In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Sarah Bruni’s Mass Mothering is an engrossing novel wrapped in themes of motherhood and loss in treacherous political times.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“In a fragmented, braided style reminiscent of Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (2014), Bruni weaves together explorations of language, borders, and belonging, as well as of the precarious and frequently terrifying state of motherhood. The result is a deeply intelligent, prismatic look at the personal and political facets of maternal care. A truly original entry into the growing canon of motherhood novels.”
In her own words, here is Sarah Bruni’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Mass Mothering:
I did most of the writing of Mass Mothering in silence, as it’s hard for me to write with music on without getting swept up and unduly influenced by it. It’s a novel about an amateur translator who encounters, and obsessively reads, a book about a group of women whose sons were disappeared by political violence. It moves between two cities that are unnamed, but there were a lot of places I carried within me while writing. Over the decade-plus of the story taking shape, I lived mostly in New York and for a few years in New Orleans, but I also spent time in Montevideo, Medellín, and Paris. I wanted the novel to exude both the interconnection and the loneliness characteristic of living in a globalized world, as it shifts between narrators with different abilities to circulate themselves and their stories. Some of these songs were regulars in my rotation during the years of writing, some accompanied me during revision, and some I imagined my characters carrying within them in these fictional worlds.
“Dumaine St.” by Trombone Shorty
I started the first draft of this novel while living in New Orleans, and I have many memories of riding my bike to Frenchmen Street after a day of reading and writing, switching from intense focus and solitude to wandering between bars with live music and sometimes catching bands playing outside in the street outside the venues. I saw Trombone Shorty play while living there, and his music has stayed with me. This song always fills me with the desire to walk and dance.
“Hoy No Quiero Verte Nunca Más” by Franny Glass
After attending a few Franny Glass shows in Montevideo, I taught myself a bunch of his songs on the guitar years later in New York. This was one of the first ones I most craved being able to play slow enough to sing along with. I love the upbeat rollicky melody paired with the desperation of the refrain of “today I never want to see you again.” For a few years between drafts, whenever I couldn’t find my way forward writing, I’d just get out my guitar and sing along to my repertoire of ten or so Franny Glass songs to lose myself in another world for a while. This was always one of my go-tos.
“Consolação” by Baden Powell & Vinícius de Moraes
This song came into my life about twenty years ago now, and the album on which it appears—blending samba and Afro-Brazilian instruments—has become probably one of my most played of all time. I’ve listened to this song in so many places walking to buses, waiting for trains, weaving through cities I temporarily called home. I love how the guitar and percussion seem to create space for one another as they advance, each at its own pace. This song feels like a kind of elegant and steady forward momentum to me, the best kind of company for revision when questioning the way forward.
“Water” by PJ Harvey
This is a favorite of mine going back to being a teenager. I never tire of the vacillation between plodding calm and ecstatic bursts, or by the way that the word “wa-wa-wa-wa-te-er” drags out into several measures of music. Parts of my novel mine my own Midwestern family mythology and childhood Catholicism. Formative experiences slanted toward thinking about religious symbolism have made me a sucker for songs like this one that inject the biblical with a twist of self-determinism or the pedestrian with a dose of the divine. I also think of the structure of my book as similar to the different parts of this song, scenes breaking through the moments of quiet white space between them.
“Ñanguita” by Quantic/Nidia Góngora
When I spent time in Colombia, I was introduced to music from the Pacific coast, often featuring marimba and rich vocal harmonies. This Quantic collaboration with Nidia Góngora—frontwoman for her own band as well as for international projects like this one that fuse music from her region with other styles—has a cyclical feeling and a playfulness, both of which make me feel a sense of pleasant disorientation, akin to being lost within a creative process. Years later, when I was in Paris, musicians with marimbas and analogous instruments of the African diaspora sometimes played sets within the train station in my neighborhood, and listening to them always transported me back to experiences of music from the Pacific, made me feel like the world was folding in on itself.
“Freight Train” by Elizabeth Cotten
Although this is a folk song from the American South, I associate it with every homecoming to New York over the years of writing. I can’t count the number of times that this song was on in the car when my brother picked me up from the airport, or we drove with it in the background going upstate or to Chicago. While she is said to have written this song as a teenager, you can find a video of a much-older Cotten, a leftie, playing her flipped-upside-down guitar while singing it. To me, the refrain exudes a slippery feeling of occupying both this world and the next one at once, the escape of hopping on anonymous trains and the willful lingering of nostalgia.
“Otra Oportunidad” by Jimmy Bosch
I realized long after writing the scene, upon hearing this song again, that I imagined that some alternate version of it was playing during my characters A. and N.’s final dance. Some of the lyrics N. mutters under his breath are close to Bosch’s, as is the idea of embracing the present fully after a period of suffering. When I lived in New York and danced salsa, this was one of the songs that sometimes closed the club down at the end of the night. I can’t help but get influenced by the infectious sense of hope in this one. It always made me feel like it was a refrain for all the dancers of the city, filling their bodies with expressions of joy in defiance of whatever pain was carried within them. I will always remember the sound of the trumpet of this song still tingling around in my bones as I walked to the train after a night of dancing.
Sarah Bruni is a graduate of the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis and holds a master’s in Latin American Studies from Tulane University. She has taught English and writing classes in New York and St. Louis, and she has volunteered as a writer-in-schools in San Francisco and Montevideo, Uruguay. She is also the author of the novel The Night Gwen Stacy Died. Her fiction has appeared in Boston Review, and her translations have appeared in the Buenos Aires Review. She lives in Chicago with her family.