In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Kristine Langley Mahler’s collection Teen Queen Training, a collection of erasure essays built from a 1963 etiquette book, is as thought-provoking as it is a treatise on girlhood.
LaTanya McQueen wrote of the book:
“Using subversive technique, Mahler’s Teen Queen Training transforms the prescriptive advice of a mid-century etiquette manual about how young women are taught to be. Form meets content in these essays, where the act of crossing out becomes a critique of the very lessons meant to shape girlhood. Inventive and haunting, Teen Queen Training is a bold look into the possibilities of the genre.”
In her own words, here is Kristine Langley Mahler’s Book Notes music playlist for her essay collection Teen Queen Training:
Teen Queen Training is a book steeped in the lessons I took from Seventeen magazine during the late ‘90s. As a teenage girl desperate for instruction, I wanted to believe that, if I could just follow the rules, I could become the girl I wanted to be: loved, desired, actualized. The truth, as you already know, is that there is no such thing as doing it right.
The book was written as a second-person instructional to indicate that the events in the essays were what I understood I should do, given these situations. Therefore, the line between truth and fiction is blurred, because the line between would-I-have-actually-done-that-if-given-the-chance or not was also blurred. This playlist for Teen Queen Training straddles that divide, with songs I held very close to me during my teen years, songs that wormed their way into the essays’ foundations, and songs that gesture, more broadly, at the generalized instruction teenage girls receive. It is all true.
Popular by Nada Surf
Believe it or not, I had never heard this song until sometime in 2019, which was after I had completed the writing of Teen Queen Training. Hearing it might have been one of the more surreal experiences I’ve had, because I instantly recognized that the lyrics were quoting an instructional book for teenage girls from some time in the mid-century. It was super uncanny that this song, which actually came out during the very late-90s period that I’d just written about in my book, was ALSO a critique of how to be popular. Wish I’d heard it back then.
At Seventeen by Janis Ian
Now I DID hear this song when I was TQT-age, helping my parents one weekend by dubbing their old 45s onto cassette tapes. It was crushing, this song about the future I most feared when I was a teenager, listening to who I might turn into if I didn’t become the girl I thought I was supposed to. Between Ian’s “rich relationed hometown queen [who] marries into what she needs” and the song’s narrator, who “desperately remained at home inventing lovers on the phone who called to say ‘come dance with me’ and murmured vague obscenities” (my essay “Tone” is a direct nod to that line), this song is the beating heart of my book.
If You Asked Me To by Celine Dion
When I was a little girl, I thought this might have been the most romantic song I’d ever heard. I would sing the song alone in my bedroom, thinking of my fourth-grade-crush, Brandon. As I grew up, I paid attention to the way the narrator is perfectly willing to proclaim her deep love and desire for the man she is singing to, but she holds back from pouring that love out—she just needs him to ask her to. She needs him to take the first step. I nod toward this same reticence in the first essay of Teen Queen Training, with a narrator who knows she’s “so hungry but you can’t take the first bite, standing by the bleachers, swaying until you’re asked.”
Just Can’t Get You Off My Mind by Lenny Kravitz
If I sang Celine in my bedroom as an elementary schooler, by the time I was in high school, it was Lenny I turned on when I also turned on my blacklight, imagining my freshman obsession entering my room (yes, my very bedroom) and taking my hand, pulling me up off the carpet to slow dance with him. I cannot picture anything else when I hear this song! The delusion of that fantasy—my freshman obsession was, in fact, a boy who threw spitballs at me instead of his heart—is prevalent throughout Teen Queen Training.
Black and White by Sarah McLachlan
When I was a teenager, everything felt black and white, and I couldn’t see the gray area I truly inhabited during my adolescence. The lack of self-knowledge and concomitant inhabitation of a performative mask during the chorus, “I’m wound up small and tight and I don’t know who I am. Everybody loves you when you’re easy, everybody hates when you’re a bore. Everyone is waiting for your entrance, so don’t disappoint them,” is embedded into TQT’s narrator. She’s searching so hard for a way into belonging and acceptance, but she does not know who she is.
Amphetamine by Everclear
Perfect in that fucked-up way that all the magazines seem to want to glorify these days, the narrator in TQT also looks like a teenage anthem. This song is a sped-up amphetamine rush racing through how the girl in the song—like TQT’s narrator—looks like she could have been happy in another life, before the crash comes and “the saddest girl I have ever known” smiles and—against everything you’ve just heard—tells herself everything will be all right.
Supermodel by Jill Sobule
This song crashed into my world on the soundtrack to Clueless—a movie where the prettiest, most desirable girl took an awkward ugly duckling under her wing and transformed her. I never saw that happen in real life. I always heard this song as less about being an actual supermodel, and more about being the sort of girl that would make your fellow classmates say, “OMG she could be a supermodel!” The cool locker door, writing reports on why she loves her jeans, young and hip and so beautiful: the girl who did it all perfectly.
Everything to Everyone by Everclear
Yes, another Everclear song, because if there’s one thing the narrator in TQT does over and over, it is trying to be everything to everyone except herself—she can know all the right people, play all the right games, but as Art Alexakis says, “I think you are blind to the fact that the hand you hold is the hand that holds you down.” The cost of pleasing everyone is that you lose yourself.
Lonely Girls by Lucinda Williams
The core of the narrator’s hurt in Teen Queen Training is her utter loneliness, the feeling that no one will want her as a friend or as a lover, a feeling she tries to mask by performing. This song repeats “lonely girls” over and over, a repetition like a thumb pressing on a bruise. The “pretty hairdos” and “sparkly rhinestones” on lonely girls evoke their attempts to be seen, possibly the most pathetic and emotional part to me.
Look at Miss Ohio by Gillian Welch
A girl can do everything correctly and still be dissatisfied with the ordered trajectory of the rest of her life. This is the inevitable outcome that would have likely occurred if anyone had, in fact, properly followed all the rules—the mama who “starts pushing that wedding gown” is very ‘63 etiquette book.
Bathroom Sink by Miranda Lambert
And finally, TQT’s narrator faces the place she cannot hide: her reflection in the mirror above the bathroom sink. She is grown up, but she will always carry within her the sixteen-year-old. To clean the bathroom sink is to try to scrub away the “the amount of rejection that I see in my reflection,” and she can’t get out of the way. She’s looking forward to the girl she wants to be—still growing past the hurts and failures of the past—but regret has got a way of staring her right in the face.
Sit Still, Look Pretty by Daya
When this song came out, my youngest daughter was four years old, and I had just begun writing Teen Queen Training. My daughter was obsessed with the song and so we downloaded the Kidz Bop version and we listened to it all the time. I was so grateful to hear the deliberate rejection of traditional femininity—the narrator might be a pretty girl, but she’s not going to sit still or do the chores (“that’s not what a lady’s for”). This queen don’t need a king!
also at Largehearted Boy:
Kristine Langley Mahler’s playlist for her essay collection A Calendar is a Snakeskin
Kristine Langley Mahler is the author of A Calendar Is a Snakeskin and Curing Season: Artifacts. Her work has been supported by the Nebraska Arts Council and Art at Cedar Point and twice named Notable in Best American Essays. A memoirist experimenting with the truth on the suburban prairie outside Omaha, Nebraska, Kristine is also the director of Split/Lip Press.