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May 18, 2020
Erin Khar's Playlist for Her Memoir "Strung Out"
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, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Erin Khar's Strung Out is a boldly written and compelling memoir of addiction.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
"Khar’s buoyant writing doesn’t get mired in her dark subject matter. There is an honesty here that can only come from, to put it in the language of 12-step programs, a “searching and fearless moral inventory.” This is a story she needed to tell; and the rest of the country needs to listen."
In her own words, here is Erin Khar's Book Notes music playlist for her memoir Strung Out:
From an early age, music has been integrated into every aspect of my life. Writing is no exception. Music has the ability to transport me, put me in the right frame of mind for whatever I am writing. This was especially true when writing Strung Out. Since the book spans such a large window of time, and such formative years, listening to the music I was listening to at any point of my personal history was tremendously helpful for finding the voice of each era of my life. These songs informed my writing in direct and indirect ways….
“Just Like Honey”- The Jesus and Mary Chain
This song takes me back to middle school. It’s dreamy and sexy and feels a little dangerous. I love it to this day. When I was writing the first chapter of Strung Out, I really needed to get myself back to the feeling of being on the edge of 13, that tipping point when I let myself fall into a boy and, more importantly, into heroin. The song opens with “Listen to the girl/ As she takes on half the world/ Moving up and so alive…” I wanted to be that girl. What I didn’t know at the time, is the song is thought to be about drug addiction. There are quite a few songs, books, films I was drawn to as a kid that are all about drugs. While I wasn’t always aware of that, I must have been drawn to the thing I yearned for, an exit door. And this song always felt like an escape to me. I remember listening to it on a cassette tape, on my little Sony boombox at the barn, where I spent nearly every day horseback riding. I’d get in the stall with my horse and sit in the hay and listen to music, breathing in the smell of alfalfa and horse and leather and sweat and close my eyes and drift.
“Five Years”- David Bowie
I often felt like the world, or at least my world, was ending. This song, from one of my all-time favorite albums—The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, is about the world coming to an end, an apocalypse. It’s also an incredibly romantic song. The part when Bowie’s voice rises from calm to screaming, singing, “I think I saw you in an ice-cream parlor,/ Drinking milk shakes cold and long/ Smiling and waving and looking so fine,/ Don’t think you knew you were in this song/ And it was cold and it rained so I felt like an actor/ And I thought of Ma and I wanted to get back there/ Your face, your race, the way that you talk./ I kiss you, you're beautiful, I want you to walk,” almost always brings me to tears. I listened to this song when writing about my best friend dying when I was 14 and about the most painful breakup of my adult life, when I was at my lowest point, constantly relapsing and unable to hold on to anything. The song transports me through grief and out the other side.
“Hey”- Pixies
I have been a Pixies fan since I first heard them on KROQ, a radio station in Los Angeles. Their first album, Surfer Rosa, came out when I was 14. My BFF and I saw them play at The Roxy on Sunset Blvd., and they blew me away. I’ve been a fan ever since. This song always reminded me of the beginning of relationships, of which I had many when I was young. There was a correlation between my drug behavior and relationship behavior. “Hey” opens with “Hey/ Been trying to meet you/ Hey, must be a devil between us.” There is something about those opening lines that stir up that feeling I used to get—being drawn to someone who wasn’t good for me, or, more often, I wasn’t good for them. It’s a simple and sexy song, but it’s also quite dark, and it encapsulates my early ‘90s dating life.
"Rid of Me"- PJ Harvey
“Tie yourself to me/ No one else/ No, you're not rid of me.” While we are on the theme of unhealthy relationship behavior, this one sums it up. I had a bad habit of betraying people, yet not letting them go. I was so terrified of being hurt that I continually pushed people away with my behavior and then pulled them back in. This song feels like 1994 for me, a year in which I was having an affair with an actor, cheating on my boyfriend, and generally making a mess all over Los Angeles. Despite what it conjures up for me, the song is so damn good. It has held up over the past 27 (twenty-seven!) years.
“Dirty Blue Balloons”- Failure
This song is very blatantly about heroin use. The title, “Dirty Blue Balloons,” refers to how tar heroin is sold, wrapped tight in small balls, covered by saran wrap, and then tied off into a balloon. And yes, they were almost always blue! In the late ‘90s, there was a donut shop near MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. You could pull up next to the donut shop, a guy would run to your car window, and you could buy heroin. The guys kept the heroin balloons inside their cheeks, safely tied up in balloons. The theory, I suppose, is that they could swallow them if police showed up, and they would come out the other end, still intact inside the balloons. The song was on Failure’s Fantastic Planet, which I listened to constantly in 1997 when my drug use escalated. I even named a chapter in my book after this song. The album is one of my all-time favorites.
Exit Music (For a Film)- Radiohead
One of the final chapters of Strung Out is titled “Exit Music.” Like so many other songs, this is one that has popped up again and again, and meant different things for me at different times in my life. In 1996’s Romeo + Juliet, this song play over the end credits and I remember the first time I saw that film thinking of how well the song worked there, haunting and beautiful. The song feels like an ending: “Wake/ From your sleep/ The drying of/ Your tears/ Today/ We escape/ We escape.” I was always escaping.
“Cure for Pain”- Morphine
One of the pivotal relationships in Strung Out (and my life) was with “Pete.” On our first date, we ate ramen and saw L.A. Confidential. He drove me back to my apartment in Beachwood Canyon. It was raining and we sat in his car and made out, listening to “Cure for Pain.” When I sat down to write about this relationship, this album, and this song in particular, got me into the time and space I needed to be in. And, thematically, it’s on point: “Someday there'll be a cure for pain/ That’s the day I throw my drugs away/ When they find a cure for pain.”
“One More Hour”- Sleater-Kinney
I love this band, I love this album, I love this song. It captures late ‘90s energy for me. Songs like this were essential when I was writing Strung Out. Music can be a time machine for me. It sets off all my sense memories and I don’t know how I would have written much of this book without songs like this, the ones that unlock all that I’ve stored in my body. And, bonus, it’s a really good song for an impromptu dance party when you need to shift your energy.
“Carry the Zero”- Built to Spill
When this song comes on, I feel it in my stomach, a little flip—longing and nostalgia, the things we want, the things we’ve lost. When I need to write about love, and it was no exception when writing my memoir, this song undoes me. I am not even sure why. Somewhere it’s lodged itself in my cells and hearing it sets off a whole host of feelings. A fast track for tapping in when I need to go deeper.
“Torn and Frayed”- Rolling Stones
As the song says, “Let it steal your heart away.” This song does just that. Another time machine. I mention this song in the book at least twice. I listened to this song in good times and bad and can use it to access memories from multiple points in time.
“Saturday”- Sparklehorse
Sparklehorse is in my top five favorite artists of all time. I was gutted when Mark Linkous died. And the live shows I saw, one of which when I was seven months pregnant, were magical. This song is one of many that Linkous wrote that have become part of my DNA. It brings to mind when I decided to have the baby, my son Atticus, against what seemed like all better judgment. That decision changed the trajectory of my life. Becoming a mother saved my life. “I'd walk to hell and back/ To see you smile/ On Saturday.”
“2:45 AM”- Elliott Smith
There are certain songs that helped me access the darkest moments of my life. This is one of them. It doesn’t make me sad to listen to it now, but it stirs the memories in my body, the memories I needed to write my story with unflinching honesty. Elliott Smith was a master of writing these types of songs, the ones that get in, under your skin, into your body. “Tired of living in a cloud/ If you're gonna say shit now you'll do it out loud/ It’s 2:45 in the morning/ And I'm putting myself on warning/ For waking up in an unknown place/ With a recollection you've half-erased.”
“Turnstile Blues”- Autolux
“I brace myself/ To fall in place/ Over you/ Over you.” I first saw Autolux play in a tiny club in Silverlake when I was still living in Los Angeles. This song and the album it’s on—Future Perfect–were part of my life’s soundtrack circa 2001-2002, especially the good days, the ones when I was sober and trying to put my life back together. (The album didn’t come out until 2004, but I had their demo and went to see them play a lot in L.A. at places like The Silverlake Lounge and Spaceland.) This whole album reminds me of feeling hopeful, and it holds up on listening to it today.
“Metal Heart”- Cat Power
“Metal heart you're not hiding/ Metal heart you're not worth a thing.” Another song from the era of putting my life back together, this time in my post-drug years. The album this song is from—Moon Pix–came out in 1998, but it was in heaviest rotation for me later on, in recovery, after I became a mother and was trying to figure out how to be in a healthy relationship. I spent so many years hiding, trying to protect my heart—and in actuality hurting myself and others, that it was a painful process undoing my behavior, but little by little I did, and this song always reminds me of how far I’ve come.
“Smile”- Smith Westerns
As I wrote the ending of Strung Out, this was one of the songs I listened to over and over. The Smith Westerns’ album, Dye it Blonde, came out in 2011, the same year I met my husband. We were friends at first. I’d met him through someone else I’d dated and, funny enough, he told me—during a dinner party conversation about bad relationships— that I was his “worst nightmare” and he would never date someone like me. I was furious. Less than two weeks later, we started dating and we never looked back. He sent me a playlist (I don’t know if he made it for me, like an old school mix tape, but I preferred to believe that he did!) and this song was on it. I love this song and it will always remind me of him, the one who taught me how to stay. “I should've realized/ Life was such a drug/ It makes me wanna try/ All of my time should've been/ In the end/ With you.”
Erin Khar is known for her writing on addiction, recovery, mental health, relationships, parenting, infertility, and self-care. Her weekly advice column, Ask Erin, is published on Ravishly. Her personal essays have appeared in SELF, Marie Claire, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, and others. She's the recipient of the Eric Hoffer Editor's Choice Prize and lives in New York City with her husband and two kids.
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