In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Jessica Gross’s novel Open Wide is a compelling and original exploration of obsession and love.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“Raising interesting questions about boundaries within relationships . . . the novel literalizes the romantic trope of becoming one with your partner, while ingeniously satirizing female neediness. There is a predatory nature to Olive’s possessiveness—or is that love? A rom-com inside a body horror story, or a philosophical examination of love as obsession.”
In her own words, here is Jessica Gross’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Open Wide:
My second novel, Open Wide, features a radio host with boundary issues who struggles to accept that she and her boyfriend are separate people. Her discomfort with his autonomy is, in fact, so deep that she takes horrific measures to obliterate the gap between them. At the heart of the book is the question of what it means to be in a relationship with someone else—to, in common parlance, meet your “other half” and “join your life” with theirs—but to preserve your separate personhood. What, in other words, does healthy interdependence look like?
Before my narrator, Olive, meets Theo, she lives in the purgatory of perpetual singlehood, and is plagued by painful longing. But meeting him doesn’t relieve her: it only introduces an unsatiable yearning of a different kind. In thinking through a playlist to accompany the novel, I consulted my brother, Andrew Gross, my go-to music savant. He and my sister-in-law, Emily Ball, led me to some of the below songs, which collectively evoke the desperate, unanswerable hunger for all-consuming connection that is Olive’s animating struggle.
[You can find the playlist for my debut novel, Hysteria, which features another narrator plagued by painful longing, here.]
“Separator” by Radiohead
If the title of this song gives a neat summary of what Olive can’t bring herself to do, these lines conjure the act that she undertakes in an effort to become one with Theo (hint: it’s surreal) (other hint: it has something to do with the gap between his teeth): “I fell open / I laid under […] I wanna slip over / And get back under…”
“Magnetize” by Wilco
I’d never heard this song before my brother recommended it, and now I can’t stop listening to it: unlike a lot of insatiable-yearning songs, it handles the theme with a light touch. Lyrics like “Everybody goes […] I’m lonely” and “I sleep underneath / A picture that I keep of you next to me” could populate a syrupy ballad that, admittedly, would make me sob—but Wilco’s music offers a soft, journaling-next-to-a-rainy-window kind of sadness. Let’s call it longing lite. For all the unsatiable desire Olive suffers, I tried to leaven her struggle with weirdness and humor, so the tone of this song feels like a good match.
“Somebody to Love” by Queen
The above notwithstanding, sometimes we need a good syrupy ballad about yearning, am I right? Throughout my own (many) years as a single woman longing for a partner, Queen’s “Somebody to Love” was a constant companion. I’d listen to it while I was prowling the streets of New York, staring down any handsome stranger who crossed my path, or pumping away on the elliptical, scanning the gym for dudes without wedding bands. If I listened loud and hard enough and offered a hungry enough bug-eyed stare, maybe one of these men would telepathically sense my singlehood and come over and talk to me and, hey, why not, serve themselves up as the key to my salvation. (Without my needing to go out on a limb and actually approach them, of course.)
“Use Somebody” by Kings of Leon
Another ballad I listened to on repeat as a young, single, lonely New Yorker was this Kings of Leon gem. Most of these listens took place in the office of a blog where I worked as an intern and harbored an enormous crush on a slightly older editor who sat across the way. I’d pipe “Use Somebody” into my earbuds as I did my mindless tasks, staring at my crush, then looking away whenever he glanced in my direction. (This ballad, I must be clear, my brother did not recommend to me, as he has fine taste in music. I, however, make no such claims, and still love the chest-surge this song gives me.)
“I’d Have You Anytime” by George Harrison
Olive could easily sing this song to Theo and mean it…literally. Don’t look up the lyrics unless you’re ready for a spoiler.
“Surgeon” by St. Vincent
Ditto this song!!!
“My Love Mine All Mine” by Mitski
The narrator of Mitski’s “My Love Mine All Mine” seems to view love as her own precious belonging, one no one can take away. Olive is less at peace, less self-assured: in her mouth, “my love” is not her own feeling, but another person, and one she wants to possess completely. What Mitski’s narrator can depend on, Olive can only rabidly seek. “I didn’t just want him pressed against me,” she says at one point, “I wanted him wanted him wanted him, I wanted him to be all mine.”
“I Wanna Dance With Somebody” by Whitney Houston
I must conclude this playlist with my number one go-to song when I’m feeling lonely: Whitney Houston’s absolute banger. When, alone in my basement studio apartment, I blasted this song and flung myself around to the beat and belted at the top of my longs, “I wanna dance with somebody / with somebody who loves me” (that key change!), my isolation transformed into something energizing, something stylish, something shared. Whitney didn’t just give voice to my yearning; she also gave me hope it would one day end. And, while I still have my lonely days, for the most part, it has. I’ve found my somebody, just as Olive—in her unconventional way—has found hers.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Jessica Gross’s playlist for her novel Hysteria
Jessica Gross is the author of Hysteria (2020), which Publishers Weekly declared “every bit a page-turner as it is a descent into sexual madness.” Hysteria has been optioned for TV development, and Open Wide for film development. Gross’s nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Lilith, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She has taught writing at The New School and Texas Tech University and currently lives in West Texas.