In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Ana Kinsella’s novel Frida Slattery As Herself is a spellbinding debut delivering poignant themes of art, power, and achievement.
Elif Batuman wrote of the book:
“Frida Slattery As Herself is a deft, profound, and seemingly effortless portrayal of how a series of artworks—as well as the personal and professional lives of the artists—takes shape over fifteen years, spanning the 2008 financial crisis, Me Too, and COVID. Ana Kinsella manages to deliver all the pleasures of a comic-romantic novel while thinking through a satisfying number of big themes: gender politics and financial precarity, the mysteries of artistic collaboration, and the relentless tug-of-war between freedom and security. Moving, thought-provoking, and utterly delightful.”
In her own words, here is Ana Kinsella’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Frida Slattery As Herself:
Music was so important to me while I was writing this book. Previously when I’d written fiction, I’d listened either to a lot of classical piano music, or else to minimal German techno, to try and sand down the edges of my mind. When I was writing my debut novel Frida Slattery As Herself, though, things were different. I was thinking about big beautiful pop music – the feelings of euphoria or heartbreak that a key change or a bridge can bestow on you, and the way the best pop music always takes you by surprise somehow. These were the facets of the medium that I wanted to work into my novel in some way. Here is a selection of songs that made a mark on me while I was writing and that wormed their way into the world of the novel as a result.
‘California’, CMAT
Would I have written this novel without CMAT? Impossible to tell. Certainly I rinsed her first two albums while working on Frida Slattery As Herself and got a lot from the densely self-referential way in which Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson seems to turn her own life into art. The lyrics of ‘California’ are posed as threat to an ex-lover – now that what we had is over, all I can do is turn this into art at your expense, in the same way we always talked about art when we were together. The outro is particularly pointed: ‘I’m writing up a book about us / They’re gonna make a movie of it / They’re gonna cast Jake Gyllenhaal / and I’m Kristen Schaal’. You would be scared, to hear this sort of thing from your talented ex, wouldn’t you? Your blood might even run cold.
‘The River’, Daisy Jones and the Six
I hadn’t read Taylor Jenkins Reid’s polyphonic novel based loosely on a Fleetwood Mac-style band recording a Rumours-style album when I wrote Frida Slattery As Herself, but early on, when I’d hit a bit of a wall, I watched the limited series starring Riley Keough as the eponymous Daisy Jones. It was huge fun, watching the creative process in all its abject horror and misery unfold, and the extremely jaunty soundtrack (composed by Blake Mills) was a wake-up call for me in how you can simply make up fake art for the purpose of your fiction. Writing a novel about an actor and a director inevitably involves doing exactly that, and listening on repeat to ‘The River’, which seems to be a mirror of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain’, showed me that putting a little time and thought into your novel’s fake art can be immensely good fun and very worthwhile.
‘I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’’, Scissor Sisters
My novel starts in 2005 and carries on until 2022 and so much changes in the culture during those years. Early on in their relationship, Frida and John find themselves driving around Ireland for work reasons. I wrote so much more of this section that I went on to discard – doing so was part of my process for getting to know these characters better, and figuring out why they like each other. Those hours spent in the car together would be soundtracked by various things, I knew – whatever music they could agree on. Sometimes it’d be drivers’ choice, and sometimes I thought that Frida might hijack the controls and stick on a bit of Scissor Sisters to inject some levity into proceedings. Even the most esoteric and high-minded 2007 indie snob couldn’t resist shimmying his shoulders to this one.
‘Fisherman’s Blues’, The Waterboys
I think Mike Scott of The Waterboys is possibly the great poet of Irish yearning, other than WB Yeats. From the beginning, I wanted to write a novel in which the time the characters spend apart is as important for their relationship as the time they spend together. The ideas they form about each other in the absence of one another are as real to them as the other’s physical reality. This elegiac song isn’t even about being a fisherman and being sad on a boat – it’s about wishing you were a fisherman who was sad on a boat, because the distance it would put between you and your lover would become romantic and significant and beautiful. I love that idea of second-order yearning – maybe we yearn to yearn because doing so would make us feel alive.
‘Marquee Moon’, Television
This song comes on the jukebox in a bar in Manhattan at one point in the novel and it’s always struck me as a funny and obnoxious thing to put on a jukebox. It’s jerky and weird with mysterious lyrics and also, crucially, it’s ten minutes long. To subject other people to it in public, even though it is also a great song, is something of an imposition. It’s self-indulgent. In that way it reminded me a little of the kind of theatrical work that John Reddan makes, and of the process of sharing one’s work with the wider public in general.
‘A&W’, Lana Del Rey
For me Lana is the contemporary bard of Los Angeles and the only artist fit to soundtrack Frida’s Hollywood years. I love this song’s investigation of ageing, of fear and self-hatred, the visibility or otherwise of women’s pain, of the inevitability of needing love to make things better – all things that would be circling in Frida’s mind in the years she spends living and working in California.
‘Graceland’, Paul Simon
My husband once described this album to me as remarkable in how it takes the inner life of the middle-aged man and treats it as seriously as a young man’s inner life. Here’s Paul Simon in New York in his 40s, divorced from Carrie Fisher, trying to figure out who he is, newly obsessed with South African music. Deceptively simple lyrics that get to the heart of this strange time in his life, and that resonate now decades later even though my own life is objectively so different. A female friend of mine believes that a man’s 40s are the most potentially embarrassing time for him, and I really internalised this idea in my writing of John Reddan’s own confusing and at times painful 40s.
‘Revelator’, Gillian Welch
As Frida gets older, she gets to know herself better – as we all do, I hope! Part of this involves leaning into the things she loves most, not trying to adapt herself into shapes and forms to fit other people. I imagine that could be a little difficult for an actress. One thing she loves is folk and country music by women with sad voices. Gillian Welch’s voice has always sounded otherworldly to me, a voice out of time and place. The first time I heard this song I felt entirely thrown, like something in me had been shifted permanently by the movement of tectonic plates. I love the idea of Frida Slattery alone in her flat some quiet evening, a bottle of wine open, a candle lit, and this astoundingly beautiful album by Gillian Welch playing on a speaker.
‘Hunting the Wren’, Lankum
I started writing this novel when I’d just moved back to my hometown Dublin after over a decade in the UK. When I got home, Lankum were everywhere. This song in particular became a talisman as I wrote – it’s haunting and a little scary, and you could call its lyrics a sort of feminist retelling of a forgotten part of Irish history and culture. Traditionally men and boys in parts of Ireland have made sport of hunting this tiny bird on 26th December, ostensibly for charity, wearing elaborate straw costumes. Lankum’s song weaves this violent tradition with another real story of the ‘wrens’, 19th century Irish women who had fallen from acceptable society in various ways. I liked the idea of Frida and John, separate but both in different parts of Dublin once again, listening to the same song without realising it.
Ana Kinsella is an Irish writer based in Dublin. As a journalist, she has written for The Guardian, Frieze, Dazed, n+1, AnOther, and others. Her first book, Look Here: On the Pleasures of Observing the City, was published by Daunt Books in 2022.