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.
Téa Mutonji’s novel My Person is a brilliant debut that examines friendship through the lens of race and class.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“Searing. . . Mutonji unflinchingly examines what it means to lose yourself in a relationship, giving platonic bonds the same psychological weight we usually reserve for romantic ones. She also deftly exposes the subtle sting of race and class in a supposedly tolerant Canada, where racism doesn’t announce itself dramatically but quietly erodes personhood through acts of extravagant generosity. It’s a sharp, uncomfortable observation. Readers of Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams, and Luster by Raven Leilani, will find much to love here. My Person is an assured, necessary debut novel from a truly promising writer.”
In her own words, here is Téa Mutonji’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel My Person:
I need to be in total silence in the initial writing phase, when I’m getting the bones of a story together. But once something sustainable is present on the page, once a chapter feels full or a section is ready to be looked at, I love writing in places with loud music and sounds. I love any reminder to take a beat, to think and feel, and maybe even dance a little. I use a curated playlist to get in the right mindset to re-enter a scene or to start my edits. It works for me like a thin veil, separating me from the text, so I can pretend to be an intruder. It makes me feel like I am being transported into a distant memory or an intersection, or inside a feeling I’m clueless about–especially when the feeling isn’t entirely my own. When I struggle to tap into a specific mode or when an emotion feels a bit too out of reach for me, I would revisit the music of my childhood to help me embody the mind of a suburban kid. I would listen to songs from my “greatest heartbreak,” playlist, maybe of which are present on this list. Much like literature, I think that music is an ongoing conversation. And sometimes, when I can’t find the right words to give to a character, I play a little song instead. And that reminds me that sometimes, there aren’t any words. There is just music.
Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler
I heard this song for the first time on an episode of Glee when I was in high school. Rachel uses this song as a form of apology, or a declaration of a love meant to survive a conflict. That’s not the imprint the song had on me when I rushed to learn the words on AZLyrics. It felt to me like a hopeless admission to the situation at hand: I love you so hard and it hurts to love this way. “Total Eclipse” (the Bonnie Tyler version) was the first song I listened to obsessively when I figured out what I was writing. And it’s the song I’d revisit over and over again like a form of meditation at the start of my editing sessions.
Julia by Fefe Dobson
Fefe Dobson was the artist of my childhood. I used to listen to Fefe Dobson (and Avril Lavigne, yes, I am a true Canadian) and write responses to their music. I thought these responses were my thirteen-year-old self’s adaptations of their lyrics, but I later realized that they were poems. In 2007, when my family moved homes again, this is the song I played obsessively while mourning the friends I was leaving behind. Specifically, my friend from that neighbourhood who was the very first reader of my work. Her name, like the song, was Julia. Of course, later in life I learned about the depth of this song, and I never forgot what these lyrics meant to me: tell me this is not the end, you, my love my oldest friend. This refrain plays for Tania in Chapter 1 and then sprinkles throughout the novel.
Ex-Factor by Lauryn Hill
This is a heavy song. It does not shy away from heartbreak or abuse or toxicity or the very bizarre fact that, behind all of that, there is still love. I cannot believe how much I love this song, how much this song vibrates still, decades later. How it can be applied to a romantic relationship or even the relationship you have with a parent. I think we all have that one person that hurts a little to love. I see this as a bit of an anthem for Tania.
I’m Goin’ Down by Mary J. Blige
This is my favourite karaoke song, and I sing it so much that my group chat has banned this song from girls’ night out. I yearn to be heartbroken again soon just for permission to give this song true meaning in my day. I often picture my protagonist singing this song, drunkenly walking alone on a dark street, singing to anyone who stops to listen. A big failure on my part is that this scene does not exist in the novel, but it does in my memory, circa 2017.
Lost Without You by Freya Riding
Whenever I needed to tap into Tania’s softer side, I used this song as an entry point. It helped me get in the right mood, almost like it reminded me to lower my weapons. To stand still for a moment and look at the scene I’m working with. I love the refrain in this ballad so much. That haunting feeling of disorientation, when you’re searching for yourself outside of the person you’ve only known how to love. I still sometimes tear up when this song comes on unexpectedly. All losses are hard. Even the ones we create.
Lose You to Love Me by Selena Gomez
Have you all had this experience? Of loving someone so much that we lose ourselves in it? Selena goes through every one of those emotions in this song, lamenting the only way to get out of it is through anger, and hatred and finally, through a return to the original self. I love the absolute devastation in this song, and the precise way it represents a break-up after years of self-abandonment.
A Thousand Miles by Vanessa Carlton
This song is technically not a traditional break-up song, but it is the song of Tania and Margot’s friendship. In the early days of writing My Person,I was on the GO Train one day going back downtown from the suburbs and this song came on shuffle. I hadn’t fully fleshed out their back story, but I knew that they were small town girls in search of the big city. That night, I wrote this song on a sticky note and placed it on my desktop computer, hoping to find a way to sneak it in. When the girls moved to downtown Toronto, because of the lyrics of this song, it felt like kismet to wrap it all together. It will forever be the soundtrack of the novel, for all the nights I spent editing Vanessa Carlton.
Summertime by Ella Fitzgerald
This too is not a traditional break-up song, but it is about that sweet, complicated love. If this novel was about Tania and someone else, a true passionate love interest for example, I think this would be the song she cooks to, the song she uses to think of her lover, to get ready to go on a sultry date. Of all the songs on this list, this was the only one that made it onto my Spotify Wrapped in 2025. While this song isn’t directly featured in the novel, I listened to it aggressively while writing chapter 4. It helped me get into character. As an Easter egg, I made Eli into a fan of classic Jazz. A fan of Ella Fitzgerald. There is tenderness in this song, and it made Chapter 4 the easiest to write. It’s the one I wish I could stay in a tiny bit longer. I imagine Tania would have wanted this from me too.
I Feel Love by Donna Summer
At a certain point during the writing process, I went through a weird phase where the only way I could get through the book was to blast this song in an endless loop. This was during the edit stage, after I had decided to include this song in one of the later chapters, and it was like being in a hypnotic state. This form of surrender is the vibration of this song, an intoxication when everything becomes so deep you have no choice but to submit to the high. This song feels to me like giving your body up to the situation at hand, whether that is a break-up or a copyright deadline. It’s about letting go and letting the emotions move through you.
Miss You by Aaliyah
I associate this song with grief. But, not in a painful way. It feels to me like proof that a love worth remembering was had. It brings me joy to get upset when this song comes on. It reminds me of all the people I’ve loved enough to carry with me as I go forward in life. I think it’s important to have a place of refuge like this. To mourn the good.
Bonus:
Break My Soul by Beyoncé
When you get to the acceptance stage of grief, after you’ve left that job or that situationship or that horrible friend, there is almost this relief, a reclamation that turns into a declaration. And little by little, you find yourself again. This is what I believe Beyoncé meant with this song. When you get to the other side of any kind of hardship, all there’s left is to look around and to see how far you’ve come. I love that for all of us.
Téa Mutonji is a poet and fiction writer. Her debut collection of short stories, Shut Up You’re Pretty was a finalist for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (2019) and Canada Reads (2024). It won the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award (2020) and the Trillium Book Award (2020). Mutonji was a recipient of the Writer’s Trust Rising Star’s award (2022) and received the Jill Davis Fellowship (2021) at New York University where she completed her MFA in fiction.