Wrongful, set at two literary festivals, is a mystery centering around the baffling fate of a popular novelist. It’s also about envy, grief, and guilt—and the danger of offending a certain type of person who may find their worst deeds rather enjoyable. Several of my characters are dedicated to the imagination in one form or another—as writers or by working in publishing—and they have honed their abilities to rationalize their baser inclinations.
Here’s my playlist for Wrongful:
“DON’T LET ME BE MISUNDERSTOOD”—sung by Nina Simone
The Animals’ version is what many of us heard first. All young angst and self-assured rebellion, their cover of “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” earned a great deal of money for The Animals. It’s a very different creature altogether from Nina Simone’s original rendition. “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” was written for Simone by Horace Ott, Bennie Benjamin, and Sol Marcus in 1964. Simone’s original is slow and mesmerizing and achingly beautiful. The lyrics remind me of one of the most misunderstood characters in Wrongful, Mira Wallacz, although I think at a certain point she gave up trying to be understood.
“DON’T YOU WORRY ‘BOUT A THING”—Stevie Wonder
This is such a joyful song, so filled with high energy through its synthesis of pop and Latin soul: “Don’t you worry ‘bout a thing, mama.”
At the start of Wrongful Geneva Finch is twenty years old, recently mother-less, and living close to poverty. The series of novels she read to her dying mother helped to lessen her mother’s suffering and lighten Geneva’s heart, but now she is living with grief, guilt, and a sense of failure—and this miraculous song by Stevie Wonder from the 1970s may be just what she needs to hear. Then again, maybe you should worry ‘bout a thing, mama.
“WHATS NEW, PUSSYCAT”—sung by Tom Jones
It’s easy to understand why Tom Jones initially balked at performing this song. Written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David and released in 1965, Bacharach called it “this bloody crazy song” and had to press Jones to take it on. The song fits the eponymous movie perfectly—it’s a cartoonish movie, bottling a lighter, less fraught, bubbly portion of the 1960s. The thing is, I don’t care how silly the song is, it’s fabulous. So funny, preposterous and nearly idiotic, the infantilizing lyrics are at such a distance from Jones’s dominating baritone that the contrast is happily perfect. The song is self-aware—you can joke about it, but it’s already joking with you. The sensibility matches, in part, one character in Wrongful: Aida, who works with Geneva Finch at an entertainment agency. Aida is polyamorous, irreverent, always up for a good time, and yet a reliable friend who presses Geneva to enlarge her life. She would understand the go-for-broke quality of this bouncy song.
“THEME FROM LAURA”—David Raksin
The swooning orchestral music for the Gene Tierney-Dana Andrews movie (1944) evokes the haunting qualities of a woman who captures the imagination of everyone who believed they knew her. That sort of projection happens to the popular novelist Mira Wallacz in Wrongful as others discharge their own fantasies, fears, and resentments upon her. Raksin purportedly wrote this gorgeously moody theme over one weekend. The music parallels the ambience I hoped to instill in portions of Wrongful.
“WHAT I WAS MADE FOR”—Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell
Billie Eilish’s breathy voice is intimate and searching while conveying loneliness and uncertainty bordering on despair. This contemporary song reminds me of the life of Geneva Finch at twenty years old when she is idealistic and pays heightened attention to the undertones in voices because of her sensitivity to predatory behavior. Ten years later when we see her again she has lost some of her instincts, but not all.
“THEY SAY IT’S SPRING”—sung by Blossom Dearie
Jazz singer and pianist Blossom Dearie had an unforgettable voice that was sweet, high, and nearly childlike, while undercut with adult awareness and the sort of phrasing that gives increasing pleasure. “They Say It’s Spring,” composed by Bob Haymes and Marty Clark in 1958, showcases her quirky voice with its innocent-as-meringue airiness. In this song “a world of dreams” and “illusionary schemes” meet reality—yet, despite the cynics, it’s still springtime. “They Say It’s Spring” isn’t about a season so much as about a poetic response to life. Although Wrongful is mostly set in autumn, at least one character’s hidden hopes are closer to those we associate with springtime.
“GROOVE IS IN THE HEART”—Dee-Lite
Lady Miss Kier, Supa DJ Dmitri, and Towa Tei, along with a few compatriots, created their one-hit wonder in 1990. “Groove Is In the Heart” is full of great samplings, and it just rolls along, traction-less, goofy and proud. It sounds like the music at a party in Wrongful where the dancing is the sort of sloppy, fall-on-the-floor kind that encourages Geneva Finch to let some of her boundaries collapse. Being at that party changes her life. That’s where she meets the former priest who will become instrumental in her plan to discover the truth about what happened ten years earlier at a literary festival.
“FATHER FIGURE”—George Michael
George Michael’s song from 1987 is regaining listeners and gaining new ones because of a scene in the unsettling, squirm-worthy movie (although some argue it’s not unsettling enough) Babygirl. Director Halina Reijn says “Father Figure” was her inspiration for the script. In the movie Harris Dickinson, bare backed, whiskey glass in hand, dances to “Father Figure” while Nicole Kidman, seated in an armchair, watches him like a beautiful praying mantis.
Wrongful is a restrained love story where misunderstandings and a delicacy of approach get in the way, even though characters want “something special, something sacred.” One of my characters in Wrongful actually had been a “father”: the former priest who was once known as Father Kleist. Being a father figure isn’t natural to him, although vulnerability in the novel may be seen as “something sacred.”
“TROUBLE”—sung by Elvis Presley in King Creole
I came late to “Trouble” through Presley’s charismatic performance in King Creole. Written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller in 1958, the song is full of great short sit-up-and-catch-up pauses. The lyrics are a warning (“Don’t you mess around with me”) and phrase after phrase is full of FAFO (“I’m evil evil evil”). There is evil in Wrongful, but the evil is not like this. No, but this song represents how deluded evil persons would like to think of themselves, imagining that they’re motivated to preserve a perfect and glamorous self-image that’s worth avenging. We hate to break it to them: they’re not Elvis.
The “Trouble” scene from King Creole: