In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
The essays in Lynette D’Amico’s Men I Hate are powerful individually, but taken together profoundly define life both individual and universal.
Claudia Rankine wrote of the book:
“Men I Hate performs the surgical accomplishment of dissecting a life while enacting a delicate transition from rage and fear into empathy and understanding. D’Amico gifts readers life-sustaining insights by immersing them inside the exhilarations, frustrations, and exhaustions of being a daughter, a lesbian, a wife, a writer, a patient, a citizen, and a human. Without shying away from the complicated details of a life that demands shifts in how she defines and understands herself, she skillfully guides us through many challenges we all face. One can only have gratitude for the perspective and hope she provides as she masterfully unlearns the past in order to meet the present.”
In her own words, here is Lynette D’Amico’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir-in-essays Men I Hate:
The title of my memoir came to me before I’d written a word. Everybody told me the title was too harsh, too off-putting, too in-your-face. Every essay in the collection at one time was titled “Men I Hate” and then a qualifier: “The Man Next Door,” “The Brother,” “The Stasi Men.” The guys in my writing group were like, “How many of these men I hate things are we going to have to read?” It was kind of my own joke to myself. Still is. The essays in Men I Hate are an attempt to convey my struggle, hope, and confusion as a queer woman to come to terms with what it means to love a man, to love men, to make sense of men. The subject of this book was thrust upon me when my lesbian lover of twenty years transitioned and began to live as a man. I had planned to coast to the end of life, no boys allowed.
I had a song or a soundtrack in mind for each of the nine essays in the book. After the 2016 American election, I couldn’t listen to anything for awhile that wasn’t screaming in my face. Although I typically don’t have an affinity for ragers, I needed loud and angry at the time to match the overflow of feelings I was feeling. Sometimes I wanted to throw myself against the beat, the rhythm surging through my body. In another essay, such as “The Brother,” I needed to calm down before I could access what I was thinking. Karen Carpenter’s smooth vocals, the easy listening sounds of The Carpenters, disguising Richard’s drug use, Karen’s starvation, provided a backdrop for exhuming the dead bodies of my own sibling history.
Changing the Story:
“Sabotage,” Beastie Boys
“Chicago,” The Staves
Anger and grief. A relationship, an identity is constructed by stories. When my wife transitioned to my husband what happened to our shared history and memories? The charging guitar and drums of the opening of “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys played in my head over and over in the aftermath of the 2016 election as I tried to sort out my response to being with a man. When the person closest to you changes a story you have relied on as part of their introduction to who they are, is the response to stand in grief and denial, or to open yourself up to new stories? The wistful cover of Sufian Stevens’ “Chicago” by The Staves is the other side of my anger: “I made a lot of mistakes.”
The Brother:
“(They Long to Be) Close to You,” The Carpenters
One of my earliest relationships with a male was with my brother. I grew up hearing that my lifelong closest relationships would be with my siblings, that the family you were born into was your real family, and that was not at all the case between me and my brother. Karen and Richard Carpenter were a model of a brother/sister relationship that made me wonder about other possibilities for siblings; the brother with bangs and his skinny, sad sister.
The Man Next Door:
“Nothing More to Say,” The Frightnrs
The white men that came to a heightened visibility since the 2016 election in America are so unappealing. When I look around at the men in my life, I notice my clueless neighbor, who gets a puppy without being prepared for dog ownership. What is our responsibility to our neighbor, to living things? Is it possible for what is done to be undone? When is there “nothing more to say?” A song from the first and only album of this Queens-based reggae band before the lead singer, Dan Klein, died of ALS.
Becoming Queered
“Never Will I Marry,” Judy Garland
“When Will I be Loved,” Linda Ronstadt
To me Judy Garland embodied the version of a woman doing it for herself and also completely dependent on booze, drugs, and systems led by controlling men. Those big wet eyes. She looked like my mother.
Linda Ronstadt is one of the women from my past who made me a big homo. At my Big Gay Wedding I recreated one of Linda Ronstadt’s iconic images from the seventies as my wedding outfit: the flowy print dress with cap sleeves, the flower in her hair. She was who I wanted to be, who I wanted.
Cities and Bodies in Motion
“Il cielo in una stanza,” Mina
How I met my husband, the cities we moved to, the houses we lived in, the things we carried with us, the things we left behind, what we were wearing. Mina is my bloodline, Italian and high femme drama.
The Burning Bed:
“Killing in the Name,” Rage Against the Machine
Framed by a blowtorch, kerosene, matches. When I woke up and found a man in my bed especially at a time when despicable men were saying despicable things to and about women daily in this country, I burned with a white hot anger every day for two years. Nothing matches my anger like a raging guitar and screaming vocals.
The Stasi Men: “Need Your Love,” Curtis Harding
My husband and I lived in Berlin for several months in 2018. We walked neighborhoods, immersing ourselves in the city’s history and culture, attended concerts and theater, trying to put our marriage back together. I collected songs I heard coming from cars driving by on the street, or playing in the background of a coffee shop or bar. I added this song it to my Berlin playlist, where we hosted dance parties in our apartment in Wannsee on the River Havel.
The Ghosts in Our Marriage:
“Smoldering Fire,” Ural Thomas & the Pain
Being married to a man is not what I signed up for. I thought we had it all— real estate stories, parking, all the dogs. In our wedding vows we described our marriage as an “open door,” a threshold of possibility and discovery, which is echoed in this song by Ural Thomas.
Men I Love:
“You’re the One,” Rhiannon Giddens
Framed by the past and present, the dead and living, the young and the old; alternative futures, soft focus remedies; pills and a robust Italian red, books and marriage. When I was writing this essay about men living and dead, friends here and gone, this song evokes the feeling I wanted my words to convey. The song, a love song to Giddens’ son, lifts me, fills me, a love song for the men I love.
Lynette D’Amico is an essayist and fiction writer. She is the author of the novella Road Trip and a recipient of a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.