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.
Rae Cline’s novel Precious Ugly may be the year’s most powerful debut, a book that examines domestic violence and generational trauma with a rare empathy that bonds the reader with the protagonist.
Matt Bondurant wrote of the book:
“Rae Cline has written a vivid, harrowing account of a young girl struggling to find meaning in difficult circumstances. Clementine is thirteen, pregnant, and looking for a miracle. Her father claims to know that a miracle is coming. But what they get is something else altogether. Or is it? Cline works with a lyrical, meticulous prose style to depict a story that needs to be told. A bold and courageous work of fiction that book clubs and readers of all kinds will adore.”
In her own words, here is Rae Cline’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Precious Ugly:
I can still hear Nicolette Larson on the turntable, “Rhumba Girl,” as my parents drank and danced and partied. I was young, supposed to be sleeping, which was impossible with the music and dancing, but I lay there still as death, playing possum. I snuck glimpses of the drunken, high adults spinning around in the main room of the riverside cabin. Larson was one of my mother’s favorites. She was truly happy when dancing to “Rhumba Girl” and that made me happy. Music was a way to connect with her amidst everything else—when he dragged her down a flight of stairs by her hair, when he dragged her to the back of the conversion van on a road trip and beat her, when he lashed me with his belt. There were so many “whens.” Larson’s “Rhumba Girl” was our escape, a forever playlist that even now catapults me back to the cabin and my mother, drunk dancing and happy. It is also the song I could not include in my debut novel, Precious Ugly. “Rhumba Girl” was for me and my mom. And now it is here. This is the first time I’ve written about “Rhumba Girl.”
In Precious Ugly I needed to build a music bubble around my character, Clementine—thirteen, pregnant and living in a conversion van on a campsite with her mother and father, an abusive alcoholic who fancies himself a miracle worker, a cult leader. Daddy is a salesman turned riverside preacher who likes Johnny Cash. Clementine is a child of the 80s who prefers punk, much like me growing up. She learns to tap into her punk. It is the only way to survive her circumstance. Patti Smith’s “Gloria”becomes her anthem.
“Gloria” by Patti Smith
“She pushed play and Patti Smith sang of Jesus dying and her sins being her own. G-l-o-r-i-a, Gloria…”
In the first chapter of Precious Ugly, Clementine listens to Smith’s cover of “Gloria,” which begins with the brilliance of Smith’s poetry. This song has always spoken to me. Like Clementine, I survived many things growing up but when you are young and surviving, you don’t know it is surviving. You think it is normal and when things go wrong it is all your fault, the sins being your own. We lived in Ohio then and I spent a lot of time at my grandparents’ house. Mammy’s and Pappy’s was a safe space. I went to the Nazarene church with them each Sunday and sometimes during the week for Bible study. I attended summer Bible school. Each Sunday, the pastor would call the sinful up to the altar that ran the entire length of the stage at the front of the church. There was a long cushion for the sinful to kneel and ask God’s forgiveness for their sins. The Sunday morning that I stood and walked to the front of the church with the other sinners, the only child who had ever done so, apparently, the entire congregation went quiet. I must have been no older than eight or nine, because we moved several hours away when I started fourth grade. I remember kneeling at the altar with the adults and crying and not exactly sure what I was asking God to forgive me for but knowing I needed his forgiveness for being so sinful. I felt it deep in my bones, the sins. It would take years to acknowledge that they were not my sins but theirs. I’m an atheist now. Clementine is something of a sin eater in Precious Ugly and if I’m being honest, I suppose I was too. Patti Smith was the first voice to make me feel less alone in the act of eating sins, my sins and those of my family. When Clementine pushes play on her Walkman and Patti Smith sings to her, she feels less alone the way I felt less alone.
“What’s Love Got To Do With It?” by Tina Turner
“Mama rolled her eyes. The girl put on her headphones and pushed play on the Walkman. Tina Turner sang, ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It?’…”
In the documentary Tina, Turner spoke about how much she initially didn’t like “What’s Love Got To Do With It?” She felt the song was too “pop” for her rock and roll, rhythm and blues aesthetic. Of course, it went to number one on the charts and made her even bigger than she already was. Iconic. The song lyrics always felt to me as playing at the edges of something sinister that in 1985, the year we meet Clementine in the novel, was an edge not often spoken. Gender politics and feminism were bad words in many communities. If you were feminist and looking after yourself over the interests of the men in your life then you were a bad woman, a bad girl. “Nasty.” And this was certainly true in my family and upbringing. The men took focus in everything. Dinner conversations were dumb blonde jokes and Rush Limbaugh, television was whatever he most wanted to watch, home was wherever his job took us. We moved six times before I graduated high school. Four different states. People often asked if my family was military. I just said, “No.” I didn’t tell them we were leaving ghosts each time, the memories of what happened in each house, leaving the old house behind as if leaving our old selves. My mother and I never spoke about the constant moving in this way. She liked to package each move as an adventure, an opportunity to recreate ourselves in a new state and town. And that we did. I became a different version of myself with each new school and group of peers, trying on lives like new skins, always hiding the spaces behind closed doors so that the new school and new peers wouldn’t get to know me or my family too closely. Like Clementine, I couldn’t quite place that feeling of unease that Turner sings so deeply about in the song. I hadn’t the words for it. My life had been a succession of bruises and justifications. Wasn’t this how all families behaved? Boys will be boys. But I knew this unease was there not only for me but also my mother. We just didn’t have the words to describe it. Or we didn’t have the courage to say them. Isn’t it hard to conceptualize, now, that a girl of thirteen could not recognize lashings with a belt or dragging a woman by her hair and beating her as abnormal, dysfunctional? Abuse? But that is how it feels in the midst of it. Normal. An earned punishment. It feels hazy in the mind if not in the body and trying to put a title on it is nearly impossible when you haven’t the language for it. We meet Clementine when she is trying to find her language, her voice, and Tina Turner gives her a place to share this apathetic unease. This challenge to would-be onlookers who think love is so central to relationships. Clementine asks, what’s love got to do with it when you are trying to survive?
“Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper
“Beater held a bag out to the girl. He said, Thought you might like these. She opened it to find a new Walkman with headphones and new cassettes. Tina Turner and Cyndi Lauper…”
Beater provides something of a safe space for Clementine when she most needs it. Where Daddy exerts control, Beater tries to give Clementine moments to simply be. Cyndi Lauper’s album She’s So Unusual is iconic for any girl who feels “weird” and out of place and dancing to her own song. “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” is a favorite, of course, but not the favorite. I still cry each time I listen to “Time After Time.” This is also an anthem for Clementine. The way Lauper describes the distance between herself and a loved one, walking behind, the leaving behind, in bed and awake, I spent so many nights in this space thinking about my mother and what might come in the next day, the next time he lost his temper. I wanted so desperately to be present with my mother in this reality we were living, to not be left behind, and so often felt exactly that, left behind in her survival of him. I imagined that my mother was singing and telling me that she saw me, that she would catch me. Eventually, as I grew older, I realized that it was me catching her. Time after time. And it would always be me catching her. Precious Ugly is in many ways a love letter to my mother. And a goodbye.
“Crazy” by Patsy Cline
“Mama was quieter than usual. She wouldn’t look at Daddy. Each time Daddy tried to talk to her she gave a one-word answer and would talk to Beater. Beater, can you get me some more butter? Beater, can you get me a towel? Beater, would you play me some Patsy Cline? You know how I love ‘Crazy’…”
My great, great grandmother on my mother’s side was named Minnie Cline. No relation to Patsy Cline that I know of. Minnie Cline lived on a farm in Rinard Mills, Ohio. She had very little education and, according to Ancestry.com, birthed eight children including my great grandmother, Freda, who married a Dye. I knew Great Grandma Freda. She drank coffee and smoked cigarettes all day and night. She was always happy to see me. She lived in a little white house in the same holler her mother lived in. The family were millers and founded Rinard Mills and some oil. We were not so unlike the Clampetts, the Ohio version, and I was an ugly Ellie Mae. That’s not self-repudiation. It’s true. I was too skinny and my baby teeth were black from the medications my mother took when pregnant. The nausea. My middle name is Rae, so you can think of me as Ellie Rae if you like. My mother worked hard to get us out of all that.
Like my mother, Mama in Precious Ugly loves Patsy Cline. Patsy Cline gives voice to Mama’s silent revolt for her positionality. Patsy Cline has a stage and takes lead in her own life but for the constant weight of her husband. Willie Nelson wrote the song and Cline did not initially take to it. When the song was rearranged into a ballad, it became Cline’s iconic track. Mama adopts “Crazy” as her anthem in Precious Ugly and plays the song when she is feeling the weight of Daddy on her shoulders, around her neck, when she feels his wanderlust and she wants to push him away and pull him back to her all at once. Their marriage is a constant struggle that culminates in violence or tenderness, depending upon their moods and proclivities at the time. Like most children of violent homes, Clementine learns to navigate her parents’ moods and proclivities with surgical precision, identifying moments she can intercede and moments to find distance, nearly impossible in their homelessness, of course, all of them sleeping in a conversion van on a riverside campground, which incidentally is a one-time campaign vehicle for Ronald Reagan, a giant photo of ”The Gipper” on each side of the van. Mama quietly disregards the ridiculousness of their Reagan campaign “house,” their dysfunction, the violence always brooding beneath everything. She loses herself in daily chores—laundry, cooking, cleaning dishes—but every once in a while she shows a glimmer of self-efficacy, a sense of the “Crazy” in her circumstance and that of her daughter, but as quickly as she recognizes it, she dismisses it again. “Crazy” becomes the tragic beat in the musicality of her life. The music is both beautiful and deeply disturbing. “You know how I love ‘Crazy,’” she says.
“I Walk the Line” by Johnny Cash
“He stood and pushed play on the boombox. Johnny Cash sang ‘Walk the Line’ and Beater backed up from the pit, smacked his hands together. Woohoo! Love me some Johnny Cash. He closed his eyes and put his arms out to the side. The lines of his jaw were sharp and strong as he kicked his boots and spun around, hands on hips. He pointed to the deer skull. God of coked-up rednecks. Hoo-wee! His face was pure concentration as he scooted to the left and the right, backwards and forwards, spun round. I’m a goddamn dancing poet!”
We meet Beater as the expected mullet wearing, snake wrangling redneck who lives in a trailer and collects NASCAR memorabilia. And he is so much more than what he presents. My roots are very much in the “hillbilly” meets “redneck” space, as much as my mother tried to learn me out of it. I spent enough of my life being called both. I decided long ago to own it and make it mine. As much as I’ve “educated up,” as some might call it, my mother brought me home from the hospital to the trailer she shared with my father who died when I was one year old. I’m proud of the humble beginnings. My mother was always a great beauty. Strong. She dropped out of high school and married to escape her father. She got her GED and a cosmetology license. I am the first woman in my matrilineage to attend and graduate from college. First to attend graduate school and receive a masters. My mother was the original driving force in my education. She wanted me to be a lawyer. Writer wasn’t exactly on her priority list. She wanted me to make decent money and have some position of power in my life, I think. She didn’t know how to support me but I know she did the best she could with which she had to work. When my father died, she picked herself up and moved on, single mother, widowed. My early memories are full of many things. My mother telling me of my biological father and his death when I was nine years old still feels pivotal. It broke her, telling me. It broke my stepfather, too, as I had thought he was my actual father. They were both a mess that day. They cried and hugged me so hard I thought they might break me. But it wasn’t their hugging and crying that would break me. As I’m writing this I am shocked to realize, just now, that maybe Beater is something of an exploration on the father I never knew. He is a surprising and complicated safe space for Clementine. Beater loves Johnny Cash and “I Walk the Line.” I prefer the Halsey version but Beater is all Cash and I love him for that.
“Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday
“A scratchy sort of rhythm played, brass instruments like they were announcing something sad and hopeless and necessary. Next a piano. Soft and simple. Painful and beautiful. Then a smooth low voice, a woman’s like she’d sat alone for ages thinking about what she wanted to say. Southern trees… She sang about strange fruit, bloody leaves, bodies swinging, haunted and grieving…”
In Precious Ugly Clementine meets Nurse Rosemary Hooks, who is kinder to her than she probably deserves. Nurse Rosemary is a woman of color who navigates the primarily white community in which she lives with a level of compassion that is both surprising and essential to Clementine if she is going to survive her circumstance. They first meet in the hospital, where Nurse Rosemary tends AIDs patients in the basement, where they have been left to die. Nurse Rosemary takes an interest in Clementine and senses something is off about Daddy and his growing cult of followers. Later in the novel, Nurse Rosemary shares her grief and her loss with Clementine. She also shares her favorite singer, Billie Holiday, hoping to give Clementine some sense of things bigger than herself, show her that the world is ripe with pain and suffering and survival, and the key, the thing that might save her, is thinking outside herself, not getting stuck on the inside. “Nurse Rosemary gave her a few seconds to linger on the melody. That’s Billie, she said. No one captures wounds like Billie. Billie’s voice was a wound, the girl thought. It was a sweet sultry gash and the girl was ripe with it. When the song finished she took off the headphones and said, Everyone’s always teaching me something about myself. Nurse Rosemary closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths. What you’re dealing with, Clementine, it’s not easy. I know. But you aren’t the only one dealing and you don’t have to be so sassy because of it.”
Rae Cline is the author of the short story collection The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals. Her stories, essays, and prose poetry have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and more. She earned an M.A. in Writing from John Hopkins University and an M.F.A. in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction from American University. A teacher for thirty-five years, she taught writing and literature at the secondary level as well as at her alma maters, the International Writing Program at Iowa State University, and other campuses. She is the founding editor of Eckleburg, where she writes the Openings column, and the founder of the Warm Words Project, a homeless and domestic violence outreach initiative. Born in Ohio, she now splits her time between New York City and the Gulf of Mexico. Precious Ugly is her first novel.