In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Susan Donovan Bernhard’s novel Westerly is a multi-generational epic that spans fifty years, three countries, and three generations of unforgettable women.
Heather Aimee O’Neill wrote of the book:
“In a story packed with as much secrecy as love, Westerly follows two generations of women as they move from war-torn Germany to an Irish village to mid-coast Maine across five decades. But the larger journey is one of learning to share our lives―our past and present truths―with those who are supposed to know us best, and trusting that they will still love us. An absolutely beautiful story of choosing honesty and forgiveness over secrets and shame.”
In her own words, here is Susan Donovan Bernhard’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Westerly:
Two German sisters are sent to foster care in Ireland, where they are separated by tragedy. WESTERLY follows one girl to the United States where she lives with a name and identity that are not her own. It’s a story of knowing yourself, expectation and longing, the shame that comes from harboring secrets, and ultimately the hard journey toward real forgiveness and authentic living. I don’t listen to music while I write. I build the playlist to set mood, to create a headspace where my characters can swim and dance and fight and do all the things complex characters do. Plus, as a person susceptible to ear worms, it’s a way for me to keep thinking about the novel even when I’m not actively working on it.
Love You For a Long Time by Maggie Rogers
Came in like a vision from the old west wind
All the songs I longlisted for WESTERLY were assigned to a character. I imagined Faye or Maeve or Molly listening to the song on the radio, singing along, hearing their own stories. But the moment I heard this song, I assigned it to me. Maybe it was at that point I started truly believing that this novel would be a book.
You know that I could never make this up
I found the reason I’m not givin’ it up
The journey to publication is scary and fraught, depressing and exhilarating, deflating and affirming. If writing is art, the art is the work and not the product. Still. To have it all bound into a physical book is like framing a painting. Characters from my first novel have stayed with me and these ones will as well. After all, I’ve loved them for a long time.
Babe, don’t you wanna see how far this thing can go?
The Benediction (A Good Woman) by Rose Cousins
Call me by my name and I will answer.
I remember exactly where I was when I first heard this song. March 5, 2020. My mom’s 99th birthday. I was walking on the beach in Chatham, MA on the first day of a writing retreat wondering what in the world this virus was and whether we would be able to get food in a week. I was struggling to understand the novel I was working on, what I wanted to write. Then I heard these lyrics about silence and interiority. I listened on repeat.
Listen and you’ll hear what I am saying
Feelings I have difficulty relaying
My silence isn’t absence, I’m just praying
I wanna be a good woman.
I made my way back to the house as the sun was going down. A pack of coyotes moved together across the grass and down to the shore. I burst into the house and played the song for my writing partners.
A strong and reliable daughter
A kind and understanding sister
A dear and attentive friend and lover
A girl with her heart on fire.
Love In Wartime by Birds of Chicago
I love quiet domesticity in the lyrics, the routine and wonder. There is something so human and flawed about the characters in this song. William and Faye both suffered through war and carry guilt and pain and a desire to forget and a desire to be loved and to love despite it all.
We are not made from metals hammered
We are lightning, clay and grammar
We’re the whispers in the dark when the night comes ’round
Yesterday and tomorrow
Keep our joy and our sorrow
Painted Blue by Sundy Best
Man, I love a broken character. And Conor O’Kane is broken and bitter and damaged. He’s a guy who knows how to hold a grudge. (The two of us might be related.)
Too bad you traded your love for your pride.
There’s a story in my family about my dad Tom and his brother Bill. The story goes that Uncle Bill came to my hometown to barhop and get drunk with my dad. The two of them got into some sort of brawl and spent the night in a jail cell sobering up. The next morning, the sheriff drove Uncle Bill to the town line and told him never to come back. And Uncle Bill, prideful and stubborn, swore he never would. Then my dad got mad because his brother wouldn’t come to visit him and he swore that, by God, he wouldn’t visit my Uncle Bill either. For maybe fifteen or twenty years they didn’t see each other. They lived 80 miles apart. I was 17 when my dad died and I met my Uncle Bill for the first time the next day. They looked so much alike I thought he was my father’s ghost.
I’ve been broke down and I’ve been fooled
By time and age and some by you
So I just lay here with a bottle on the floor
Why wouldn’t Conor just…? Why didn’t he tell William that…? Why didn’t my Uncle Bill just…? Why wouldn’t my dad pick up the phone and…? Because these Irishmen—real and fictional—held grudges like possessions. To give up the grudge would make them poor and weak. It was a game of chicken and my dad and his brother crashed into each other. For Conor O’Kane, giving up the grudge would have meant letting go of Fiadh. For my dad and Uncle Bill? I don’t know. But, to this day, I don’t forgive either of them for keeping me from knowing the two of them together. I am my father’s daughter after all.
So when the pain starts to creep in
And I just pour another shot again
So I don’t have to miss you anymore
Eyes to the Wind by The War On Drugs
So I’ll set my eyes to the wind
But it won’t be easy to leave it all again
Just a bit rundown here on the sea
There’s just a stranger livin’ in me
When I first started building the character of Maeve, I imagined a path for her that would lead to (spoiler alert) happiness. I had a friend in high school named Marla. Everyone loved Marla, wanted to be close to her, wanted to be her, even. This was the early 1980s and Marla was a star basketball player, a “tomboy,” and utterly cool. We kids were shockingly obtuse and cruel back then, ridiculing and mocking girls who were drawn into Marla’s orbit. Surely some of those girls were attracted to Marla more than they were to any boy. Surely some experienced the confusion of desire at a time when you just couldn’t be gay. Marla’s twin sister Joni, equally charismatic, was a literal beauty queen. Both sisters were insanely popular and beloved. Both girls had better and closer friends than me, people who knew their secrets and their pain. No one escapes high school unscathed, after all. Marla, though, carried the kind of pain that ultimately led to her taking her own life.
When I met you and I fell away again
Like a train in reverse down a dark road
Carrying the whole load just rattling the whole way home
At a class reunion in 1992, I talked to Marla about my life. I was living in San Francisco at the time, dating a guy who would eventually be my husband. Marla had come out by then and brought the woman she was dating to the reunion. We talked about San Francisco, what a great city it was, how open and adventurous and artistic and wild. I think that was the last time I saw her. Though we weren’t close, I was heartbroken by the news of her death. There was just something about her. When it came time to write the character of Maeve, I imagined Marla, confronting the demons that haunted her and coming out on the other side of the fight very much alive.
Nightflyer by Allison Russell
Molly is constantly in battle with herself, two things, fourteen things at once, all versions of herself vying for attention. She is The Morrigan, the triple goddess, a shapeshifter. Even her grandfather sees the warrior in her.
I’m the melody and the space between
The fire and the branch that’s burning
I’m each of his steps on the stairway
I’m his shadow in the door frame
Molly’s battle to get overcome the trauma of her childhood by owning it, literally wearing it, is so perfectly encapsulated in this song. I feel like it was written for her.
His soul is trapped in that room
But I crawled back in my mother’s womb
Came back out with my gold and my greens
Now I see everything
Now I feel everything…
Macushla by The Adler Brothers
She sings the song her dad would sing
Now he listens from above
It’s all gonna be okay
My macushla, my love.
Faye and Thomas have such a lovely and melancholy relationship, bound as they are by secrecy and loss. I found this searching for versions of the traditional Irish song. I love that it came to me so organically. And boy do I know that feeling of missing your dad.
Come Back by Pearl Jam
Please say, that if you hadn’t of gone now
I wouldn’t have lost you another way
From wherever you are
Oh-oh, oh-oh, come back
There’s a running theme for all the characters in WESTERLY of running away and returning home, of blame and sacrifice that is often misplaced and misapplied. Early on, I had an epigraph from Euripides. “Come back, even as a shadow, even as a dream.” I’ll take any piece of you, any version of you—you who I have lost, you who I long for, you, gone too soon or simply gone. Not long after my dad died, I dreamed that he came into the house like he’d never left. He hugged me, put his arm around my shoulder, and pulled me close to him. In my dream, I imagined climbing into his shirt pocket. I woke up so sad but also so grateful that he came to me, even in a dream. I keep that now as a memory, as if it were real. Because aren’t dreams real?
And the days, they linger on
And every night, what I’m waiting for
Is the real possibility that I may meet you in my dreams
Sometimes you’re there and you’re talking back to me
Come the morning I could swear you’re next to me
And it’s okay
Carry Me by The Secret Sisters
What if this song had three narrators instead of one?
Molly: I’m a long way from home
I feel the weight in my bones
I’m tired like a sinner
I’m cold and my money’s all gone
Maeve: I’m ashamed of the things that I’ve done
Feeling love is like facing a gun
The closer you get
The farther that I’m gonna run
Faye: If I keep on hiding, how will I be known?
I keep telling myself that I’m better alone
On a roadtrip through Ireland in 2019, we got turned around in the Wicklow Mountains and ended up at a place called The Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation. The organization is housed in an old barracks that has had many functions during Ireland’s turbulent history including as an ignominious reform school operated by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Post-World War II, the Irish Red Cross housed German orphans here before fostering them with families throughout Ireland. I’d never heard anything about the program, dubbed Operation Shamrock, but these little German sisters appeared to me like an apparition. I pictured them stepping off a bus in a foreign land, the sound of bombs still bursting in their ears. How strange that must have been. WESTERLY was born from that wrong turn in the Wicklow Mountains. That the place is now one for peace and reconciliation seems especially apt.
I’m worn and I’m weathered
But your love is the shelter I need.
Fly by Nick Drake
Please, give me a second grace.
Please tell me your second name.
I’ve been a fan of Nick Drake for so long. I don’t remember when I first started thinking about this song, about Faye and Sela, about second chances, about how you don’t want to wait too long to ask for forgiveness or to grant it. But it’s always been there.
Now if it’s time for recompense for what’s done
Come, come sit down on the fence in the sun
You and Me On The Rock by Brandi Carlisle
I already spoiled that Maeve’s ending would be happy so here she is, with Wendy. (And it makes me so happy to imagine that in some alternate universe, Marla got there, too.)
I build my house up on this rock, baby
Every day with you
There’s nothin’ in that town I need
After everything we’ve been through.
Front Porch by Joy Williams
Say my name through the screen door
Come on back to the front porch
I hear this song and I think of all the women in WESTERLY, the headwinds and tailwinds that buffeted them and nudged them along, how they fell and rose. I wish I could bring all my characters together (and all the people who inspired them) so we could sit on the front porch at the farmhouse in Maine and have a cold beer as the sun goes down.
Whatever you’ve done, it doesn’t matter
‘Cause darlin’ we’re all a little splintered and battered.
Donoughmore by Rose Cousins
In the green of Ireland, oceans in between
I think of you again and what all of this means.
Rose Cousins bookends, perfect for Faye and Molly and Maeve, for Fiadh and Gisela and Elisabeth, all of them making room for love.
Heart be with me now,
As I make room for love.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Susan Bernhard’s playlist for her novel Winter Loon
Susan Donovan Bernhard is the author of Winter Loon, an Amazon bestseller and winner of the Boston Authors Club’s Julia Ward Howe Prize for fiction. She is a Mass Cultural Council fellowship recipient, a GrubStreet Novel Incubator program graduate, and a Tennessee Williams Scholar to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A dual citizen of the United States and Ireland, Susan was born and raised in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana and graduated from the University of Maryland. She now lives and writes in Massachusetts.