In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Keely Jobe’s novel The Endling is a surreal, unsettling, and engaging debut.
Foreword Reviews wrote of the book:
“An electric and unnerving novel, The Endling follows a radical feminist community’s undoing.”
In her own words, here is Keely Jobe’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel The Endling:
I remember being moved by music at a really young age. When I was around five, I used to hide behind one of the speakers in our house and listen to ‘I dreamed a dream’ from Les Misérables and cry quietly to myself. I remember kind of enjoying the total despair the music offered, and which I can now recognize was a kind of catharsis. When I was writing The Endling, music was such a significant part of the process. I used it to get a sense of the culture I was depicting, to describe the state of particular characters, and more than anything else, to locate the atmosphere and emotion in a scene. It might come as no surprise that this playlist includes very few men.
X-Ray Spex, Oh Bondage Up Yours!
There’s a sneaky mention of this song in the book. It’s such an awesome song, I play it way too much. Partly influenced by reggae but unmistakably punk, this band sums up that anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, liberationist energy of the 70s. The lead singer, Poly Styrene, is still considered a pioneer of feminist punk. She’s a black woman screaming about bondage and freedom so it’s impossible not to feel energized and outraged when you’re listening to her. I also love how crappy the recording is, how discordant the saxophone, how shrill the vocals. It’s the epitome of disorder.
The Slits, Typical Girls
When I was researching second-wave feminism and Radicalesbians in Australia, I was struck by how theatrical a lot of their activism was. There were women joining punk bands but there were also women joining street theatre troupes to play out their politics to the public. The Slits embody that cultural moment for me. The name of the band says it all – prepare to be affronted. This isn’t the kind of music you can sing along to, it’s too choppy and dissonant, but it captures a very particular sentiment: it’s defiant and confrontational, and underneath it all is a real sense of frustration at the status quo.
Grace Cummings, Storm Queen
How do you write a group of women feeling sexually attracted to a forest? Listen to Grace Cummings. Hers is one of the most eerily seductive voices out there. When I first heard this song on the radio, I remember saying, ‘Who is this?!’ and turning the volume right up. This song is like a spell, and I played it a number of times to get into that supernatural headspace. If you ever get a chance to see Grace play live, don’t hesitate. You won’t regret it.
PJ Harvey and John Parish, Sixteen, Fifteen, Fourteen
I played this song on repeat when I was writing the birth scene. The lyrics don’t clearly point to something like mass birth but there’s a sense of dizziness and excess in the instrumentation I was able to piggyback off. The banjo always sounds a bit hick and rural. In this song, it’s also an invitation to chaos.
Karen Dalton, Katie Cruel
I heard this song about 20 years ago and I remember seeing a character in my mind back then: a woman on the move, someone who upsets people wherever she goes. She doesn’t fit in well, doesn’t conform, and it’s probably best for everyone if she just sticks to herself. When I was researching feminist separatist projects, I found examples of women who joined these projects not for community but for isolation. That’s what this song says to me – leave me the hell alone. It’s Frank through and through.
The Platters, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Just before I started writing this book, my partner was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Some of her early symptoms were so strange, and they make up a part of Frankie’s story. Where I live in Tasmania, treatment for MS is effective and accessible (it’s free) because it’s an MS hotspot, but I wondered what would happen if a person never got that treatment. I read that one rare symptom of MS is auditory hallucinations, which sometimes take the form of music. This song was one of my grandma’s favourites – it really tugs on my heartstrings for that reason – and it’s the song that gets stuck in Frankie’s head when she’s getting sick.
Divinyls, Back to the Wall
In one scene, Mila wonders what life would be like if she left the mountain. She’s feeling very out of the loop, especially in terms of pop-culture. If she did leave the mountain and entered early 90s Australia, she’d be confronted by Chrissy Amphlett’s sneering, schoolgirl persona, fronting the timeless band Divinyls. She might even find this particular song sums up her experience of motherhood on the mountain.
Björk, All is Full of Love
I have been a massive Björk fan since forever. I find her work so generative when it comes to my own writing. Her lyrics are always opening doors for me, partly because they’re so enigmatic. This song speaks to me of the novel’s ending, which I won’t spoil here. Let’s just say it’s a song that blooms into something beautiful and strange.
Keely Jobe is a writer of fiction and nonfiction living on the east coast of Lutruwita/Tasmania with her partner and two staffies. Her work has appeared in The Monthly, Island Magazine, Australian Geographic, and Cosmos. She has a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Tasmania and is the nonfiction editor at Island Magazine. The Endling is her first novel. Keely lives in Tasmania.