In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Amanda Uhle’s memoir Destroy This House is a transfixing and heartfelt memoir.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“With riveting precision, candor, and wit, Uhle mixes emotionally complex memories with research into her parents’ audacious schemes in a staggering feat of exorcism and reconciliation, a testament to loyalty, compassion, and love.”
In her own words, here is Amanda Uhle’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir Destroy This House:
They weren’t criminals, but my parents were a kind of late twentieth century Midwestern Bonnie and Clyde: constantly making self-destructive choices, sticking together through thick and thin. In my household growing up, we were always in some kind of money trouble–usually the kind of trouble that came from my dad’s overoptimistic truth-stretching or from my mom’s penchant for hoarding everything from canned food to new, unworn clothing. As challenging as it was, my childhood was unexpectedly fun, too. It was a weird house–actually, about ten different houses and apartments over forty years–but it was also a home filled with humor and with love even alongside the outlandish things my parents did. By the time I was about eight, I’d had enough of the fakery and was growing increasingly distressed about living in a place piled high with unopened mail, shopping bags of fabric and unbelievable amounts of food all over the place. It was hard to find a spot to sit down on the couch, much less have friends over.
Around 1990, when I was 12, my musical consciousness kicked in. I heard songs that felt like little portals into worlds so much more appealing than mine. And on the radio and my cassette tapes, I met musicians whose confidence and intelligence were like nothing else I’d experienced. Music was a little path to a new kind of life; it’s that way for a lot of teenagers, I think.
Destroy This House takes place in a few different states but this list hits hard on the Detroit area, where my family moved during my high school years. Many of these songs also reference what I hoped to do with the memoir–find out the truth about my parents, and tell their story in its unadorned, stranger-than-fiction beauty.
1) Madonna, “Into the Groove”
For a short time, one of my father’s harebrained schemes involved Madonna and high-end perfume. He probably believed it on some level when he told me Madonna would be visiting our home in rural Indiana in 1986–the absolute height of her pop stardom. I sang this song off key while dancing on my twin canopy bed as a third grader. Madonna never visited!
2) The Lemonheads, “Kitchen”
When I was 14 in 1992, Evan Dando was indescribably beguiling to me. First seen on the pages of Sassy magazine and later worshipped for his sensitive-yet-tough lyrical music, I fell hard for Evan and The Lemonheads and stand by their 90s albums as deeply emotionally resonant and so smart. Kitchens get a lot of play in my book and there’s this genius pair of lines, which make me think of my father’s yarns. “We’ll repeat the same stories/But of course never in front of friends.”
3) Majesty Crush, “No. 1 Fan”
I was a junior in high school when we moved to Detroit and Majesty Crush was a local band I saw many times. I was surprised to read them described online this century as “shoegaze” but I suppose that’s accurate. In 1994, I would have described them as a gritty pop band with breathy vocals, their music inseparable in my mind from the sweaty, dark little Detroit clubs where I saw them for a cover charge of a few dollars as a teenager.
4) Elastica, “Stutter”
Justine Frischmann embodied all the womanly swagger I was hoping to acquire as I grew up. The haircut. The black clothes. The guitar hooks. The lyric, “Is it just that I’m much too much for you?”
5) Yo La Tengo, “Pablo and Andrea”
Later in my high school years, I went moody. Yo La Tengo became my favorite band around this time and they’ve basically held onto that distinction for thirty years. Recently, they played an outdoor show in Detroit a few days after my 47th birthday. It was as humid a July night as anyone could possibly imagine and they played a huge range of songs, many from this gorgeous 1995 Electr-O-Pura album that first introduced me to the band. Seven or eight songs into their show the humidity broke into a driving rainstorm and I swayed along with them another 45 soaking wet minutes, feeling 17 instead of 47. The band, and their music, is ageless.
6) Luna, “Kalamazoo”
Chosen largely for its slightly non-sequitur Michigan reference, this song has some of the vibes of my favorite art and music: eerie and sad but not devastatingly so. It’s the filmic background music for something utterly ordinary, preferably in the American Midwest.
7) Frontier Ruckus, “Orion Town 3”
Speaking of Michigan, no one does this state like Frontier Ruckus songwriter Matthew Milia, whose songs and words I return to again and again. In the book, I tried to tell some aspect of the story of my growing up years by telling the reader about all the many things that filled our home: the voluminous stuff of our lives. Matthew does the same. His lyrics are maximalist and specific in the best ways, and nostalgic, too, the way I hope my memoir can be read by anyone who grew up in a late 20th century American family. Most Frontier Ruckus songs remind you of something you didn’t even know you longed for. This one is special with its reference to Independence Day which also comes up in Destroy This House, “The sulfur fills the trees/On the fourth of July/ You and I/We travel the gravel going home.”
8) The Promise Ring, “Anne You Will Sing”
When I went to college in Chicago I finally did what I thought I’d do in all my teen years: find a new community and home in the realm of music. Mine in 1996 was a club called The Fireside Bowl where I saw The Promise Ring, Braid, Blonde Redhead, Karate and more. I felt like I sort of lived there to the extent that I would simply go, with a five dollar bill in hand, many nights a week without really knowing which band was playing. It didn’t matter. But this romantic Promise Ring song is one to remember forever.
9) R.E.M., “You Are the Everything”
It’s impossible to overstate the importance of this band on how my brain and my heart developed. And this song is a pure gut punch–the veneration of childhood memory, the fleeting beauty in the specific little things we have to do each day. If you have never felt this specific feeling before in life, you will, after listening to it, “The voices talking somewhere in the house, late spring/And you’re drifting off to sleep with your teeth in your mouth.” And in so many ways, it’s a similar feeling to how I got through all those bizarre years with my parents. We faced hard and monumental things, we argued, we never saw the world the same ways or properly understood one another and yet, day after quotidian day, we marched on together, taking car rides and standing in our kitchen, and falling asleep night after night with our teeth in our mouths.
Amanda Uhle writes about culture, politics, and civil rights for The Washington Post, Politico Magazine, The Boston Globe, and Newsweek. Uhle is coeditor of the I, Witness series of first-person stories by youth activists, former director of the 826michigan youth writing and tutoring program, and cofounder, with Dave Eggers, of the International Congress of Youth Voices. Their work with youth writing organizations worldwide is documented in Unnecessarily Beautiful Spaces for Young Minds on Fire. Uhle is the publisher and executive director of McSweeney’s, an independent nonprofit publisher of distinctive books and magazines.