In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Kate Christensen’s novel Good Company is a compassionate and profound examination of the complexities of loss and life.
Library Journal wrote of the book:
“In probing misogyny’s legacy and the uneasy intimacies among women, Christensen delivers a bracing meditation on trust, aging, and the wreckage violent men leave in their wake.”
In her own words, here is Kate Christensen’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Good Company:
When I was young, I used to play three or four albums in a row at top volume and sing along, also at top volume, to get out of my own head. In my twenties and early thirties, I had no idea how to handle all my inconveniently outsized emotions. Rootless and lovelorn and anxious, I found fellowship and vindication in albums that met and held my powerful sadness and yearning, nostalgia and loneliness, frustration and heartache. These voices felt like my friends. Singing along with them felt like the most meaningful conversation in the world. And it was communal—these were the albums we all listened to back then. Studio apartments in every city held girls in our twenties singing our hearts out alone but together to the same music.
As I was writing Good Company, a novel about a middle-aged woman novelist revisiting her past on a book tour to promote her memoir, I listened anew to all the girls of my youth. I’m old now, long and happily married, settled in my forever home, and my pursuits are tame and seasoned ones. But I loved hearing these once-loved voices again, still young, still filled with that wild passion and yearning. It felt good to remember the bad old days, to feel how long a life is, how far I’ve traveled, how many girls I’ve loved.
Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris, “Trio”
Aretha Franklin, “Greatest Hits”
Patsy Cline, “Sweet Dreams”
In the early 1980s, my two younger sisters and I spent summers at our mother and stepfather’s in Barrytown, New York. We were all in college, between school years. We lay around in the green humidity, restless and barefoot in the shadowy old house where we didn’t really belong, itching to begin our lives, playing cassettes on the boom box out in the half-renovated garage where my sisters slept. From early childhood, we’d always sung together, rounds and choral pieces, songs in three-part harmony. We were all artists, a writer, a dancer, and a musician. Our alliance was fraught but deep, riven with fissures but intense. Whenever I hear “Oh have you seen my dear companion” and “I say a little prayer for you” and “I go out walking after midnight searching for you,” I think of my sisters back then, the closeness of our shared proximity, the now long-lost familiarity we could all still come back to.
Sweet Honey in the Rock, “Breaths”
Joni Mitchell, “Court and Spark”
Joan Armatrading, “Show Some Emotion”
During my sophomore year at Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 1983, I lived in a pink ranch house on Lambert Street with five other women. I had a record player on the plywood bar of my windowless basement (former rec) room. I’m sure I played my music too loudly, naively thinking my housemates couldn’t hear my full-volume singing below their feet. One of my housemates was my close friend and fellow English major, Bronwen. She and I performed at Student Union coffeehouses as a duo, in a jazz band, as part of an a capella women’s ensemble, “Listen more often to things than to beings,” and “My analyst told me that I was right out of my head.” Our friendship began with instant recognition of each other at freshman orientation. We both swooned to “I’m not the sort of person who falls in and quickly out of love.” We shared a goofy, romantic, intellectual solidarity that sustained us both at that competitive school.
The Go-Gos, “Vacation”
Cyndi Lauper, “She’s So Unusual”
Eurythmics, “Touch”
Tina Turner, “Private Dancer”
The year after graduation from Reed, 1986-87, I stuck around Portland, working as a cocktail waitress at a downtown blues club called The Last Hurrah. Getting ready for work in my apartment on Woodstock Avenue, I ginned myself up for a night of hauling booze to already-drunk middle-aged men by singing along to lush, moody ballads and high-energy girl-power bop, “See the people walking down the street” and “I travel the world and the seven seas.” It took me a while to gel and spike my punk-cut hair, put on eyeliner and eye shadow, get my miniskirt and fishnets just so, crush my feet into stiletto ankle boots. One of my best friends, Michelle, worked as a stripper at a club near mine. After my shift, I’d go to Macambo and wait for her night to end, watching her slither almost naked on the pole after whipping my young body around the Last Hurrah all night like a predatory cat—it amazes me now how young and hot we both were, how sure of our sexual power: we had so much time to burn. Our entire adult lives lay ahead of us. “Tell me, do you want to see me do the shimmy again?” After she tipped out, we took a cab to her place for a slumber party to count the night’s tips in our PJs and snort a little coke before bed; “When the workin’ day is done, oh, girls they wanna have fun, oh, girls just wanna have fun.”
Tracy Chapman, “Tracy Chapman”
Kate Bush, “The Kick Inside”
Bonnie Raitt, “Home Plate”
I had undiagnosed celiac disease until I was forty. Until I did an elimination diet after 9/11 and finally stopped eating gluten, I thought this was who I was: a depressive, hotheaded, foggy-brained introvert with chronic eczema and heart-pounding insomnia. Nothing I could do about it. Oh well. At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the late 1980s, I lived on refried-bean and cheddar cheese burritos made with two gigantic, floury tortillas, served with a side of buttery frozen peas. Because of this gluten-y diet, I spent a lot of time hiding out, not going to Workshop, not writing, playing Solitaire in my apartment while my two best friends left messages on my answering machine. “I’ve got some wine coolers,” came Sally’s voice, crackling with laughter. “I’m heading out to the Rez, can I pick you up?” “Give me one reason to stay here, and I’ll turn right back around,” I sang defiantly while her voice filled my little apartment at Black’s Gaslight Village, which had the size and shape and general feeling of a doublewide trailer. Then came Gretchen’s fun-filled, crisp voice: “Katie, there’s an estate sale in Solon, it’s our favorite hot auctioneer, let’s go!” I crabbily dealt out another Solitaire hand on my bedspread, singing, “And here I am again my girl, wondering what on earth I’m doing here…” After my cheap, filling, toxic-to-me supper, I filled my bathtub with hot water, poured a big slug of Jim Beam, and soaked myself into tipsy transcendence. “I’m blowing away, and shadows take my love and leave….”
Suzanne Vega, “Suzanne Vega”
Rickie Lee Jones, “Flying Cowboys”
k.d. lang, “Shadowland”
After I got my MFA, I moved straight to New York City. My first apartment was $300 a month, a roomy top-floor railroad I shared with two college friends in the crime-ridden wasteland of as-yet-undeveloped downtown Brooklyn. I worked at William Morrow as an editorial assistant for a brilliant young female editor and yearned to be one of her published writers instead. My Walkman was permanently strapped to my head in those days, filling my ears with cool, fresh, urbane voices. On Saturday mornings, I lugged a pillowcase stuffed full of dirty clothes and linens to the laundromat, walking up Fourth Avenue from St. Marks Place crooning, “I’m a shadow, but you know, I’m the one who loves you so, so please take my and and lead me out of shadowland.” On my morning commute to Manhattan, I sang on the train, not caring who heard, “Solitude stands by the window, she turns her head as I walk in the room.” Once a week, I went to lunch at a pub with my new best friend, Cathi, who worked nearby at Seventeen Magazine. We were two young ambitious 27-year-old writers just starting out, in corporate jobs, and our lunches were bubbly and festive and full of laughter. We wore tiny black miniskirts and ordered hamburgers and fries and talked about the novels we were working on. Burbling back to the office, late but knowing my boss was still at lunch herself and wouldn’t care anyway, I sang along the sidewalk as if life were just one big musical, “Don’t let the sun catch you crying, the night’s the time for all your tears…”
Joni Mitchell, “Blue”
Alison Krauss, “I’ve Got That Old Feeling”
Marianne Faithfull, “Broken English”
I spent the summer I turned 30 essentially alone in my tiny East Village studio apartment, looking out my two windows at an airshaft, hot and hungover, feeling like a hermit in a cave. I was writing so much, and it was all I cared about. The way I remember it, I had no friends that summer, no one at all. I was working as an office temp at various law firms on weekdays. I spent evenings reading my way through shiny stacks of library books in the bathtub with a bottle of wine. I remember sprawling on my futon bed with my head dangling off, half crying, “Just a little green like the color when the spring is born,” and cooking myself supper from ingredients I’d bought in Chinatown and lugged home in a pink plastic sack, “I’ve got that old feeling, you’re leaving, I’m so tired of goodbyes,” and staring moodily out at the rain dripping off my fire escape. “And all over the world, strangers talk only about the weather. All over the world, it’s the same, it’s the same, it’s the same…”
Hole, “Live Through This”
PJ Harvey, “Dry”
Lucinda Williams, “Sweet Old World”
Julia Heimdahl, the narrator of Good Company, describes the aftermath of her compulsory weekly phone conversations with her needy, self-involved mother:
As soon as I hung up from these calls, even if it was early afternoon… I sloshed straight tequila or vodka into a glass… The alcohol loosened the knot in my chest, muted the roar of rage in my head. I blasted CDs on my boom box, P.J. Harvey, Courtney Love, Lucinda Williams, and I scream-sang along. The music and liquor blotted me out. That was the whole point. I needed to cease to exist for a little while.
I did the same thing. I hung up the phone and hit “play” and sloshed tequila into a water glass and paced around, howling “I changed the number on my phone so you can’t call me up at home,” and “Don’t you please make me real, fuck you” and “Oh my honey thighs, give me your troubles, I’ll keep them with mine.” Talking to my mother always opened up ancient wounds, filled me with helpless rage I had no idea how to even admit to myself. These tough, winsome girls brought me back to my essential self, something alive and vital in me that had nothing to do with anyone else. I knew that part of me was going to win, if only because these girls told me I’d be okay some day, over and over and over.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Kate Christensen’s playlist for her novel The Astral
Kate Christensen’s playlist for her novel The Great Man
Musician Nathaniel Bellows Interviews Author Kate Christensen
Author Kate Christensen Interviews Musician Nathaniel Bellows
Kate Christensen is the author of nine previous novels, most recently Welcome Home, Stranger. Her fourth novel, The Great Man, won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She has also published two food-centric memoirs, Blue Plate Special and How to Cook a Moose, which won the 2016 Maine Literary Award for Memoir. Her essays, reviews, and short pieces have appeared in a wide variety of publications and anthologies. She lives with her husband and their two dogs in northern New Mexico.