In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Stephen Policoff’s A Ribbon For Your Hair is a moving memoir of love and loss.
Susan Choi wrote of the book:
“Stephen Policoff is so singular in so many ways-as the first writing teacher I ever had; as a seer of the ineffable, the unbearable, and the unexpectedly comedic…a joy to know and to read.”
In his own words, here is Stephen Policoff’s Book Notes music playlist for his memoir A Ribbon For Your Hair:
Because my beautiful doomed daughter Anna loved music so much—it was her balm, her joy—music is a thread through my memoir, A Ribbon for Your Hair.
Maybe the most resonant song throughout this book is Box of Rain by the Grateful Dead, a song beloved by Anna and by her late mom Kate as well. I almost called the book Box of Rain (though to be fair, that was only one of about 7 possible titles for this book). But the final verse of that song is what ultimately provided the title. Not only because Anna loved sparkly ribbons and bows but because it is a down-to-earth image yet also a mysterious one: the ribbon of life, the ribbon of time.
Anna loved the Beatles. To her they were still all alive and being fab. We owned and watched A Hard Day’s Night many times. The scene on the train where the Beatles play cards and then somehow end up singing I Should Have Known Better while giggly girls peer into their car was one she absolutely adored. That song would always make her bounce up and down in her chair, and is part of the soundtrack of her childhood. She was as happy a kid as has ever lived, which makes her death at 20 from the dreadful and obscure disorder Niemann-Pick Type C impossibly sad.
Anna also adored the kids’ rocker Dan Zanes. We watched his concert videos a zillion times. Her uncle Tom loved to play some of those tunes for Anna in the many days we spent with Kate’s sister Rita and family. Anna often declared that listening to “Tommy Boy’s ukulele” was among her favorite things. The traditional song Cape Cod Girls from Dan Zanes’ album Sea Music made Anna laugh uproariously—she had a great laugh. We spent part of every summer on Cape Cod with Kate’s family, so that song was thoroughly entwined in our lives.
Once my younger daughter Jane started to comprehend that her big sister would not make it into adulthood, her sunny spirit began to cloud. I knew that one of the most difficult tasks I would face was keeping Jane from sliding into darkness. I sometimes played the Velvet Underground’s anthemic Sweet Jane for her, which made her smile. And for a few evanescent moments, I could smile too. (Reader, it worked. She grew up to be a thoroughly excellent human.)
A Ribbon for Your Hair also celebrates the life of Kate, my beloved wife, Anna’s mom, who died of cancer in 2012, three years before Anna succumbed to her illness. I know how cheerful this sounds! But Kate was an exuberant person, and one of my happy memories is of Kate leading Anna and Jane in a bedtime dance to the Beach Boys’ Do It Again. Whenever I hear the Beach Boys now, I can see my family, alive and still rocking out to that song. The spirit of that dance keeps me going.
Dylan’s elegaic Simple Twist of Fate is another motif throughout my memoir. That song echoed especially during the weeks Kate spent in the hospital, when I was racing back and forth between trying to help Kate and taking care of our forlorn daughters. The image of a path gone astray, which haunts that song, was very much on my mind, and lingered while I was writing the memoir.
After Anna died, we gathered on a blazing hot August afternoon to place her ashes with Kate’s. I had asked Tom to learn Paul Simon’s Mother and Child Reunion for the slapdash funeral. Whatever Paul Simon might have intended, that song with its happy beat and enigmatic lyrics seemed the most profoundly appropriate song, and as he played it, we lay roses down on the little grave. Though I lack the belief gene, sometimes I like to imagine Kate and Anna hanging out together on paradisical lawn chairs, in some celestial field (which always looks to me like upstate New York).
I never spent a lot of time listening to jazz but when I was first starting to think about whether I could actually write this memoir, I was half-watching a PBS show about Miles Davis, and the music from his famous album Kind of Blue really grabbed me. That music—so magnificently sorrowful yet with a glistening thread of hope—allowed me to think that my own sorrow might help other people who have suffered loss. The message of that music, I think, is that it’s okay to be sad, to learn to live with that sadness, to go on, to move forward carrying that sadness. And that’s what I hope A Ribbon for Your Hair offers.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Stephen Policoff’s playlist for his novel Dangerous Blues
Stephen Policoff’s playlist for his novel Come Away
Angela Woodward is author of the novels Ink, Natural Wonders, and End of the Fire Cult, as well as two collections of short fiction.