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.
Wendy Wimmer follows up her impressive story collection Entry Level with a debut novel, The Doomscroller’s Companion, that dazzles with its storytelling through a variety of narratives.
Foreword Reviews wrote of the book:
“Provocative. . . . An engaging novel in which ramped-up pandemic anxieties are reflected in online interactions, amid which choosing embodied connections proves best.”
In her own words, here is Wendy Wimmer’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel The Doomscroller’s Companion:
In late 2009, I went on a white shark cage diving trip to the Farallon Islands, a little-known wildlife refuge about 30 miles off San Francisco’s coastline. As luck would have it, I didn’t see any sharks (although others on our expedition did see several), but I spent that twelve hours staring up at this forbidden landscape of crumbling rocks, kelp flies and more sea birds and seals than you could count and thinking “If there was a zombie apocalypse, that would be the perfect refuge because no one would be trying to get on this island. They’d take one look and nope right the fuck out.” Or one smell, because the accumulated dense fog of bird and wildlife excrement and ammonia was almost visible.
Upon my return, I became obsessed with the history of the islands – the Egg War in the 19th century, the indigenous people, Juan Cabrillo and Sir Francis Drake, and became locked on the history of ecological nightmares inflicted on this beautiful collection of cliffs, shoals and secret caves. Not only were sea bird eggs pillaged to serve San Francisco’s breakfast tables (to the tune of 500,000 eggs a MONTH) and the fur seals hunted to extirpation, during the mid 20th century, the US government sunk over 44,000 containers of radioactive nuclear waste, as well as an entire radioactive Naval aircraft carrier – the USS Independence – next to the islands, and then named it a Wildlife Refuge. Sounds like us.
The one thing that all zombie movies have in common is that zombie movies don’t exist in those worlds. If they did, everyone would automatically know how to react when you saw a bunch of rotting corpses shambling toward you. Zombie movies and shows like The Last of Us and The Walking Dead have trained us to survive a zombie apocalypse, with those double taps, cardio tips, base building tips, etc. But what if a pandemic happened and everyone was so ready to go into zombie movie mode that they started murdering sick people?
Throughout the 2010s, I wrote and rewrote this novel, finishing it in fall of 2019 and started querying agents in February 2020. Instantly I had a lot of interest and then, well, that interest became very strong “not for me” once March 2020 hit. What happens when your super speculative novel becomes not at all speculative? It gets the benefit of psychological distance and then another rewrite.
A fun fact about me: Back before “blog” was a common word in our lexicon, back before the turn of the century (yes, the 1900s), I was writing about my life online (some of the older archives are still preserved at my website), hand coding the HTML because WordPress didn’t exist yet. I was a prehistoric, almost neolithic internet influencer. I even had some brand deals, a beauty closet filled with literally thousands of dollars in skin and beauty products, as well as a fashion closet filled with free clothes from indie fashion designers. Conde Nast hired me to build two of their dot com brands and paid handsomely for what I used to just give the internet for free. My work was featured in household name publications and websites, I appeared on nascent vlogs and video podcasts. It was surreal. Then the 2008 dot com crash changed everything – I lost three jobs, including my day job, in the span of eight days– and I was burned out by being what I called, “the internet’s liver.” I felt like I was filtering and metabolizing all the worst things into consumable forms. I stopped updating my own blog and rejected monetizing everything because it felt disingenuous. Jokes on me, I had earned so much Googlefu at that point, I probably could have just been a legit internet identity brand if I had cared more. And that was the genesis of Jane’s character – she’s what might have happened to me if I had pursued that path further, become loved and shared by millions and then struggled to invent more novelty to draw internet eyes and clicks.
Holocene – Bon Iver
In The Doomscroller’s Companion, both Jane and Brian are on separate islands, staring back at civilization as it begins to unravel, both from their vantage points and via webcams. Brian’s safe and protected on his island until the ice forms over the water and the island is now vulnerable to the people who are infected with the insomnia plague and are dealing with ambulatory coma-type situations. The world is reacting as though it’s a zombie apocalypse but it’s not actually zombies, they’re people who are ill, out of their minds with delusion and hallucinations. A fellow Wisconsinite, Bon Iver is capturing the coldness of the upper Midwest while being alienated and yearning for connection. “And at once, I knew I was not magnificent, strayed above the highway aisle, jagged vacance, thick with ice but I could see for miles, miles, miles.” The ever-beating thrum of Brian’s inner monologue is that he’s an imposter as an artist, flummoxed by his successes and constantly finding excuses for why it’s not his own talent that is driving his commercial success. Bon Iver sings “It’s a part of me apart from me” and “now to know it in my memory” – when the entirety of our social media stream is both us and not us at all, out of order, manipulated by an all-power algorithm that decides who is heard and seen and who is not.
Fun fact: My working title for The Doomscroller’s Companion was “Fake Internet Friends” – I knew I wasn’t going to keep that title, but I suspect it lingers just outside the margins, as real as the ghosts that share Jane’s bedroom on the Farallon Islands.
The Shins – Simple Song
This novel explores so much nostalgia for the Before Times, before we ever had this societal breakdown, the juxtaposition of Internet 2.0 with Internet 5.0, when our currency was in pretend internet popularity points, likes, follows and shares. Like so many moments of our lives, we don’t realize the importance of those glimpses until long after they have passed. I envision this song playing in the background of the scene set in the mid-Aughts, Jane riding a borrowed Fixie bicycle among the tech bros playing ultimate Frisbee on San Francisco’s Crissy Field. In that blog post, Jane describes to the internet: “And for one brief instant, while flying along this perfect bike path, I felt like I could peddle that way forever, making concentric circles around the peninsula, using hills and gravity to propel me into perpetual motion, like an executive desk toy. Click clack click clack I would never ever stop. It was a glorious moment. And then I wiped out.”
She has a high-side fall, this huge dramatic bike crash but no one seems to notice. In that moment, she falls out of love with San Francisco, her lucrative career in the tech boom, and faces who she believes she is, and what she believes she deserves out of life. Mercer, the songwriter and lead singer for The Shins, writes “I know that things can get really rough when you go it alone. Don’t go thinking you gotta be tough, and play like a stone. Could be there’s nothing else in our lives, so critical as this little home” Later in the novel, we see the moment again, only this time from Brian’s point of view – and we learn that it is the moment when they meet in real life, sending each of their fates into an intertwined online ‘e-lationship’ that will impact their lives in countless ways. They become each others’ online soulmates but both are too afraid to break the enchantment by meeting again in real life. As the song opines, “Love’s such a delicate thing that we do with nothing to prove, which I never knew” and “I told you about all those fears and away they did run You sure must be strong and you feel like an ocean made warm by the sun.” This song is that shiny feeling of meeting and clicking with someone and being just a little bit addicted to the world seen through they’re perception, and the image of you they are interacting with.
OneRepublic – Connection
Beyond my premise of zombie movies training us to react to a zombie-like scenario, my other working inspiration for the novel was that when the apocalypse happens, it will mostly be filtered through and to some extent, be felt through social media. The lyrics opine “There’s so many people here then why am I so lonely? Can I get a connection.” Beyond Jane and Brian’s textual relationship – which Jane calls their e-lationship – there’s the constant yearning of other characters who might or might not be known to us in the narrative. We see Jane’s named social media stream, we see one from Brian’s ex-girlfriend, but other characters exist only as their social media handles. Reddit posters write long theses about human colony collapse and encourage fellow Redditors to end it sooner than later, Google’s suggested search terms offer “why am I still here?” and “Can insomnia make you fat?” The social media streams are full of tiny stories from the lives of strangers, along with the number of likes, comments and shares. @Gemma1989 says “Just made friends with neighbor who has never spoken to me or met my gaze. I’ve only lived here for six and a half years and we share a driveway, so that was cool” while @MightyMych offers to pick up groceries for people who are unable to leave their houses and at one point says “If you’re lonely in lockdown and need someone to talk to, I’d love to hear from someone” which is hearted by 429 people but far fewer take her up on it. @DBmm talks about the people who have been lost to the pandemic, but without funerals “it’s like they’re still there, not answering my emails,” a sentiment hearted by 3.9K followers and shared 87 times.
The text lays out all these flailing attempts for connection that interject within Brian’s and Jane’s narratives, emails, chats and blog posts, a Greek chorus that reminds us that even when we’re alone, we are reaching out into the ether.
Half-alive – Everything Machine
The diptych to the social media element is the facet of technology and the algorithm that acts as both a censor and a feeder to what we consume. In every crisis, count upon the fact that we’ll be making jokes and using black humor to cope with the cognitive dissonance. Our cell phones have become “everything machines.” Of the insomnia plague, Brian says “We each hold tiny blue suns. up to our faces and then are surprised when our primate selves can’t get a decent moment’s rest.” These lyrics counter his disdain, arguing “I’m your second nature, never leave your side I’m a growing cancer (the feeling of sleepless nights), I’m your serotonin, I’m your burning eyes, Baby, don’t you cry, I’m right here tonight” and promise to “keep you close when it’s getting late” and “make you feel at home ‘til the pain is numb.” Are these machines helping or hindering our existence? Are they literally keeping us from connecting because we hold them between each other?
Stars – Your Ex-Lover Is Dead
Stars is one of my most favorite bands in the entire world, but I listened to this song repeatedly while drafting The Doomscroller’s Companion. It captures the intensity of connection and then moving on only to be faced with who you were in another lifetime – the duet between two people, one of whom was devastated by the loss and the other who can’t even remember the person’s name.
Jane details her romantic devastations online, displaying her self-incriminating inner dialogue for millions of readers. Her hunky tech bro was just never really going to be in love with her, despite the evidence she had clung to all along. In her blog, Jane writes, “That night, while drunk, he says he will never love anyone as much as he loved his first girlfriend. He says I’m unlike any woman he’s ever met. He says I’m special, someone he knows will be his best friend forever. Dear Reader, you may have already guessed he says these things out of order.”
In that scene, I was very much thinking of Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan singing in heartbreaking harmony “I’m not sorry I met you, I’m not sorry it’s over, I’m not sorry there’s nothing to say.” Chris Seligman writes baroque pop operas, capturing these gorgeous and lonely moments with a sardonic French horn thru-line. We need more pop with melodicas and French horns, right? Maybe that’s just the marching band geek in me.
Fun fact Doomscroller trivia: the character Patty was named for Pat McGee, Stars’ drummer. McGee’s nickname is Paddy, but when I met him, I heard “Patty” and was so confused, like Jane is when she meets Patty for the first time.
The Cure – Plainsong
There are several cross-country road trips in my novel – I love a good road trip, especially one fueled by running away from or to something. I’ve crossed the country by automobile several times myself and I’m 99% ready to fully give up air travel in exchange for auto and train travel, because you just get to see everything up close and spend time in your own mind. When Jane embarks on one of those trips, the first thing she does is queue of The Cure’s Disintegration on the car’s stereo. The entire album is flawless, and while I probably wouldn’t rank Plainsong as my absolute favorite on the compilation, it feels like a disembarkation, a transition point (probably why it’s the first track). The lyrics are bittersweet, “I think I’m old and I’m feeling pain, ” you said “And it’s all running out Like it’s the end of the world, ” you said “And it’s so cold, it’s like the cold if you were dead” Then you smiled for a second” It feels like a triumphant reclamation of the self. Sofia Coppola must agree, as she uses it to great effect in Marie Antoinette, as the titular character walks to her coronation.
Fun fact: When Billboard ranked The Cure’s top 40 songs, it put Plainsong fourth, calling it “a slowly unfolding poem for the apocalypse” and well, if someone said that about The Doomscroller’s Companion, I’d never stop talking about it.
Lucy Dacus – Night Shift
This song is all about the transition from disbelief and shock to anger post-breakup, which both Jane and Brian certainly go through on their own parallel but distinct paths. The lyrics are insistent that the singer is fine, she’s fine, she’s fine, even though the singer then asks in the chorus “let me kiss your lips so I know how it felt” and holding themselves responsible for their own actions, knowing that they will “walk for hours in the dark feeling all hell.” While Brian and Jane’s online relationship has never involved physical touch, they’ve been trapped in a stasis of a pretend situationship. Jane is afraid that her online persona is impossible to live up to in real life and doesn’t want to risk losing Brian’s friendship – or whatever it is – by meeting up in person again. She relies upon his memory of her during the one chance meeting, as the lyrics say, “forget you’ve ever saw me at my best… it’s too dangerous to fall so young, take back what you said, can’t lose what you never had.” In the novel’s opening scene, she thinks about Brian, “No one could live up to the persona I’ve created. Jane ’Ere is a goofy best friend that millions of people Like and Share. People rarely Like the real me… Disappointment flickering on Brian’s face after so many years. He’d try to hide it, but I’d see. I depend upon his foggy memory, a girl in San Francisco so long ago, a stranger who didn’t matter.”
Brian, separately, has his own reasons for maintaining the online-only status. “Jane was my perfect friend, an ideal relationship, held at arm’s length behind my phone’s smart screen. I was in total control. She only got to see this ideal version of Brian, one I couldn’t accidentally fuck up.” He acknowledges the relationship dynamic is fragile, saying “We seemed to believe our email friendship was magical, and to meet in person would render the spell completely broken. As though this knowing without knowing was the only thing keeping the illusion going. We were strangers, two ships passing in the cyber night.” Of course, they insist repeatedly that they’re strangers to the other, unable to even admit to themselves that they know each other better than they know themselves.
Fun fact: author Carmen Maria Machado appears in the video for this song! I’m such a fan of her work and spotting her in the video was an absolute literary Easter Egg.
That Funny Feeling – Bo Burnham
This is the literal track to the most recent pandemic, Burnham’s tender voice just unleashing a song version of doomscrolling during a mass disaster. “Full agoraphobic, losing focus, cover blown, a book on getting better hand-delivered by a drone, total dissociation, fully out of your mind, Googling “derealization,” hating what you find, that unapparent summer air in early fall, the quiet comprehending of the ending of it all.” This cheery little fireside singalong melody just keeps assuring “we were overdue, but it’ll be over soon, just wait, ba-da-da ba-da-da, ba-da-da-da-dum” and it’s just a cheerful little love song to everything being terrible. I say “the most recent pandemic” because of course, it won’t be the last.
Fun fact that isn’t so fun: In 2010, I started writing this novel about the very impossible and speculative situation where the entire world needs to lock down quickly due to a super contagious and highly fatal disease. I spent years working to get it believable, to make sure that people would believe a full global lockdown COULD happen, even dialing things back in severity, and then it did happen and everyone who had read the draft asked if I was a witch. Then I had to rewrite the entire draft because of course, COVID had to have happened and now it’s a novel about us going through it all again, in totally different and more surreal way, as we’re all a bit braver, having survived the last one, and maybe just a bit careless or emboldened with what we’d do differently next time.
The Decemberists – Once in My Life
Once I heard someone say, “The Decemberists are what English lit grad students play on dates when they’re trying to get laid” and you know what, that’s probably true. But I love The Decemberists so much and so many of the songs are short stories more than songs. This isn’t one of them, it’s probably the most poppy of all Decemberists songs, but Colin Meloy calls it both “a celebration of sadness” and “a longing holler to the universe against one’s perceived otherness.” Each of the characters in this novel feels some kind of otherness – Jane and Brian are carrying tremendous grief over the deaths of their mothers and past traumas. Brian is dealing with agoraphobia and other anxieties while still trying to be a cool, snarky and above-it-all artiste. Patty has been misunderstood his entire life as someone who is physically huge while being a virtuoso and champion of the tiniest and most fragile birds. Jane’s aunt Heidi’s unspoken motto is “if you can’t be loved, be needed” yet she’s grappling with a world that has no need for her. The characters in the novel have each “been waiting all (their) life” for something to click in, to be seen for who they are, to be treasured for who they are, not despite who they are. The synthesizer-heavy anthem echoes their individual hot messes. Each character is deeply lonely and yearning, watching the world stumble around but realizing that they’ve always been the main character in their own personal disaster movie, one that predated any pandemic.
“Wait For Me” (Hadestown)
Running the final proofreading for The Doomscroller’s Companion I was obsessively listening to the Hadestown original Broadway cast recording. I had resisted letting this musical into my brain forever – I weirdly loved Hamilton so much that for me, Hadestown represented a threat, and I had heard “Flowers” without narrative context and thought it was too obvious and annoying (it’s now one of my favorites). But then I finally saw the musical at the end of 2025 and fell in absolute love with the entire thing. And then, during the third run at the final proof, suddenly I woke up in the middle of the night and realized that Brian and Jane were Eurydice and Orpheus. Hadestown begins with Hermes informing the audience that it’s a sad song and that the musical would be sad, and yet, we’re going to tell it again. Unlike Orpheus and Eurydice, Brian and Jane become each other’s imperfect salvation. Jane was in hell. Brian was too. They both help the other find their way out. In the novel’s climax, one character rushes through an infected landscape filled with sleepwalkers and dangerous shooters, toward the other, which echoes in this song “Wait for me, I’m coming, Wait, I’m coming with you, Wait for me, I’m coming too, I’m coming too” while the Fates jeer back “Who are you? Where do you think you are going? Who are you? Why are you all alone? Who do you think you are? Who are you to think that you can walk a road that no one ever walked before?” which echoes in both Jane and Brian’s refrains of imposter syndrome and self-recriminations. Hadestown is also an inspection of late-stage capitalism and fear, of being trapped by circumstance and poverty, about how the institution will insist it’s protecting you while using you to build a wall that traps you inside. I didn’t set out to write a novel that so strongly sided with the working class, and yet, sometimes these things just happen. Whoops.
Arvo Pärt — Spiegel Im Spiegel
Much of The Doomscroller’s Companion deals with the symptoms of not being able to fall asleep – a type of hell that I dealt with for decades. Anyone who has ever spent a night desperately needing to fall asleep but instead stuck in a mental prison of ideas, anxiety and memories will understand how awful that is. One of my coping strategies is an audio trigger – essentially condition my brain to be in a sleepy state with a specific playlist that I listen to every night. By repeating the same songs in exactly the same sequence, my brain had something to latch onto but there was no novelty – the songs were always the same. After more than a decade, the same playlist knocks me right out. The playlist is only 47 minutes long and I rarely make it past the fifth song. It starts out in a chill mood, The Decemberists’ “California One (Youth and Beauty Brigade)” and The Cure’s “Plainsong” and “Last Dance” from Disintegration (my single favorite album of all time), then gradually devolves into quieter songs without words, Kevin Shields’ “Goodbye” and Air’s “Alone in Kyoto” and finally, “Spiegel Im Spiegel.” I’m rarely awake by the time my Sleepy Time playlist gets to this final piece, but sometimes I wake up during it and instead of panic, it soothes. For a playlist inspired by a novel about an insomnia plague, it feels right to end with an ingredient for my own cure for insomnia.
I fell in love with this composition from the About Time soundtrack originally, but since then, I’ve spotted it in so many places. Michael Schur chose this for the series finale of The Good Place because he found it on YouTube and noticed that every single commenter talked about how much peace and joy it had given them. The piece echoes itself in the melody, a call and response which I find deeply satisfying from a narrative perspective – my writing often circles in on itself at the sentence level and the narrative arcs themselves. It’s such a deceptively simple melody but like all things compelling, hides a much deeper truth and is in conversation with the listener. Rather than repetitive, the modality is concentric, creating a pattern that is almost like a maternal heartbeat. Of the composition returning to the central pitch of A, Pärt said it was like “returning home after being away.” This novel is very much about Jane and Brian trying to escape themselves throughout their lives and finally returning to their home, to a new form of home, a found family, and being better for it.
Wendy Wimmer is the author of the short story collection Entry Level, selected by Deesha Philyaw as the winner of the Autumn House Fiction Prize. She lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin.