In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Mo Daviau’s Epic and Lovely is an unforgettable and powerful novel of love and mortality.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“A dark and complex exploration of the vagaries of parental and romantic love.”
In her own words, here is Mo Daviau’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Epic and Lovely:
One of my dearest friends died earlier this year. Her name was Susan DeFreitas and she was a goddamn genius. Susan was a brilliant editor who saw things in fiction no one else did, and in 2022, before she was diagnosed with late-stage cancer, she served as the developmental editor for the first draft of my new novel, Epic and Lovely.
One thing Susan used to say about me and my writing: you take the ugliest of things and make them beautiful. That’s your talent. Alchemizing shit into the most beautiful thing. This always felt like the most generous of praise.
Epic and Lovely is “alchemizing shit into the most beautiful thing” writ large. A list of shit I’ve had to alchemize that made it into this novel: Marfan syndrome, although my weirdly-shaped body has carried me for nearly fifty years, and I can’t imagine what it would be like to not have bad lungs and a four-inch crater in the middle of my chest. A father who was sixty-five when I was born, whose mutated sperm is probably responsible for the weirdly-shaped body, which is nothing compared to the three decades of grief I’ve endured over his death. Being called ugly. Bad boyfriends. Bad culture. And that time when I was eighteen and I was told by a genetic disorders specialist never to carry a pregnancy to term because it would kill me. So, I didn’t. Twenty years later, a similar doctor told me that other doctor was wrong, and I could have survived a pregnancy. Oh, really?
I guess you could say I felt a certain way about that pronouncement. I didn’t have a baby, but I did write a novel about what might have been if I had.
Nina Simone – Suzanne
Nina Simone is the greatest alchemizer of shit into beauty. This is why Nina was named after her. I grew up listening to the Judy Collins version of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne,” which is quite bland when compared to Simone’s cover. She kicks it up about fifty notches into a sassy jazz number. You didn’t want to travel with her before, but you’ll want to travel with her now that Nina Simone has made the song so bright and colorful. Once you hear this version, you’ll look down upon any other cover of this song for the rest of your days.
Wolf Parade – You Are a Runner and I Am My Father’s Son
This is the song I played on repeat when I first started writing Epic and Lovely. It had the vibe I was going for. It’s angry. It’s accusatory. Those drums! And I am most definitely my father’s son. If there’s one song that encapsulates the vibe of the whole novel, it’s this one.
Atlas Sound – Shelia
If anyone knows anything about Marfan syndrome, it probably comes from knowing Bradford Cox and Deerhunter (or Jonathan Larson of Rent fame, or Abraham Lincoln). We Marfanoids don’t get a lot of media coverage, but we do have an indie rock star to call our own. The cover of Atlas Sound’s Logos album, where Bradford Cox’s severe pectus excavatum is on full display, sometimes pops up on my Apple Car Play while I’m driving. “Shelia,” with its refrain “we’ll die alone together,” seemed to match the fates of Nina and Cole. They really do die alone together
Timber Timbre– Black Water
This is the theme song of Three Fates, the sex party gone wrong that happens halfway through the novel. It’s got a slimy vibe, but it also has great lyrics (“I found empathy from madness/deliverance from malaise”). I imagine this song playing during the worst part of the party, which is a really terrible, unethical party. If anything from that chapter happened to me in real life, I’d die of a heart attack.
Roy Harper – Goldfish
Baby Siggy’s song! What if I had wanted a baby and gone through with an extremely high-risk pregnancy at age forty because a doctor told me I could after believing I couldn’t for all my twenties and thirties? My character Nina takes her doctor up on that offer. This is the lullaby she sings to the baby she’ll never know. It’s a sweet little number.
Midnight Confessions – The Grass Roots
This is one of Cole’s karaoke go-to songs in the novel, which, when he sings this directly to Nina, it drives her crazy with lust. It has a certain scumbag charisma about it. This song played in my head when I read a BlueSky post from a friend about how my novel is very horny. Whenever I play it on the stereo at the bookstore where I work, patrons of a certain age want to talk to me about the golden age of AM radio.
Benny Goodman – Bei Mir Bist du Schoen
The sound of Eddie Blaine! My father was born in 1910, and though he was not a singer, the toast of the Catskills, or a washed-up Hollywood has-been like Eddie, he did listen to a lot of Big Band music in his day, like everyone else of his generation. He even had a Victrola growing up! My beloved writing teacher, Eileen Pollack, recommended that this song be part of young Sandy Blattner’s Catskills repertoire, so it’s in the novel. It also means, “To Me, You are Beautiful,” which fits because so much of Nina’s story revolves around being perceived as ugly.
Foxygen – How Can You Really
Between 2014-2017, I spent hours every day reading about narcissistic personality disorder and abuse recovery online in the aftermath of an emotionally abusive relationship. Cole is the amalgamation of the villains of hundreds of stories I read on those websites. When I first heard this song, it felt like a song that could mark the triumphant end of that phase of my life. Thanks for calling me out, Foxygen.
Jefferson Airplane – White Rabbit
Nina’s go-to karaoke song and one of mine as well. It is not in the novel so much, because Nina wouldn’t say this about herself, but she did inherit her father’s beautiful singing voice. In my mind, she really nails this one.
Phoebe Bridgers – Motion Sickness
For everyone who looks back at a person they dated and asks why did they lie about THAT? Piddly little lies over minor, stupid things! I mean, why do you sing with an English accent? Cole tells Nina many lies in the book, but I guess only I know what they are. Here’s one: at the end of the novel, when Cole tells Nina he got married again—that’s a lie. He’s just being mean. I started writing Epic and Lovely when I lived in Highland Park in Los Angeles and would play this one on repeat on walks around York Boulevard, so this is a very LA song to me.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Mo Daviau’s playlist for her novel Every Anxious Wave
MO DAVIAU was born in Fresno, California and proclaimed her life goal of publishing a novel at the age of eight. Mo is also a solo performer, having performed at storytelling shows such as Bedpost Confessions and The Soundtrack Series. She is a graduate of Smith College and the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan where Every Anxious Wave won a Hopwood Award. Mo lives in Portland, Oregon.