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.
Rebecca Birrell’s novel Venus, Vanishing is an encompassing and unsettling debut.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“The literary debut from art historian Birrell magnificently reimagines Jewish women’s artistic pursuits in 1930s Berlin and their world of bohemian individuality as they confront an oppressive regime that erases people, figuratively and literally. The prose, which is of high caliber, sensitively reveals the process of creation and poses questions about what artistic freedom truly means. Especially recommended for readers of Lisa Barr and Julie Orringer.”
In her own words, here is Rebecca Birrell’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Venus, Vanishing:
It feels shameful to admit that music isn’t important to my work. I have never listened to music while writing. I could explain this by arguing that visual art has always been at the forefront of my thinking, and perhaps because the mind has only finite space for creative inspiration— or so I have reasoned in the past—music has never been an equivalent touchstone. Another problem I might point to is that I intuitively share the art historical canon beloved by my protagonist, Hannah, a young Jewish seamstress aspiring to be a painter in the late twenties in Berlin. I imagine there are people out there regularly listening to thirties jazz and cabaret numbers, but I am not one of them.
I expect, however, that the discomfort goes deeper than this. I remember being asked in my twenties what music I liked by people innocently attempting to get to know me and announcing in response: ‘I don’t listen to music.’ I didn’t mean this literally —what I meant was that I didn’t know how to provide an answer that would shed any light on my personality. Similarly, I worried I wouldn’t be able to make much meaningful sense of Venus, Vanishing this way. So, I went back to my Spotify Wrapped for the year I wrote the first messy draft of the novel, 2024. Well, that was enlightening—by which I mean, traumatising and very funny. I could see the shape of my own histrionics, and my attempts to overcome them, in the collection of songs about love and longing. Many of the songs I was listening to then had embarrassingly literal connections to what was going on in my personal life, which I kept as compartmentalised as possible, not wanting to let it encroach upon my writing. I won’t bore readers with the vast quantities of Taylor Swift and Gracie Abrams I was blasting out my phone’s tinny speakers while I sat in my bedroom crying. These are mostly crossover songs that enriched the novel, but also helped me feel less insane about my own circumstances so I could muster the energy and wherewithal to write.
- Mitski, “Nobody”
When Hannah moves away from her family to a room of her own at the beginning of the novel, I wanted to convey something of the possibility and excitement that entails—as well as its occasionally melancholic aspect. I was living alone in a house on the edge of the city when I wrote the novel, so I knew this experience well, and had found solace in this song’s account of desire and loneliness. ‘My God I’m so lonely,’ Mitski sings, but her tone isn’t exactly unhappy—there’s pleasure in the confession, almost a pride in the self-sufficiency of her solitude, and this was something I hoped to convey in those early parts of the novel.
- Kate Bush, “Hounds of Love”
I tend to think of this as a song about emotional avoidance, something which is very relevant to Hannah in the novel, who finds herself lying about her relationship with her patron more and more to her lovers as time passes. Love involves responsibility and vulnerability and sometimes we don’t feel up to the challenge of that, would rather run from it, maintain our so-called autonomy—and I love the imagery Bush uses to express this: the wounded fox she can’t bear to hold as it dies. This will be a common theme in the playlist, but I also think of this song as being about creativity—feeling pursued, haunted, stirred, and the courage that’s required in allowing yourself to confront and inhabit that desire.
- Leonard Cohen, “Famous Blue Raincoat”
The letters of artists and writers in the early and mid-twentieth century were a significant source of inspiration for the novel. This a favourite example of a song with an epistolary format, one which really feels like a letter in parts: the remarkable scene-setting in the first verse; the oblique, private details—why is the blue raincoat ‘famous’? —that give a sense of a full, shifting, intersubjective world behind the writing. It also happens to touch on many of the novel’s themes: desire, betrayal, jealousy.
- Florence + the Machine, “Rabbit Heart (Raise it Up)”
Another song about ambition, and wondering whether you can adequately meet the magnitude of your fantasies and aspirations. ‘Will it ever be enough?’ Florence asks and answers herself immediately: ‘it’s not enough.’ I wanted Hannah’s relationship to her own creativity to feel like this: urgent, hungry, always grasping for better and more. ‘This is a gift, it comes with a price/Who is the lamb and who is the knife?’ The gift, perhaps, is talent, artistic capability, and sometimes it’s unclear who has the authority—the artist or the art, which can feel like an exterior force bearing down upon her, causing her pain, pushing her beyond her limits. These power dynamics also resonate with those that fuel the erotic relationships in the novel, though I don’t think there’s much question of who the sacrificial object is, and who threatens violence. Attention, acclaim and eros galvanise Hannah, but she remains aware of her vulnerability, and her conscientiousness as an artist is largely motivated by dread about the arrangement with her patron, Elke, crashing down around her.
- Lorde, “Perfect Places,” “Liability,” “Writer in the Dark”
These songs are sensitive to the ecstatic, self-destructive attempts at release that punctuate spells of anguish and self-doubt, in romantic love as much as creativity. This tension underlies all of Hannah’s actions and choices throughout the novel. ‘Bet you rue the day you kissed a writer in the dark,’ is obviously a line I feel an affinity with, but more because I think writers are annoying to date than what Lorde implies, which is that writers/artists have the power to blow up your life with the intensity of their emotions, not least because they have a global stage on which to express said emotions. But there’s another way of interpreting this line that feels more accurate to Hannah. If you are possessed by a creative vocation your desire for it will be stronger than your desire for a person, it will make you selfish, wilful, emotionally unavailable, and I think this becomes true for Hannah at several key points in the novel.
- Gracie Abrams, “I Love You, I’m Sorry”
Ok, will you indulge me one Abrams song? Coming to the end of the novel, it was useful to have a song ready at hand that expressed regret, wistfulness, and impossibility. Listening to so much contemporary anguished young woman pop music might seem ill-suited to writing about this period of history, but the novel is, at its heart, a coming-of-age story inspired by the diaries and letters of young women who continued to worry about love and desire even as the world as they knew it collapsed around them—this was my justification, at least.
Truthfully, though, this song became more like a sedative I would administer after I finished writing for the day. I listened to it so many times during the gestation of the novel that when I eventually happened across the music video (some eighteen months after I’d first heard it) I felt a cold, dissociative dread set in. These were my thoughts and feelings, not hers; it didn’t matter that the song was comprised of references that had no bearing on my life. I have since come to realise, sanely, that these are in fact Abrams’ experiences to sing about. But I feel a certain amount of pride (and embarrassment) at the deranged number of times I played it in the latter half of that year (according to Spotify, nearly 500).
So much of Venus, Vanishing is about the pleasure—sensual and visual—Hannah takes in garments, and how her work as a seamstress comes to shape her aesthetic as a fine artist. This song feels like an investigation, in Virginia Woolf’s words, of ‘frock consciousness’—a state I hope my novel provides some access to too. The emotional, tactile cataloguing of colours, textures and fabrics shares the imaginative aims of my own writing about clothes.
- Paul Simon, “René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog after the War”
Simon is possibly my favourite lyricist. I love his poetic, playful, moving storytelling—there are songs on Graceland that make me very envious as a writer—so I was thrilled when I discovered this sweet, tender piece of art historical fiction writing, inspired by a photograph of surrealist Magritte and his wife taken by the German photographer Lothar Wolleh.
Rebecca Birrell is an art historian and a Bye-Fellow in the History of Art at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge. She was formerly the curator of nineteenth and twentieth century paintings and drawings at the Fitzwilliam Museum and has occupied curatorial positions at the Jewish Museum London, the Department of Prints and Drawing at the British Museum, and at the Charleston Trust. She studied English literature at University College London, followed by a master’s in women’s studies at the University of Oxford and a PhD from the Edinburgh College of Art. Venus, Vanishing is her debut novel.