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.
Miciah Bay Gault’s The Nobody Code is an unforgettable coming-of-age novel.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“Folklore, motherhood, and sins of the past collide in this multifaceted novel. . . . Gault’s plot is compelling at its core and even potentially polarizing. The questions it raises are sure to inspire conversation, making it a good choice for book groups.”
In her own words, here is Miciah Bay Gault’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Nobody Code:
“Friday I’m in Love” by Yo La Tengo
I keep a playlist going every time I’m working on a book. I play it mostly when I’m driving and the highway lulls me into a kind of waking dream where I enter the the world of the new book and exist there for a while, checking things out, waiting for the characters start talking. For The Nobody Code playlist, I looked for songs from the late ’80s or early ’90s, the decade when my characters first meet as teens and form a vigilante group in the forest of Vermont called Nobody. I added several songs by The Cure, which still feel surreal and sexy to me, and which used to fill me with a kind of romantic ferocity when I was a teenager. Because the novel is about the ways the past shows up to haunt us years in the future, I also wanted songs that I remembered from my adolescence reimagined by contemporary musicians. That’s why “Friday I’m in Love” by Yo La Tengo works so well on this playlist. There’s something perfectly adolescent about the song. The Cure’s version came out when I was a junior in high school, and back then it felt saccharine. But Georgia Hubley’s voice doesn’t feel sugary; it’s surefooted, startlingly simple, lucid. My playlist of rerecorded 1980s masterpieces also includes “When Doves Cry” by the Be Good Tanyas, and “Never Tear us Apart” by Paloma Faith.
“When We Were Young” by Red Heart the Ticker
I’m crazy about this song for a few reasons. The melody, the lyrics, all speak with such desperate yearning about the past as an expansive time of simplicity, love, longing, a time when the future has a holy glow because it hadn’t yet arrived, a sense of possibility infusing everything: “when we were young / we had a cabin / with one window and one table / we had hours, we were vandals…” The Nobody Code takes place primarily in two time periods—one in which my main character Dinah is a teenager and sees her future fanned out before her, sweet and unwritten, something to be sculpted as she ages. In the novel’s second time period, Dinah has come to understand life as something more prescribed, a daily existence full of rules and mores, a script handed to her that she’s expected to enact as an adult. The tension between the understanding of life as scripted and the view of the future as improvisational are at the heart of this song. I also love it because Red Heart the Ticker happens to be a husband-wife team comprising Tyler Gibbons and my dearest writing friend Robin MacArthur, with whom I’ve spent hours talking about girlhood, motherhood, marriage, art, authenticity, and the other themes that made their way into this book. I’m pretty sure this book grew organically out of so many conversations with Robin over the years. This song would be on my Nobody Code playlist regardless, but it’s awfully nice to have Robin’s voice on the soundtrack.
“Do You Remember” by Chance the Rapper (featuring Death Cab for Cutie)
Let me just say that nostalgia is a feeling I’ve always been utterly wrecked by. Nostalgia isn’t sweet or gentle; it shreds me. This song is pure nostalgia, in both lyrics and the easy swinging melody that somehow manages to feel like rocking in a hammock on a long summer afternoon. The layers of nostalgia in The Nobody Code are part of the motivation of the character. My main character Dinah feels attached to the deep (and complicated) enchantment of childhood, even as, decades later, she’s trying to squeeze herself into domestic life: motherhood, marriage, a nine-to-five job. For her, nostalgia is a lifeline back to the self she was as a girl.
“Why the Bright Stars Glow” by Valerie June
So many scenes in The Nobody Code take place in the middle of night. So I like the lyrics of this song on a literal level. Valerie June’s gorgeous cracked voice singing, “’Cause what would we do? / And where would we be? / If it’s not you / And if it’s not you and me,” is the soundtrack to the love story between my two main characters Dinah and Rex, who meet as teenagers and fall into a kind of dizzy, dazzled love for a very brief period. Writing young love is so hard and so much fun. The love Dinah and Rex experience is maddening, vast, intense, and exquisite.
“A Groovy Kind of Love” by Phil Collins
I’ve always been embarrassed that this is one of my favorite songs, but I happen to think it’s good for me to embrace my embarrassments. So here, picture this: I’m thirteen years old, slow dancing at the school dance with my crush whose freckled face I have imagined repeatedly declaring his love for me in various romance-movie-inspired circumstances. Maybe, I think hopefully, a hundred-year blizzard will strand us together in the school where we’ll fall in love before the plows arrive to dig us out. The middle school cafeteria is dim and dank, and that beloved boy’s sweaty hands are damp and warm on my waist, and I’m swarmed by exquisite love and its one thousand stingers. I’m sure I’ll never have such a perfect moment again. We sway and sway. The song is “Groovy Kind of Love” by Phil Collins, and when I hear it now I’m immediately transported back to sweaty hands and radiant love. My Nobody Code playlist is meant to transport me (when writing) and now you (while reading) to the dreamy green-sunlit speckled years of my youth when I first learned how to fall in love (madly, completely, painfully). The first chords of this song can still unlace me like a corset, and that’s a feeling I needed to remember in vivid detail when writing this book.
“Carousel” by James
This was an early demo of the song that was eventually released as “Say Something.” I love the plaintive chorus: “Say something, say something, anyone / Your silence is deafening.” I love the way the music in this version sounds rough, raw, unfinished. And I love the way the song is about darkness, imperfect love, distance and isolation. Half of The Nobody Code takes place when Dinah is in her thirties, married and questioning the unexpected isolation and loneliness she feels in marriage and motherhood. This song seems to call across time to a younger or older self, a plea for iterations of self to speak up for the whole self. When adult Dinah begins to discover clues related to her past vigilant actions, she knows someone is reaching out to her from the past, though she doesn’t know if they’re looking for connection or revenge. When the silence is deafening, though, even possible revenge is a thrill if it connects you to past loves, past selves.
“Long Shadows” by Josh Ritter
I haven’t mentioned yet that a bear is a major character in The Nobody Code. And briefly Dinah can converse with the bear. I can’t think of a better song to capture the fear and delight of wild things, the fierceness of first love, the enchantment of youth. I love the cheery bouncy melody of this song and how it illuminates the contradictory lyrics (“When the sun goes down / And the dreams grow teeth / And the beasts come out / And cast their long shadows / Every time they start / I’ll be right here with you / I’m not afraid of the dark”). I’m not afraid of the dark, and neither is Dinah.
“Animal Tracks” by Mountain Man
I’m lucky to live in Vermont (where the book is set) and though I live in town, the minute I step outside my door, I’m in close proximity to wildness. I’ve seen bears, foxes, fisher cats, owls, hawks, racoons, and skunks in my yard. Once late at night I couldn’t get home because a mama bear and baby were standing on my front walkway. This song is about the wild sweetness of hot summer days and wild spaces. It was important to me to set the book in a place that was still at least partly wild, because in many ways the book is about holding onto (or letting go of) the tracts of wilderness in us, the uninhabited, untamed desires, fears, and obsessions of our youth.
“Nothing New” by Taylor Swift with Phoebe Bridgers
This is the best song I know about the rules and regulations governing women’s lives, particularly the double standards and Catch-22s of girlhood. “They tell you when you’re young,” the song goes, “‘Girls, go out and have some fun’ / Then they hunt and slay the ones who actually do it.” The girls of my vigilante group Nobody are caught, whether they see it or not, in a system of oppression that’s normalized and even comfortable. They sense it more than understand it. I wanted one Taylor Swift song on the playlist because I love Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s assessment that what we love about Taylor Swift is her “acknowledgment of girls as people to memorialize, of who we are and who we were, all existing in the same body, on the same timeline. You are your sluttiest version, your silliest version, your most wholesome, your smartest, your dumbest, your saddest, your happiest—all at once.” Dinah and the other girls from the vigilante group Nobody, all the girls in the book really, are trying on different costumes, different masks (sometimes quite literally), looking for the right fit, the version of self that won’t be punished, but that still feels authentic.
“Wild Soul” by Langhorne Slim and the Law
This song sets up a juxtaposition between tamed cities (“cars alarms and cracked concrete”) and wild spaces (“honeysuckle breeze”). The Nobody Code sets up a similar juxtaposition between the caged animals of the zoo Dinah works in and the wild animals of the forests of Vermont. So much of the book is about the tension around the explicit and implicit rules, and Dinah’s longing for the enchantment of childhood is about preferring the wildness of childhood over the domesticated existence of adulthood/motherhood. This song feels like adult Dinah’s soundtrack. I picture her washing dishes, rocking the baby, filling out paperwork at her job with Langhorne Slim’s growl in her head: “Lord, release my wild soul.”
“The Big Day” by Chance the Rapper (featuring Francis and the Lights)
This whole playlist falls apart without this song, because this is the song that lifts the mood directly into a kind of surreal desperation. Melodic and dissonant all at once, lyrics both vulnerable and aggressive, and then completely unhinged for a moment before swerving back to philosophical and supplicant, this song musically captures the collision of feelings underlying the scenes at the end of The Nobody Code. No spoilers, but one of the final scenes of the book takes place in an underground tunnel where a bear who’s been in the book from the beginning finally gets a chance to speak. At this point in the story, Dinah is drugged, afraid, and on the cusp of understanding something huge: the identity of her tormentor—but also how moments of darkness are the times we face fears, take chances, choose boldly, follow dreams and instincts, and change our lives.
Miciah Bay Gault has an MFA in Fiction from Syracuse. She teaches in the MFA program at VCFA and directs the Vermont Book Award. Miciah’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, LitHub, Electric Literature, the Harvard Review, and many others. She’s been a fellow at Bread Loaf, a Visiting Writer at the Vermont Studio Center, and the recipient of a Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant.