In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Molly Gaudry’s Fit Into Me leverages the power of fiction and writing about craft to build a haunting, complex, and powerful memoir.
Foreword Reviews wrote of the book:
“Molly Gaudry’s Fit Into Me is a hybrid book that challenges notions of the self, authenticity, reliability, appropriation, and truth.”
In her own words, here is Molly Gaudry’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir/novel Fit Into Me:
In Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir, I write about writing and about my writing process, which usually involves working on two manuscripts in various stages of development, and enjoying long stretches of time away from each while switching back and forth between them. Years ago, I learned it helps me to have a playlist for each manuscript, so that after a year or more away I can just hit play and quickly find my way back into the mood and tone of those pages. I hesitate to admit here that when I listen to these songs on my manuscript playlists, I don’t really absorb the lyrics or the meanings of them; to my ear anyway, these generally register as melodic notes, not as words, which are supported by the songs’ instrumental harmonic notes. For the many, many years that I’ve been working on and editing Fit (the first draft began forming in 2014), I’ve resisted making any effort to really listen to these songs’ lyrics, and so I’ve never really been sure what they’re about. But their sounds, their tones, their moods, have been a driving force for me as I slowly made my way toward the book’s completion. Now that Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir is on its way out of my head and into the world, I’m taking this Book Notes opportunity to hit play on this playlist once more, and to really listen to these songs, as if for the first time, after hearing so many of them on repeat for over a decade.
“Medicine”: Daughter
There are two ways I’ve always heard this song—either at the start of a writing/editing session, or when the playlist has cycled through and made its way back to this opening song. If I’m sitting down and hitting play for the first time, I sometimes just listen to the notes and the chords and the song’s steady, static scratch throughout, as a way to mentally re-enter that time period when I first began writing Fit Into Me, which was a time when I was struggling to read or write at all and thought my brain injury meant I might never read or write again. When I hear this song again at the top of a new loop through the playlist, its swelling static at the beginning, before its first melodic note comes along, somehow helps me reset, invites me to mentally hit pause, briefly, if I’m lost in writing or editing. When I hear this prefatory surge of urgency as it builds up to its opening chord, I think my subconscious brain kind of rises back up to the surface and returns me to my writing desk, to my dog, and to my coffee that has almost certainly gone cold. In this moment, I know my playlist has restarted—and in a rare exception to what I wrote above, I do actually hear the words of this song’s first stanza, “Pick it up, pick it all up / And start again // You’ve got a second chance,” which I realize, as I type them now, do resonate thematically with Fit Into Me, and help send me back into the world of my manuscript again.
“Love Will Leave You Cold”: Sóley, Sin Fang & Örvar Smárason
It looks like this album didn’t come out until 2017, so somewhere along the way I added this song to my playlist, specifically, to make it the second song. This makes sense to me, because the transition from the preceding song into this one is, for me, completely unnoticeable. I just played, and replayed, it now—the end of “Medicine” into the beginning of “Love Will Leave You Cold”—and I realize how useful it must have been for me, when trying stay in my pages, that this song stays in that same static-y, atmospheric realm. As I listen to this whole song in its entirety now, and to its insistent repetition of “love will leave you cold,” it seems like it’s also wholly appropriate for Fit Into Me—both Fit Into Me: A Novel as well as Fit Into Me: A Memoir. In each of these narratives, love does, I think, leave their protagonists cold.
“Wouldn’t It Be Great”: rei brown
Overall, I think this song lifts the atmospheric, tonal qualities of the playlist up a bit. Despite the fact that its opening lines are dark—“I’m trapped beneath the ice / Memories and flashbacks pull me down”—there’s an amazing tension between the refrain’s titular line “Wouldn’t it be great” (optimistic) and its twice-repeated subsequent line, “If things were okay” (pessimistic). One reason I always hesitate to look up lyrics, or spend too much time really listening to them, is because then I think there’s a chance of them creeping into my own work, and I can’t have that. It’s fun to do this exercise now, though, and to be the kind of person who’s really looking at song lyrics, now that Fit’s final edits are in and galleys are heading out. It’s so interesting that these lines really do resonate with Fit, particularly the memoir. Memories and flashbacks? Check. Feeling trapped? Underwater? Frozen? Check, check, check. And wondering about, speculating about, some kind of “okay”? Yeah, that seems to be exactly on point, too.
“Underflow”: Emma Louise
Like other people, apparently, I found this song after watching an episode of Supergirl. When I make these ms. playlists, I’m usually going for some kind of tonal throughline, and this song was an easy add. I often need to shuffle songs around on the playlist, in an effort to make those transitions more seamless for a sustained, continuous listening experience. Sometimes songs that I like, which feel right for the playlist, don’t ever make it on because I can’t get them to transition easily into or out of other songs. But this song, like the preceding, seems to keep the playlist’s atmospheric energy up. I think it’s a faster song, even, and so that seems useful, too, at this one/third mark in the playlist. Like we’re still swelling, building, rising, and on our way somewhere.
“Breathe Me”: Sia
I think this song is also filled with that tension of having sad lyrics while, at the same time, sounding slightly more upbeat and maintaining a steady, faster-moving pace. There’s something unsettling and perfect about the relentless bounciness of the music, and the lines: “Be my friend, hold me / Wrap me up, enfold me / I am small and needy / Warm me up and breathe me.” Definitely in Fit Into Me: A Memoir and in Fit Into Me: A Novel, the protagonists take turns feeling small and needy. And right now, it’s interesting, too, to think of Fit Into Me: A Novel, which exists inside of Fit Into Me: A Memoir, as its friend. As if the fiction is held, wrapped up, and enfolded by the nonfiction, as if the memoir has breathed the novel into life.
“Hell to the Liars”: London Grammar
The end of the preceding song, with its couple beats of hanging silence, oddly opens the door for this song’s vocal beginning, sans instrument. Once the piano gets going, though, this song, like so many above, makes its way toward a kind of uplifting rhythm while still feeling moody and dark-ish. And like the others, this one is also largely concerned with love. Love and liars. Fitting. There are definitely liars in Fit Into Me—I’ll point the finger at myself, in the memoir, and I’ll point another finger at one of the lovers in the novel. My friend and fellow author, Kirsten Bakis has long been my writing-accountability buddy (we do weekly check-ins), and about this particular lover-character she has often said: “What a crumb!” That she always hates him and has the same indictment of him every time she re-reads him has absolutely delighted me for over a decade. Sorry you had to read him a million times, Kirsten!
“Wonder”: Soap&Skin
Okay, I’ve listened to this one a few times, trying to figure out what to write here, and I’ve got nothing. I guess I just like how it sounds? And like so many of the other vocalists’ here, Anja Plaschg’s voice is perfectly haunting, equally smooth and clear, and airy, while also sounding incredibly soft and light, and heavy. I think these contradictions, present in her singular voice—however this translates into what we’re doing when we type words on a page and try to bring our own voices to life—are just as present in Fit.
“Lost Me Head”: Domenic Haynes
I remember adding this one after Domenic Haynes popped up in my feed singing “River” on The Voice. I listened to every song of his that I could find online, and this one felt right for this playlist. I think it’s the quality of his voice, the emotion he brings to the surface, that made it the right fit, without question. There’s agony on full display here, and the way I hear it/feel it, is how I felt it throughout Fit, the memoir, and how I imagined it for Fit, the novel,too.
“Night Song”: Family Band
I love Kim Krans’s voice. If I could sing, this is what I’d want to sound like. I’m reading the lyrics to this song now, and I’m just sitting here staring at these lines: “This house is dark / Nothing moves inside.” Fit Into Me: A Novel is in many ways about a house, indeed about a house that exists mostly at night (and strangely, Fit Into Me: A Memoir is about houses, too). Fit marks the end of this house—the tea house—for me, though, which has been with me since 2009 when I first began writing about it, and which made its first appearance in my first book, then showed up again in my second, and now, here, in this third book, my little tea house gets to share more of its life and history. As I write this now, I am remembering the summer I spent renovating a dollhouse so I would have an actual model, a “real” tea house, to look at and study and live with. More about that here.
“In Between”: Ayra Starr
Probably this is my most-played song from the past two years. There was a span of at least a full semester that I played this song on repeat every time I got in my car (and I have a 3-hour commute to get to work, one day a week). So in the rare case of this song in particular, I actually do know the lyrics—and even though I am most certainly tone deaf (like actually tone deaf), I have sung along with Ayra Starr for many, many hours. Recently, when we caught up after our summer break away from campus, my colleague and poet LB Thompson, asked me what song I had on repeat this summer, and I of course blurted out “In Between” by Ayra Starr. Here are the lines I belt out in the car: “I forgot that I can’t swim / Why did I get myself / into this mess? / ’Cause I’m drowning / Oh, I’m drowning / How did I get myself / into this mess? / Oh, I’m drowning / I’m drowning / I’m drowning.” I guess what I’ll share about Fit is the beginning of the first page of the prologue, the end of the first prose tercet: “…I had spent a lot of time staring at the ocean. / Because if I got close enough, I could just swim in and not swim back. Temptation—or what my life had come to.”
“Swimmer”: Caroline
I swear that until now—until I wrote the paragraph above this one—I never knew that this song, this final song of the playlist (which I know was one of the first songs to be added to this playlist) is literally called “Swimmer.” And I never realized until now that this song’s theme of swimming, and its boing-ing ending, leads us back to the top of the loop again, where “Medicine” greets with the lines: “You’ve got a beautiful brain / But it’s disintegrating,” and even though “Medicine” seems to be about addiction, and Fit is about my brain injury, and about trying to love myself and others in its aftermath, those words haunt. Your brain is disintegrating. Write this book. Swim. Your heart is still warm, despite it all. Keep swimming. Even though your brain is disintegrating. Finish this book. Finish this book. Finish this book.
Molly Gaudry is the author of the verse novel We Take Me Apart, which was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award and shortlisted for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. Desire: A Haunting, its sequel, and Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir, are further explorations of the same storyworld and characters. Molly is the founder of The Lit Pub and holds master’s degrees in fiction and poetry from the University of Cincinnati and George Mason University, respectively, and a PhD in experimental prose from the University of Utah. An assistant professor at Stony Brook University, she teaches nonfiction and poetry in the MFA and BFA programs. In the summers, she teaches fiction at the Yale Writers’ Workshop.