In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Erin Somers’s novel The Ten Year Affair is a funny and profound look at modern life and relationships.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
“Two young parents meet-cute at a Hudson Valley baby group. Unfortunately, they’re both married to other people. What comes next is not in fact a 10-year affair, but something trickier — a dual story line in which Somers explores ideas of monogamy, motherhood and modern living in the vein of Miranda July’s All Fours or Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir.”
In her own words, here is Erin Somers’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Ten Year Affair:
The Ten Year Affair is a comedic riff on the mid-century infidelity novel set over a decade in a small Hudson Valley town. It follows a woman, Cora, as she contemplates an affair with her friend Sam. These are the songs I would listen to during the crucial sanity walk between drafting sessions to try to invoke the right mood.
“Loving Cup,” by The Rolling Stones
Any playlist for the book would have to start with this song about being an idiot in love. I love when Jagger does his country western voice. It’s so stupid and funny. I love how he’s blatantly begging for affection. I love when he lists his resume of failures. This book is about arriving at middle age, being all too aware of your flaws, and still endeavoring to live. The song, pathetic yet exuberant, humorous, full of life, could be the book’s anthem.
“Raised Eyebrows,” The Feelings
The characters in this book–millennials who lived in New York City in the 2000s and then left when they had kids–listen to The Feelies. It’s not on the page but they definitely do. The protagonist’s husband Eliot was at the last night of Maxwell’s, you know? That type of guy. He’d love to tell you about it. The characters in the book would say something like “do young people still listen to The Feelies?” They’d say something like “Do you know the drumming in Raised Eyebrows is inspired by Fourth of July fireworks?”
“Flashes of Orange,” by Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band
Ryan Davis is easily my favorite discovery of the last few years. This is might be the best track on the band’s first album, an exquisite rumination on pre-dawn regret. Even if you’ve lived an ordinary and mostly good life, the regrets pile up. Your mistakes find you in the early morning hour and keep you from falling back to sleep. There are so many good line in this:
If I only had a Pepsi for now for all the coke spilled in this truck
Distant cargo trains are the divas of these hills
I lie down with a book of answers but I doze off and I lose track of my place
With the book, I wanted to make something like Ryan Davis’s music, where the ordinary experience of regret is treated seriously.
“If You Could Touch Her At All,” Bill Callahan
This is a cover of a Lee Clayton song, done simply and beautifully. Callahan’s deadpan gives the impression that he’s understating the situation. Perfect. I keep saying what the book is “about” but the literal plot is that two parents meet in a baby group and are attracted to each other but become friends instead. It’s about, among other things, loving someone you can’t have. A pretty-close-to-universal experience.
“Imitation of Life,” REM
I got into REM a couple years ago after a lifetime of not really engaging with them. I didn’t dislike them, I just didn’t look beyond the best-known tracks. Humbly: I was wrong. What else is out there that I’ve mistakenly underrated? So much stuff, I’m sure. This might be my favorite REM song. What could resonate better with this book about life imitating fantasy and fantasy imitating life? “You want the greatest thing, the greatest thing since bread came sliced.” You know what though, the song seems to say, you’re probably not going to get it. That’s cinnamon, that’s Hollywood.
“Another Good Year For the Roses,” Kurt Vile
The sixth chapter of the book takes place in a post-pandemic spring when the flowers are really big and vivid. I listened to this song while I wrote it. It was a good year for the roses! Vile makes perfect walking around music–lazy, pretty, in no great hurry–and this novel is a walking around novel. At one point, one character describes another as “the lady who walks around town.” That’s kinda me. I’m the lady who walks around town. Try Pretty Pimpin on a sunny, 70-degree day. Try Another Good Year for the Roses during a good year for the roses.
“Our Town,” Iris Dement
This song sounds like a traditional but isn’t. It sounds like some old piece of Americana that people cover as rite of passage, but isn’t. It sounds like a Civil War ghost wrote it, but it was written by Iris Dement when she was 25. What a heartbreaking song about the ever-sunsetting dream of small town life. Check out the version with Emmylou Harris if you want to really feel it. It gestures to some of the same things the book gets at: Goodbye to the town you grew up in! Goodbye to your parents before you are ready! Goodbye to the life you thought you’d have!
“Touch of Grey,” The War on Drugs
The book takes place over ten years and we watch the characters age in real time. This is a cover of the Grateful Dead song with a nice new wave sound. I love the Dead the version too. I love “it kind of suits you anyway.” Such a shruggy consolation about the growing old. What can you do but shrug?
“The Last Day of Our Acquaintance,” Sinead O’Connor
There is a break up of sorts at the end of the book and this is my definitive breakup song. I don’t listen to it much because I don’t want to erode its power. The way the vocals start out quietly and gain strength as the narrator gains conviction. Remarkable. And then at the end the whole thing opens up and starts to rock. Pinpointing a specific day as the last day of your acquaintance with someone is so poignant. Especially when you go into the encounter knowing it will be. I try to end a piece of writing on a down beat that’s not hopeless. A moment of deflation/inflation. Maybe it’s easier in music, which can cut to the crux of things more efficiently, on the level of intuition, or suggest mysteries that can’t be spelled out.
Erin Somers is a reporter and news editor at Publishers Lunch. Her first novel, Stay Up with Hugo Best was a Vogue Best Book of the Year in 2019. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, New York magazine, The Atlantic, Esquire, GQ, Best American Short Stories, and many other publications. She has been the recipient of an Emerging Writer Fellowship from the NYC Center for Fiction, a fellowship from the Millay Colony, and was a 2020 finalist for a National Magazine Award. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her family.