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March 20, 2020
Sarah Ramey's Playlist for Her Memoir "The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness"
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, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Heidi Julavits, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Sarah Ramey's stunning memoir The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness vividly illustrates how medicine has fallen short in treating women.
Booklist wrote of the book:
"A visceral, scathing, erudite read that digs deep into how modern medicine continues to fail women and what can be done about it."
In her own words, here is Sarah Ramey's Book Notes music playlist for her memoir The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness:
A Playlist for the Mostly Homebound, by a long time veteran
The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness is about an illness I have been fighting through for seventeen years. It’s not unusual for people like me (WOMIs, or women with mysterious illnesses – and also men/MOMIs - people who have chronic fatigue syndrome, Lyme, Ehlers-Danlos, fibromyalgia, POTS, etc.) to be sick for decades, waxing and waning in pain, fatigue, and the ability to leave the house. There’s actually quite a few of us in the music world - Kathleen Hanna, Lady Gaga, myself - we’re all WOMIs. And so the following is a list of songs that got me through being partially, mostly, and sometimes totally homebound, lo these many, many years.
May they help all of you, in these socially distant times.
2003:
This was the year I became sick. As noted in the book, it all began for me with a botched surgery my senior year of college. But before this botched surgery, I was in a budding relationship with a truly lovely, blond boy. And even though that surgery derailed my life pretty firmly, that boy and I made some glorious mixtapes - and not even a botched surgery that ended up ruining my life can take those precious mixtapes away from me. They are still the soundtrack of my life from that time, especially this masterpiece by Tom Waits.
[Tom Waits - Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)]
2004:
2004 was the golden year. I miraculously went (mostly) into remission, I moved to Portland, Maine, and I joined an indie band that would change my life. All in all I lived life to the fullest - and those two years were the last time I was ever able to do that. This Caetano Veloso song embodies for the me joy and the artistic growth of that year - and I was introduced to it by the most influential musician in my life to date, my dear friend and bandmate Dave Noyes, who tragically passed away in 2019. (#davenoyesforever)
I remember listening to this in our smoke-filled practice space at three in the morning.
[Caetano Veloso - Irene]
2005:
In 2005, I settled further into the incredible musical scene in Portland, Maine, and found myself listening mostly to Nick Drake. The aughts!
[Nick Drake - Know]
2006:
I had moved by this point to New York City to pursue a masters degree, and this is when my health began to collapse again. This was also when that indie band (called Seekonk) released our first album. That album is actually lost to time and not available online, but another one is, and this Seekonk song is my all time favorite:
2007:
I took some measures to get better this year (radically changing my diet, taking up yoga, meditation, etc.) and improved enough to go work on the Obama campaign. I was the deputy chief blogger in the headquarters in Chicago, a silly title for the least silly job of my life. What a time. I was quite sick, but I was able to hide it - and I sure did. I showed up every day like everyone else, and like everyone else worked truly insane hours. I can’t believe my body lasted as long as it did. My job was largely to document everything Obama did on the campaign trail, and because this song was his walk-on song at all live events - it is seared into my 2007 memory:
[Stevie Wonder - Signed, Sealed, Delivered]
2008:
I still cannot believe I was a part of this historical moment (a moment that seems so, profoundly, impossibly far away from this moment.) Probably the most memorable hour of it all was the night I got to read the Yes We Can speech in a Word document the day before he delivered it. I just sat there looking at my screen, weeping. Just like I did when everyone pulled together and made this song a few days later:
[Will.i.Am - Yes We Can]
2009:
I finally had to leave the Obama campaign early because my health collapsed. If I’d understood my disease better, and that a job like that would almost certainly shatter any health I had cobbled together, I would not have taken it. Alas, I did not know that at the time, and my health indeed shattered. I moved home in the middle of the campaign, and then to San Francisco to live in my aunt’s house, and sought alternative health care. As I slowly started getting better again, I started playing music at home and taught myself to play the guitar by learning Leonard Cohen songs. When I was finally well enough (after a year almost completely housebound), I went down to a place called The Hotel Utah that has a big open mic. I put an alter ego down on the signup page, and played this song. It was the beginning of my career as Wolf Larsen:
[Leonard Cohen - Chelsea Hotel]
2010:
In 2010 and 2011, I began to sing with the two most treasured women in my life - a supergroup called Glittersnatch. Here are two songs by those two women, women I think I love more than my own life.
[Kelly McFarling - Lost Boy]
2011:
[Megan Keely - Daydream Ditty]
2012:
At the end of 2011 I released my one and only album as Wolf Larsen. With help from my friends, we launched it into the world just as I was falling back into another major slump of illness, living at home with my mother, and very much pressed up against the window, watching life go by without me. In my absence, my friends pulled together to make a music video for one of my songs - an unbelievably beautiful work of art and act of friendship that still brings a tear to my eye. This is the song:
[Wolf Larsen - If I Be Wrong]
2013:
In 2013, I descended into the Upside Down. Chronic fatigue syndrome, or myalgic encephalomyelitis (which I have) has stages of severity - and the most severe is commonly described as a “living death.” I can attest to this description. It lasted for two horrific years, in which my mother had to prop me up and feed me soup in order to keep me alive.
The song I listened to the most was one called “Weather of a Killing Kind” by the Tallest Man on Earth. But for reasons one cannot fathom, he does not have this online.
Luckily this other TMOE song is just as good (and, fun fact, I played it TO the Tallest Man on Earth once, on his tour bus), and I probably listened to it just as much:
[Tallest Man on Earth - Like the Wheel (rare piano version)]
2014:
Another year gone by, another year undead. Fittingly, my favorite album that year was Lazaretto, by Jack White. God I love Jack White.
[Jack White - That Black Bat Licorice]
2015:
Final year underground, with another excellent underworld companion, Sufjan.
[Sufjan Stevens - No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross]
2016:
Resurrection. With some good treatment, I got quantifiably better in 2016, and one of my favorite memories of being able to go out be amongst the living again was going to a Gillian Welch/Dave Rawlings concert, where I was introduced to Willie Watson (who tours with them) and considering that Gillian Welch is my favorite living songwriter and Willie managed to steal the show - it does make sense that I would go on to listen to his album Folk Singer Vol. I almost exclusively for the next year. I was, after all, now able to drive around and sing in the car again, a universal joy of the living, and this album is great for that if you’re a folkie like me.
[Willie Watson - Keep it Clean]
2017:
Another year well-spent driving around when able, listening to Willie Watson and his new album, Folk Singer Vol. II.
[Willie Watson - Gallows Pole]
2018:
In 2018 I had to start undergoing the first of eight surgical and invasive procedures over the next two years. This meant a lot of time in gurneys, waiting to go under anesthesia, listening to this Bon Iver too-on-the-nose song over and over.
[Bon Iver - 22 (OVER Soon)]
2019:
At the beginning of 2019, I did some ketamine treatments monitored in a hospital. You’re there for about seven hours - and it was only at the end of those seven hours that I realized I’d listened to the same, one song, on repeat, the entire time. I mean, it’s a great song.
[Angelo de Augustine - Time]
2020:
Well, here we are, at the end of a very long road. I am still sick, because the treatment of the mystery illnesses is extremely poor. On top of that, the zombie apocalypse has arrived, just in time for me to release this book about my own zombie apocalypse.
So it goes, and has always gone. Cue: Neil.
[Neil Young - Don’t Let it Bring You Down]
Sarah Ramey is a writer and musician (known as Wolf Larsen) living in Washington, DC. She graduated from Bowdoin College in 2003, received an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Columbia in 2007, and worked on President Obama’s 2008 campaign.
also at Largehearted Boy:
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Largehearted Boy playlist by the author for Lady Lazarus
Book Notes (2015 - ) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2012 - 2014) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2005 - 2011) (authors create music playlists for their book)
my 11 favorite Book Notes playlist essays
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