In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Catherine Newman’s Wreck is a novel that is heartbreaking, hilarious, and brimming with humanity.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“Newman excels at showing how sorrow and joy coexist in everyday life. She masterfully balances a modern exploration of grief with truly laugh-out-loud lines . . . . A heartbreaking, laugh-provoking, and absolutely Ephron-esque look at the beauty and fragility of everyday life.”
In her own words, here is Catherine Newman’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Wreck:
Wreck is technically a novel but it’s really just a semi-autobiographical collection of feelings: The main character, Rocky, is my age (56), and she’s in love with her husband, her kids, her elderly father, her friends, the gorgeous and heartbreaking world. There are stories in here, definitely, a whisper of plot: Rocky has a mysterious and potentially significant ailment that is being diagnosed in alarming ways through her patient portal; Rocky is obsessed with a local accident in which a schoolmate of her young-adult kids has been struck and killed by a train, and this tragedy turns out to be closer to her than she first understands. But mostly Rocky is the kind of person who finds herself in tears for no reason. For every reason! The preciousness of her children, her beloved Nick, her old dad, her life! How fleeting it all is. How fragile and precarious. The book is about her learning to hold steady while the exquisite too-muchness crashes all around her.
Stream the playlist on Spotify
“Right Back to It” by Waxahatchee
Okay, yes, I am obsessed with Katie Crutchfield because she tours in a sports jersey and sequined underpants. But also these lyrics are so utterly the way Rocky feels about her husband Nick, who she’s been with forever: “Your love written on a blank check / Wear it around your neck / I was at a loss / But you come to me on a fault line / Deep inside a goldmine / Hovering like a moth.” Nick is just there, totally present and constant, and Rocky feels a million different feelings about him all the time. And the chorus starts: “I’ve been yours for so long,” which is so deceptively simple because, honestly, how deep is that?
“You’re Gonna Go Far” by Noah Kahan and Brandi Carlile.
Oh, geez, well, embarrassingly enough, I have to include this song because it is such an empty-nest anthem. These lines: “So, pack up your car, put a hand on your heart / Say whatever you feel, be wherever you are / We ain’t angry at you, love / You’re the greatest thing we’ve lost.” That just kills me. The kids are so totally the greatest thing we’ve Rocky has lost! Sob! And the Brandi Carlile version because Brandi Carlile.
“Love Looks Better” by Alicia Keys
So, I already loved this song as a traditional kind of upbeat love song? But then we went with the kids to see Hell’s Kitchen, and in that musical the mom sings it to the teenaged Alicia Keys character, which I loved even more. I read an interview in which Alicia Keys describes how so many of her love songs turn out to work perfectly as songs sung by a parent to a child and that speaks to me so deeply. I’m like Rocky in the way that my family is the greatest romance I’ve ever known.
“Send in the Clowns” by Sarah Vaughan
Okay, for one thing: as soon as you here Sarah Vaughan’s voice, you just want to fall to your knees because it sounds like the way you feel when you watch a video of a candy-factory chocolate enrober, with the bare fillings sliding through a gleaming curtain of liquid chocolate, if that makes any sense. For another, those lyrics! My god. You’re up but now I’m down; I’ve arrived but now you’ve left (to paraphrase). This so accurately describes how it feels to be in a long relationship, sometimes. The way you can just keep missing your cues and missing each other. Also, bonus, the line: “Isn’t it rich, isn’t it queer.” Like Willa, our real-life daughter is queer, and she loves the old-fashioned use of the word to just mean strange.
“Loved” by Leslie Odom Jr.
I do understand that this is a song about trying to remain authentic in the face of increasing fame and attention—I do. But also it really is a song about being a beloved child, and I am just so moved to imagine a grown child writing a song about that. Rocky wants her kids to understand how deeply loved they are, and they do. Not that either of them has written a song about it, she can’t help noticing!
“Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac
I’m sure the reason this song is so popular is that it can really hit you wherever you are, whatever transition you’re going through: “Well I’ve been afraid of changing ‘cause I built my life around you.” You can hear that piped into the fitting room of a Salvation Army and be stopped dead in your tracks while you’re trying to extricate yourself from a too-small pair of jeans. A lover to a lover; a parent to a child; a child to a parent. There are so many ways to feel this in your bones, the changing seasons of our lives and the ache it brings. Also the aging! My god. The aging.
“Everybody Hurts” by R.E.M.
I loved this song anyway? I mean, I always have. It’s such a beautiful and comforting pain anthem. Hold on! But also sometime in the 1990’s it was the soundtrack of a scene from the brilliant show My So-Called Life—a scene where Angela (played by Claire Danes) bursts into frustrated, aching, misunderstood tears. And I will forever associate this song with the sight of her beautiful little big-cheeked face crumpling in sorrow. And at the time I first watched it, I was in my twenties and identified completely with the teenaged character. But now, of course, who I identify with is her parents. This is Rocky’s flip-flop moment of existing as both somebody’s child and somebody’s parent. It is not for the faint of heart.
“Ordinary World” by Heather Maloney
This is another great song from my youth—Duran Duran! I had a heartthrobby poster!—and this moody cover is especially poignant: raw and lovely Heather Maloney in excruciatingly beautiful harmony with Don Mitchell from the band Darlingside. Also, I should try to explain this, I was creating a playlist for a different novel, and my daughter made the first pass at it and included this song. I knew, listening to it, that she had included it because of the line: “Where is my friend when I need you the most? Gone away.” (My lifelong best friend died of ovarian cancer ten years ago.) And this kind of intricate, loving, knowing support is exactly what Willa in Sandwich offers her mom Rocky because Rocky is the luckiest.
“Forget Me Not” by Rose Cousins
This is the weirdest song: a ballad that just lists the names of wildflowers in a really sad way—everything dies is the vibe—and then suddenly swells and soars into this crushing beautiful orchestral plea to be remembered. Rocky’s mom was the kind of person who knew all the names of the plants and flowers everywhere, and Rocky is always wishing she were here still to tell her what everything is. To tell her everything.
“Good Goodbye” by Lianne La Havas
My kids went to the kind of public performing arts high school where graduation looks like sparklingly talented kids interpreting the end and beginning of things through dance and song. And one year, a couple of young women sang this song so brilliantly. I cried and cried! I can’t even tell you. And also? It was the year before Ben, our elder child, graduated. Nobody was even leaving me yet and I still couldn’t even take it—the preemptive grief of it all. Now all of us always include this song on our playlists for each other, and it’s really just code for That was so great, when we all lived together. I miss you all the time.
Catherine Newman is the author of the kids’ how-to books How to Be a Person and What Can I Say?, the memoirs Catastrophic Happiness and Waiting for Birdy, the middle-grade novel One Mixed-Up Night, and the grown-up novels We All Want Impossible Things (Harper 2022) and Sandwich (Harper 2024). She edits the non-profit kids’ cooking magazine ChopChop and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, Cup of Jo, and many other publications. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with her family.