visceral sense of time and place, acting as little doors to the past I can open and shut to revisit whoever I was, wherever I was, again and again.
Below, I share a few highlights, but you can check out the full monty here: The Wanderer’s Curse playlist.
“Our House” by Madness
I am terrible at interpreting music lyrics. For example, I sang “big suburban” in the chorus of The Rolling Stones’s “Beast of Burden” for years, even though there are context clues in the song’s title. I am drawn to sonics and musicality, more than anything, generally in the realm of new wave, because I have always considered myself spiritually Gen X. When I was little, I’d tape songs off the radio during 80’s flashback weekends and play them back on a boombox over and over, memorizing cadence and lyrics I most certainly misheard but belted out confidently anyway. “Our House” was one of those songs, and on a playlist I made for myself years ago with “house” themed additions. The Madness hit has this peppy nostalgia, and hearing it reminds me of those long afternoons sitting at the double tape deck in a house I thought my family would stay in, together, indefinitely. Ah, youth.
“Free” by Cat Power
When I moved to New York City at 17 years old, I thought I’d never leave. I stuck around for 17 years, and much of that time, as documented in the book, was marked by a reckless, feckless electricity of being in your 20s. I didn’t worry about much except the best drunk brunch spot or 2-4-1 happy hour to hit up on days off from working shifts at a biergarten. Time was expansive, so I thought, and I had plenty of it to figure out what I was going to do with my life. Tracks 3 through 11 retain that propulsive energy. I listened to these songs on repeat while wrapping up day-old pastries at Drink Me Café on E. 6th, or while winding through Chinatown, from the Hua Mei bird garden to the market on Mott that sold packaged poultry labeled Patrick. (Why? Who? We’ll never know.)
“Babooshka” by Kate Bush
“Babooshka” is a divisive song, though inarguably her weirdest. I’m one of those long-haul Kate Bush lovers (i.e. whatever the opposite of a fair-weather fan is), so she shows up twice on this playlist. Once for “Hounds of Love,” which is a nod to Molder, the Korean jindo dog that changed my mom’s life. I write about how Molder got named in a section called Escape Artists. It’s a misspelled and misgendered reference to Fox Mulder from “The X-Files,” my favorite show when I was in high school.
But Babooshka is specific to a different time. I’m a person of sturdy rituals, and while I was living in a terrarium-like loft in Tulsa, Oklahoma (part three of the book), I started every Saturday with a playlist, which kicked off with Babooshka. This was my first, non-janky-or-jerry-rigged apartment, which looked like a set for an NYC loft on a CW television show. There’s a good stretch of glass-breaking sounds throughout the song, and I’d thrash around dancing and vacuuming and faux screaming to the chorus like a maniac, I guess because I just could. I have listened to the song hundreds of times but only recently paid attention to the lyrics, which are…so bizarre. Retrospectively, it was an effective antidote to the style of music my neighbors were known for. Hanson’s studio was located across the alley. Yes, they are still making music. Tracks 23 through 33 are reminiscent of this era, a generative time for me creatively and when I unlocked the ending to The Wanderer’s Curse.
“Beautiful Child” by Fleetwood Mac
The real ones know Tusk is hands-down Fleetwood Mac’s best album. More importantly, it’s their favorite album, which is interesting because some folks think the 20 tracks aberrate from the band’s signature sound. “Beautiful Child” is probably no one’s favorite song, but I simply could not stop listening to it in 2017. It will forever remind me of living in Carson McCullers’ childhood home/museum for a writing fellowship. Sometimes you just want a good cry, and that’s what I did, often, to this song, for little pity parties in the downstairs basement studio, while trying to write about Korean cults (Part Two of the book).
“Our House” by Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young
The playlist closes with “Our House” by Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young. Those lyrics I actually paid attention to, which illicit such tender longing, for an imagined ideal, one of ordinariness—two cats in the yard, the simple pleasures of companionship, a shared home and life. There’s an openness, to possibility, that mirror the ending in The Wanderer’s Curse. And it’s no coincidence I bookended this list with songs of the same name. I only just realized this echo is a similar structure I use throughout my book—revisitations of ideas and notions, to unearth newfound images or experiences through the refractions, to deepen my understanding of an event, feeling, or time.
The Wanderer’s Curse – Full Playlist
- Our House by Madness
- Crazy – Single Version by Patsy Cline, The Jordanaires
- Teenage Kicks by The Undertones
- It’s My Life – 1997 Remaster by Talk Talk
- Hounds of Love by Kate Bush
- Cities in Dust – Single Version by Siouxsie and the Banshees
- This is the Day by The The
- Forever Young by Alphaville
- Sister I’m a Poet by Morrissey
- Home, by LCD Soundsystem
- Free by Cat Power
- Temptation – 7” Version 2015 Remaster by New Order
- Have You Seen Her by The Chi-Lites
- Myth by Beach House
- Babies by Pulp
- Suedehead – 2011 Remaster by Morrissey
- True Faith – 2011 Total Version by New Order
- I Can Change by LCD Soundsystem
- Over and Over by Hot Chip
- Come Undone by Duran Duran
- Beautiful Child – 2015 Remaster by Fleetwood Mac
- Tiny Apocalypse by David Byrne
- Babooshka by Kate Bush
- Nobody by Mitski
- I Want You to Love Me by Fiona Apple
- Storms by Fleetwood Mac
- Heaven or Las Vegas by Cocteau Twins
- Regret – 2015 Remaster by New Order
- There She Goes by The La’s
- Save Me a Place by Fleetwood Mac
- Dreams Never End – 2015 Remaster by New Order
- Cozy by Beyoncé
- It’s My House by Diana Ross
- Gypsy by Fleetwood Mac
- Immortality (feat. Bee Gees) by Celine Dion and the Bee Gees
- Our House by Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young
Jennifer Hope Choi is a National Magazine Award–nominated editor at Bon Appétit. Her writing has been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing and has appeared in the New York Times, Guernica, Lucky Peach, VQR, BuzzFeed, and the American Scholar.