In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Amy Crider’s Catching an Orange is an epistolary memoir, a book exceptional in both its form and exploration of how mental illness can shape our lives and creativity.
Amanda Eyre Ward wrote of the book:
“Once you begin reading Crider’s utterly transfixing, vulnerable, and honest memoir, you won’t be able to stop. Crider’s stylish sentences investigate the space where brilliance and mental illness collide. Her story is heartbreaking and important.”
In her own words, here is Amy Crider’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir Catching an Orange:
In January of 1993, I was hospitalized in a psych ward because a manic episode had worsened into a psychotic break. There, I met the psychiatrist who was head of the ward, Dr. L. When we met and I said hello, I gave him a big smile, which was meant to say, “I know I’ve been crazy. I’m embarrassed.” He gave me a small, shy smile, and said, “Hi.” I thought he had a cute smile. I only stayed in the ward for three days. The circumstances are all in my memoir, Catching an Orange. When I left, a nurse invited me to write to them at the ward. I started writing to him obsessively, and gradually felt I was in love with him. In true ’90s fashion, at one point, I sent him a mix tape.
I have never been someone who could follow music, to know who did what songs, not for lack of interest, but lack of resources, before the Internet made research easy. But as that long-ago time comes back to me, here is my playlist.
Be My Yoko Ono, by Barenaked Ladies
This was the first song on the mix tape. I recited a letter to him, and then said, here are some songs I thought you might like, and it cut immediately to this. I didn’t even know mix tapes were an actual thing at the time. I sent this before I had decided I was in love, despite how obviously romantic this choice was.
If I Had a Million Dollars, by Barenaked Ladies
This was the second song on the mix tape. I don’t remember what, if any, other songs were on the tape.
You Were Meant for Me, by Jewel
Foolish Games, by Jewel
After years of not owning a radio, I acquired one, and these two songs were being played a lot when I bought it. I wrote to Dr. L. saying I was listening to Jewel, and how plaintive the music was.
Music for Flute & Guitar, Jean-Pierre Rampal and René Bartoli
I owned this cassette in college and listened to it repeatedly. When Jean-Pierre Rampal died, I wrote to Dr, L. about it and told him how much I loved the album. I assumed as an erudite kind of man, he would know who Jean-Pierre Rampal was.
Tainted Love, by Soft Cell
Where Did Our Love Go, by Soft Cell
My memoir ends on my marrying my best friend from college, Sam, when we were reunited twenty years after we first met. In the winter of 1982, we took a bus from Goddard College in Vermont to MacGill University in Montreal to visit a high school friend of mine. There was a party one night that weekend, and though Sam and I are nerdy people who don’t dance, we danced together to this mash-up by Soft Cell, and I remember it vividly. I loved the beat as one song morphed into the other. I consider my knowledge of popular music to have mainly ended in the ’80s, and I definitely have a soft spot for that era of music. I graduated in December of 1982, and have sometimes wished I was in college for more of the ’80s in order to have heard more of the music of that time.
Wee Croodin Do, Scottish traditional
Love Song, by Joan Armatrading
In 1988, I sang these songs a Capella in a college talent show in the Haybarn Theater when I went back for my low-res MA from Goddard. I became manic during the residency week, and when I sang these two songs, I blew the roof off.
Amy Crider is an award-winning novelist and playwright who has won honors for both fiction and drama. Born in Ohio and raised in rural upstate New York, she studied theater at Goddard College and later trained at Second City and Chicago Dramatists. Her work explores themes of redemption, courage, and compassion. She lives in Chicago.