In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Bonnie Friedman’s novel Don’t Stop is a vividly told and moving debut.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“This coming-of-middle-age story explores a woman’s obsessive affair and the unraveling of her life… A fiction debut that will appeal to fans of Miranda July’s All Fours.”
In her own words, here is Bonnie Friedman’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Don’t Stop:
Goldfinger (Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings)
Don’t Stop is a novel about a woman with an utterly divided life, who tells herself that part of it is real and important (the part with her kind husband and good job) and the other, which encompasses an increasingly dark sexual affair, is make-believe. And yet she is increasingly enthralled by the make-believe part, the part that she can’t allow herself to understand is real, even though she is taking more and more risks and discovering that what happens in the bedroom has repercussions for the entire rest of her life.
The novel begins in 1999, and Ina is sitting with her friend Janie on the Brooklyn Promenade, across from Wall Street. There’s an absolute euphoria in the city because the stock market is soaring and, unlike today, everyone seems to benefit, not just The Masters of the Universe. An atmosphere of recklessness pervades the city, and a sense that the old rules of reality might no longer apply. I chose Goldfinger from the soundtrack of The Wolf of Wall Street because I love its big louche horns and almost tawdry clamor. The song originated with the James Bond movies, which had a panache to them, a certain sardonic bordello swank just a step away from the overripe. As it happens, it is a song of warning.
Maria (Blondie)
Ina is a scholar is on a tight deadline to complete her academic book in order to keep her job, but nevertheless allows herself to be persuaded to go to a networking meeting at a bar. It’s a foggy night and she steps into this loud, throbbing, bewildering place that to her is something like the go-go party of hipsters featured in Laugh-In, a million years ago. She hates it. Something is thumping on the sound system. I chose a song I very much like, Maria, by Blondie, which was a power pop single that year. It’s about romantic obsession. Debbie Harry keeps sounding like she’s going to break into “The Tide Is High” with that sultry expansive lower register. It’s deeply hooky, this tune, with fantastic pounding drums that want to make your blood jump, and that do make Ina’s blood jump, despite herself.
It Might As Well Be Spring (Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz)
Could there be a cooler delivery that Gilberto’s? Perhaps Chet Baker’s on horn. Ina finds herself playing this song on repeat during the afternoon when she’s anticipating her first date. Gilberto sings it with her characteristic trance-y sangfroid. Delivered in a monotone and played over and over, the song is thrillingly hypnotic as it asks the question, “Why do I have spring fever / when I know it isn’t spring?” In fact, winter is coming to New York but something in Ina seems to be taking on a life of its own. “I’m starry-eyed and vaguely discontented.” “I feel so gay in a melancholy way that it might as well be spring.” Gorgeous Hammerstein lyrics set to Rogers’ insistent, driven melody about this delicious, fixated, in-between state.
I Saw the Light (Earl Scruggs)
Ina’s husband is the extremely decent, Texas-born Simon, who grew up in a fundamentalist family, and is an ace banjo player. This character was marvelously satisfying to write. I could very much imagine him playing Earl Scruggs’ version of I Saw the Light. It’s an upbeat, radiant bluegrass gospel number that reflects some of Simon’s own warm spirits and humane faith, being outward looking and open-hearted. Ina views Simon’s goodness as being somewhat childlike and simple, a limitation for which the reader knows she may pay.
My mother, in her late nineties, isolated in her tiny apartment during COVID, used to sing this song with me over the telephone, only she sang “two sisters” instead of “two drifters”. Two sisters, off to see the world. In fact, she never had a sister, although she always wanted one. She had grown up in a family of boys. “Moon River” is a song all about longing and inner voices impelling one to a fateful rendezvous. Ina and Simon hold tight to one another as they dance around their living room to this tune, which Ina notices is a waltz. Elton John’s rendition, his foot heavy on the echo pedal, skirts the sentimentality that the song risks while letting us feel all the yearning.
Let’s Get It On (Marvin Gaye)
The vibe of Jack’s bedroom is summoned by this slow-burn Motown classic. I kept thinking that Barry White sang this song, as perhaps he should have at some time, with his melt-your knees bone-rumbling bass-baritone but no, this is Marvin Gaye’s slow-jam ballad, with his swoony bass and shouting tenor urging you to unstring yourself, to deliver yourself over. It’s impossible for me to hear this song without feeling the lights turn low and the heat turned up. An anthem for eroticism.
Dreams (The Cranberries)
Ina’s sister is a prickly, forbidding, domineering presence who has a difficult life, having been stricken with multiple sclerosis. She always makes Ina feel like two cents. In the background, while sister Violet and Ina are cooking together at Violet’s claustrophobic house, this catchy song comes on the radio, a missive from a distant reality, the reality in which most normal people obliviously move, with its relatable experience of first love, ringing and up tempo, full of possibilities. Violet’s experience is the opposite – has she ever been in love? — and yet she’s a force to contend with, one of the strongest characters in the book, with her superpower being an ability to meet life open-eyed, without recourse to fantasy.
Agnus Dei from Missa in Festis Apostolmin (Palestrina)
Under protest and ill-prepared, Ina is assigned a creative-writing class to teach, to fill in for a professor who’s gone AWOL. She doesn’t know how to teach this class, and is told that the students will teach her. She has often stepped past this teacher’s classroom and noticed strange behavior: the lights out and a candle burning, Renaissance music playing, the students silently bent over their desks as if taking dictation, each from a different source. This polyphonic sacred choral piece by Palestrina, performed a capella, evokes spiritual presences as if drawing them forth from the clerestory of a cathedral, the sopranos ringing with a pure tone, and, beneath them, the rolling-forth bases smooth as sheets of water sliding in at low tide. The meditative, unhurried air invites one’s own inner truths to manifest, which may be why the original creative-writing teacher liked it. It awakens something uncomfortable in Ina, who, especially at this point in her life, wants order and control. This classroom will bring her the opposite.
Every Time We Say Goodbye (Annie Lennox)
Late in the novel, Simon and Ina dress up to hear a favorite performer of theirs, who sings in a Frank Sinatra style. This Cole Porter ballad, with its wry “how strange the change from major to minor” captures some of the beauty of the American songbook classics that allow an expansion of feeling within a contained few bars. Ina, at the end of the novel, will go with one man or the other (or neither) — and there will have to be a goodbye. My friend John Kane used to play this number at the end of a Friday evening when he lived in Milton, Massachusetts, and I’d come over to visit him and Gary, and would eat his magnificent roasted chicken and braised leeks, and drink Australian Savignon Blanc, and eat the real-vanilla-bean ice cream I’d brought. He’d step out into the snow if it was winter, and walk me to my car in his rolled-up white shirtsleeves and pressed gray office slacks, and say, “Safe home!” waving as I left. Some people when they say goodbye give you a present of their love to carry you toward home. Some people, even as they pass from this life, do the same thing. I think of John Kane when I hear this song, saying “Safe home!” and recall the love that stays even after the person is gone, and is never taken away.
Bonnie Friedman is the author of the bestselling Writing Past Dark, named one of the Essential Books for Writers by the Center for Fiction and Poets & Writers. She is also the author of The Thief of Happiness and Surrendering Oz, a finalist for the PEN Award in the Art of the Essay. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares and numerous other literary journals, and she has been named a notable essayist four times in The Best American Essays. She has taught writing at the University of Iowa, Dartmouth, NYU, and the University of North Texas. Don’t Stop is her first novel.