In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Madeline Vosch’s memoir Undead is a profound and honest recounting of suicidal ideation and the aftermath of a suicide attempt, as well as a clear exploration of self and how the world shapes us.
Clancy Martin wrote of the book:
“A brave, honest, and really quite magnificent book that will save lives. It’s very hard and absolutely necessary to describe how the suicidal mind works. If you struggle with suicidal ideation, love someone who does, or have lost someone to suicide, you will be helped by reading this book. Thank you, Madeline Vosch. We need you.”
In her own words, here is Madeline Vosch’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir Undead:
In 2017, when I was struggling daily with the growing desire to die, I made a playlist. The playlist was thirty-one songs, all by the Mountain Goats, titled simply: stay alive.
My book, Undead: A Memoir of My Suicide, tells the story of surviving a suicide attempt in 2018. It opens in the immediate aftermath of the attempt, then jumps back in time to tell the story of all the days and hours and years that led up to the attempt. The last part of my book moves to recent years, in which I’ve tried to answer the question of what it means to go on living in a world that is so hostile to so many of us. What do I need to change about myself, what do we need to change about the world, to make this place more livable?
When I was making the playlist to accompany the book, I was tempted to only use Mountain Goats songs. I love the Mountain Goats for many reasons, not least of them being how many songs boil down to some version of, “You don’t have to kill yourself today.” But, I tried to expand out of that and tried to limit the number of Mountain Goats songs on the playlist.
I’ve tried to arrange the songs in this playlist so they follow the general arc of the book: starting with the daze and fog that followed the attempt, tumbling downwards into the darkness that led me there, then, finally, stumbling up toward something like hope, something like a way forward.
A Preface
This Year by the Mountain Goats
In the years and months and days leading up to my suicide attempt, I sang this song like it was a prayer.
After I tried to kill myself, they took me to a hospital where they watched me night and day. In this locked ward, there was a guitar. You needed a special note from your doctor to be able to play the guitar. The strings could be used to hurt yourself, I learned. We couldn’t be trusted with it. I didn’t have a note, but I have always been good at lying when I need to be. The afternoon shift at the hospital would never let me touch it, but there was a boy on morning shift who handed me the guitar one morning.
We realized at the same moment there wasn’t a pick. He took a piece of notebook paper, lined and thick, folded it over and over itself until it made a triangle. He covered it in tape, handed it to me like a talisman.
I could only play the guitar in a soundproof room. This room was where they took other patients when they were having what the staff called breakdowns, when their screaming or shouting was uncontainable by their own body.
I had just started learning guitar and didn’t know what I was doing, really. On that couch, staring out into a colorless Boston day, I played the only song I knew by heart. I played it again and again, out of tune and rhythmless, all alone in that soundproof room in the locked ward. In the first days after I tried to die, I sat in that room and sang that I was going to make it through this year, as if I could trick myself into believing it.
Wild Sage by the Mountain Goats
This is a simple story. Someone walks out of a house in the morning, walks along the side of a highway, trips, gets up. Soft, restrained, it is the story of a person on the periphery, a person unnoticed. This, a story of things thrown away, tossed aside, things that still, somehow, in ditches and rubble, grow.
In Corolla by the Mountain Goats
In this song, someone decides, without fanfare or agony, that they are going to kill themselves. It is mostly just the singer and a guitar, tranquil and peaceful. The night I decided I was going to kill myself, I felt a comfort I had never known. This song captures that feeling, walking toward a final peace, looking at the beauty of the world and saying goodbye. Not urgent, not panicked, a soft acceptance.
No one was gonna come and get me, there wasn’t anybody gonna know. Even though I leave a trail of burned things in my wake every single place I go.
This stanza is sung decrescendo, fading softer with each word. The final word, “go,” no more than an exhale, disappearing into the air.
To Meet You There by Anjimile
The first time I heard this song, I was in an attic in Cambridge. It was mid-April, less than a month before I tried to kill myself. A friend had turned the top floor of her apartment into a makeshift, DIY venue. She hosted bands, readings, karaoke nights. She draped fairy lights over the windows. In the crowd, I watched Anjimilie perform this song, this acknowledgement of the person you’ve been and the person you are, and finding a way forward to be the person you want to be.
Stay Alive by José Gonzáles
After I was released from the psych ward, I spent two weeks in an outpatient program in the heart of Boston. I don’t know how I found this song, but I listened to it on repeat on the bus ride across the city, watching the sun rise over the Charles River.
Left and Leaving by The Weakerthans
Intertwining longing and resignation, the song takes us across a city, across time, trying to move on. Trying to be the person who is doing the leaving, all the while knowing they are the person who was left.
Loneliness by MAITA
There is something haunting. Not really a song of loneliness, but a song of profound aloneness. Maita’s lyrics are always striking, and here, paired with the soft, high notes of the chorus, there is person moving through the world all alone, left with a ghost of something that might never have been there at all.
sucks to see you doing better by Valley
Who among us hasn’t been there: still heartbroken over someone and suddenly seeing them in the distance with someone new? The way I used to gasp, the way I used to want to run to the person who broke my heart, tell them everything I thought, everything I felt. This is one of those songs that lets you lean into that feeling, that lets you dance in that feeling. This song is catharsis for the moments when you know you can never actually tell that person the story of your heartbreak.
If you see light by the Mountain Goats
Here, a slant retelling of Frankenstein, the creature hiding, waiting for the villagers to come kill him. In the days after I tried to kill myself, I waited for everyone to see all the things that were wrong with me. I moved across the country, rented a little room in a house, hid from my housemates as much as I could. I didn’t want anyone to know what had happened, or who I had been. I wanted to hide from the world, and waited in terror for the day someone would find out who I really was.
No one knows how to keep secrets round here, they tell everyone, everything, soon as they know, and then where is there left for poor sinners to go?
I’ll believe in anything by Wolf Parade
This, this is something like happy desperation, hopeful desperation. Like the kind of joy and freedom that comes when you’ve finally given up. I wouldn’t ever call this song nihilistic though. Instead, I think this song is saying that there is still something to believe in, even if we don’t know what it is. I can take you where nobody knows you, and maybe that will be where we find something good, but even finding something good there isn’t what matters. It’s the idea that there is a place that actually exists, somewhere, where no one knows you, where you can start over, where people don’t care about the person you used to be. I think in this song, it is the dream of that place that matters more than anything that place might offer.
A Better Son/Daughter by Rilo Kiley
I go to a little karaoke night here in Austin that stubbornly only lets people perform indie/punk music. This song is often on the list of the most sung of the year. We call it the fight song. The song for when you want to give up, when you’re breaking, and you need someone to shout alongside you that sometimes shit just sucks. Sometimes you are the worst version of yourself and the only thing to do is to get up tomorrow and try again. This song is an anthem for those moments, to remind you that you can still try even if you failed today. That you can try again tomorrow, and the day after, and all the days that come after that.
I’m Not Your Hero by Tegan and Sara
A triumph, a triumph for those of us who will never be heroes. A reminder that things that can feel so simple: standing where we are now, standing up at all, these things can be victories, and no one gets to take that from us. No one else might know how much it took for you to be standing wherever you are, or how much it took for you to get up out of bed today. But you know, and you can be proud of how far you’ve come, even if no one else knows where you started.
American Hearts by Piebald
Whether or not you want to be, you’re part of it. You’re part of all of this, this life, this country, this world. This world that can be so beautiful, this world that can be so unlivable.
From all I’ve heard, and all I’ve seen, this place has broken my American heart.
Absolute Lithops Effect by the Mountain Goats
A lithops is a plant that looks like it isn’t alive, like it’s never been a living thing, even as it grows. Lithops are sometimes called living stones. Because of their coloring, their size, their strange split tops, it’s sometimes hard to tell that it’s a plant at all. But there is something so small, growing so slowly it is unnoticeable, growing and changing there in the dirt.
My insides are pink and raw, and it hurts me when I move my jaw, but I am taking tiny steps forward.
Madeline Vosch is a writer, a translator, and a professor. Her work has been published in Ploughshares, the Washington Post, and The Rumpus, among others. She was awarded the Ploughshares Emerging Writer Award for Nonfiction and was an Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow.