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.
Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s Said the Dead is wholly atmospheric and inventively told, one of the most impressive postmodern ghost novels I have read.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“Ní Ghríofa brings an elegiac sensibility to a haunting portrait of a hidden world . . . Weaving biography, history, fiction, and memoir, Ní Ghríofa vividly imagines the muffled voices of desperate women, honoring their suffering, and her own. A radiant work of empathy and insight.”
In her own words, here is Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Said the Dead:
Jonny Greenwood, ‘Never Cursed’, ‘Phantom Thread II’, ‘House of Woodcock’
‘Said the Dead’ was made in silence. There were my silent hours of research in the archive, reading my way through a series of century-old asylum casebooks. Then, there were the silent hours I spent roaming the remains of the asylum. And there were the silent hours of writing that followed, when I parked my car in the ruined shadow of that institution, and tried to pour all I’d learned into the pages of a book. I only invited music into this process if if I was disturbed by a hedge-trimmers or a yapping dog. In such moments, I’d dig out my noise-cancelling headphones and listen to the Phantom Thread soundtrack on loop. Like a river diverted into a culvert, something of that soundtrack might still be felt, burbling under the text of ‘Said the Dead’.
John McCormack, ‘Adeste Fideles’
So much of the process of writing this book occurred in silence, and yet, I always longed to evoke a sense of the soundscape of the asylum. Whereas the old stairwells would once have bustled with voices, I found those steps grown quiet – the sound of my footsteps echoed. Through the asylum casebooks, various doctors were writing to me from that loud past. Among them was Dr Scanlan, whose belief in the curative powers of music had been praised in local newspapers. There he was, rolling a piano to patients’ bedsides, hoping that music might help them towards healing. Other newspaper reports detailed the lengths he went to, one long-ago Christmas day, calling in favours from local musicians, so that he might treat the patients to a full orchestra. Among the hymns the orchestra played in the chapel that day, according to the newspaper, was ‘Adeste Fideles’. I came across a 1915 recording by John McCormack, and those lyrics seemed to beckon me closer. ‘Venite, venite’… come, they insisted, come. And I did. Although that derelict chapel was boarded as I stood outside in the rain on Christmas day, I held my phone to the security barrier and let the sound waves of that old hymn find their way in, slipping through that border to enter the chapel, a song turning back to enter its own past.
Lankum, ‘Go Dig My Grave’
The asylum casebooks held vivid descriptions of each woman as she arrived through the asylum doors: her name, age, address and next of kin were all recorded, followed by details of her hair, her eyes, her expression, her skin, her clothing, and sometimes, her speech. Often, these women spoke clearly and powerfully of their inner agonies, listing heartbreaks and losses and griefs, explaining what it was that had driven them to the noose, to the river, to the knife, or the window. The doctors wrote it all down, and a century later, I wrote it all down again. I was writing ‘Said the Dead’ when Lankum released ‘Go Dig My Grave’, and their version of this old song really shook me – how the dread rises and rises, while at its beating heart, Radie Peat’s voice soars with power and ferocity. Something in this song recalled the anguish so often articulated by patients in the asylum casebooks, particularly those who had been thwarted in their decision to end their lives. This song haunts me, still – a song of death, with a glint of defiant life pulsing inside it.
Emahoy Tsege Mariam, ‘Song of Abayi’
In the asylum casebooks, I read of a patient named Anna Martha, and I was struck by all she had held throughout her life. She’d held her brothers’ hands as they died, and then her father’s, too. Through seasons of shock and grief, she held her violin bow and held her paintbrush tight, determined to hold onto her devotion to art and music despite her sorrows, until a sudden change in financial circumstances meant that she could hold no longer. Her path to the asylum was decided the day she held a gun against the city magistrates. She would die in that institution, only a few years later, of tuberculosis – the same disease that had killed both of her brothers. I brought flowers to lay on her grave, but despite my map, I couldn’t find her place in the graveyard. Finally, I understood that she lay right where I stood, in an unmarked grave. Anna Martha’s name may not be written in stone, but it is written in this book. I will always hold the memory of her life dear. I know it’s an impossibility, but whenever I imagine Anna Martha’s youth, I see her sitting to her piano lessons, playing Emahoy Tsege Mariam’s ‘Song of Abayi’.
‘Kyrie’, Linda Buckley
The therapeutic role of music in the asylum extended far beyond Dr Scanlan’s gifts – there were regular concerts in the asylum ballroom, and guest visits from musicians on tour to city theatres. The ballroom has been closed to the public for decades, and the first time I visited, I found rain falling inside, through a hole in the roof. This past summer, however, we reopened those doors and brought music back to the ballroom. Composer and musician Linda Buckley designed an incredible musical performance, including motifs from the operetta ‘Patience’ once performed in the ballroom, alongside some readings from ‘Said the Dead’. It was unforgettable, and deeply moving, to remember those women in the room in which they had all once stood. I wish you could have been there. To give you a sense of it, here is the beautiful ‘Kyrie’ by Linda Buckley.
‘Rhiannon’, Fleetwood Mac
Doctor Lucia Strangman began to write in the casebooks towards the end of the 1890s, and she soon became my brightest guide. To piece together the history of the hospital in which she lived and worked was also to piece together a sense of this remarkable woman’s life. I found her a visionary, a gifted doctor, who was devoted to her patients and to improving their lives. Sometimes, as I wrote, I could feel her presence very close. At others, she sidestepped my efforts, slipping from my grip, like that line in Rhiannon— ‘she is like a cat in the dark, and then she is the darkness’.
‘White Winter Hymnal’, Fleet Foxes
This book drew me on a quest, helplessly chasing traces of long-ago lives through stairwells and corridors and paths and tunnels, through ledgers and newspapers and casebooks, trying to follow the shadows of those who had been present a century before. It has been among the blessings of my life to spend these years of mine in service to their lives, to become the listener to this chorus of voices, and to follow, always to follow, and through these years, the lyrics of ‘White Winter Hymnal’ were a comfort to me, since I, too, ‘was following the I was following the I was following the I…’
‘Scars’, William Stafford
For quite some time, I wanted to call this book ‘Cicatrix’, a word I learned from Dr Lucia. This word refers to an old scar, and was often used in her casebook notes. It moved me, to read these detailed maps to the women’s bodies, to know that one woman had a long cicatrix along her leg, that another bore the mark of an amputated breast. This recording of William Stafford reading his poem ‘Scars’ is incredibly dear to me. The poem itself is a masterpiece. In an oblique way, it felt like every line chimed somehow with the book I was trying to bring into being. As he writes, ‘we see the lesson: / there are years in that book, there are sorrows / a choir can’t reach when they sing.’
Doireann Ní Ghríofa is an Irish writer. Her first prose work, A Ghost in the Throat, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; the winner of the Irish Book Award for Non-Fiction Book of the Year, the Foyles Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and the James Tait Black Prize; and a nominee for the Rathbones Folio Prize. It was named a best book of the year by The New York Times, NPR, The Guardian, The Observer (London), The Irish Times, and The Globe and Mail. Ní Ghríofa is also the author of numerous acclaimed books of poetry. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the Ostana Prize, a Seamus Heaney Centre fellowship, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.