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February 12, 2021
Alison Wisdom's Playlist for Her Novel "We Can Only Save Ourselves"
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.
Alison Wisdom's novel We Can Only Save Ourselves is as unsettling as it is imaginative and lyrical. An impressive debut.
Booklist wrote of the book:
"Eerie and powerful. . . . the hypnotic storytelling and exploration of Alice’s character—and the character of Alice’s entire town—will draw readers in."
In her words, here is Alison Wisdom's Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel We Can Only Save Ourselves:
My debut novel We Can Only Save Ourselves follows a teenage girl named Alice Lange, who gives up her conventional future as a mother and a housewife and runs off with an enigmatic stranger named Wesley, who is living with a group of young women all searching for enlightenment and authenticity. But Wesley’s methods to achieve these things grow more and more dangerous, and tensions among the girls rise. Alice’s story is narrated by the mothers of the neighborhood she has left behind, and while they worry for Alice’s safety and wonder what’s become of her, they resent the tear she has made in their perfect world. This is a book about reckoning with the inevitability of danger and the fight to retain control, about desire and longing, about regret and the passage of time, about love and obsession and placing your bets on the wrong dude, and these are all songs that capture those elements in some way.
“Our House” by Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young
The mothers who narrate the book pride themselves on their perfect little neighborhood, and there’s a lot of talk about how happy they are, which makes the upbeat “Our House” and its happily-ever-after innocence a good anthem for them. Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell’s home in Laurel Canyon was a “very, very, very fine house with two cats in the yard” and the evening sun illuminating the windows, shining just for Joni. It’s a fairy tale of domestic bliss, all elements of their home working in chorus to showcase the lovely, golden life they share. “Life used to be so hard,” Graham sings, “now everything is easy.” Uhhh here too, the mothers insist. Our house is just as fine, and our lives are just as easy. But you can’t trust everything they say.
“The Trapeze Swinger” by Iron & Wine
In this song, Sam Beam’s speaker repeatedly asks his listener to remember him: happily, fondly, mistakenly, seldomly. It’s so desperate and mournful, this begging and the implicit regret, that even the memories of joy the speaker shares are tinged with melancholy. It’s like there’s such an ache in the song that even those past joys feel almost too tender to talk about, like a wound that hasn’t healed, and so the happiness of the earlier verses is presented in an elliptical, highly imagistic way. The regret lingers just beneath the surface until the song’s closing verses when it becomes more explicit, as if he can no longer keep them from his listener. Similarly, the mothers of Alice’s neighborhood try to keep their own feelings of disappointment and longing hidden, but every now and then, those feelings threaten to reveal themselves. They want Alice to remember them, not only because they want the best for Alice but because if Alice remembers them—fondly, happily—it’s a validation of their lives and the choices they’ve made for themselves, even though their choices are ones that Alice, in her running away, rejects.
“Making Pies” by Patty Griffin
When Alice was a child, she and her mother used to bake things for their neighbors corresponding with every season: pumpkin bread in the fall, soft sugar cookies in the spring, and so on. When Alice leaves and Mrs. Lange doesn’t know where she has gone, she goes on a baking spree, making all kinds of breads and cookies to leave on her neighbors’ doorsteps. It’s a way to keep busy, but it’s also, for Mrs. Lange, a spiritual kind of gesture; it’s an act of creation that isn’t meant to last, but it offers nourishment and a momentary joy. She doesn’t have a daughter to care for, but she can do this—she can create something to offer those around her. “You could cry or die,” Patty sings, “or just make pies all day.”
“Garden Song” by Phoebe Bridgers
Here, Phoebe mixes images of beauty with death and decay, growth with destruction. In other words, this song is about growing up. When else besides the end of childhood do we have such a strong sense of life beginning and ending at the same time? (Actually, the answer is childbirth, but that’s a different book, haha.) “Garden Song” is ethereal, navigated by dream logic, which is to say by almost no logic at all—time is slippery here, with the future and the past occurring almost simultaneously. We Can Only Save Ourselves explores some of the same central themes—the end of one era and the darker beginning of another and the almost magical nature of time passing—but it’s the closing lines that get me. “I get everything I want,” Phoebe sings. “I have everything I wanted.” But there’s a defiance, an obstinance here, hands clenching around a lie, that makes it impossible to believe her fully, and it’s on this note that the song ends. This is the same kind of stubborn insistence practiced by the mothers in Alice’s neighborhood, as they cling tightly to their assertion they have the lives they always wanted.
“Mirrorball” by Taylor Swift
Sorry, can’t have a list without Taylor! “I’m a mirrorball,” Taylor sings here, “I’ll show you every version of yourself tonight.” At one point in the novel, Wesley tells Alice that he’s a mirror—everything she sees in him is a reflection of herself. But Wesley is a liar, a master manipulator, and this is just one of his attempts to blur the lines between himself and the girls’ selves. We’re all the same, he tells them, but the truth is that a cult leader wears down the selves of his followers until all that’s left is his self in place of their own. Men like Wesley love to see themselves reflected in every shiny surface, and for Wesley, there’s nothing shinier than a girl who, with the right encouragement, might learn to reflect exactly what he wants. And so Alice becomes the mirror—she wants to make Wesley love her best at all the girls, she wants Wesley to see something he can treasure, which is just a version of himself.
“Heads Gonna Roll” by Jenny Lewis
I love everything about this song, from the dreamy vocals to the evocative imagery, and there’s a sense of glamour and doom that I think We Can Only Save Ourselves possesses as well. When Jenny sings, “I hope the sycophants in Marrakesh make you feel your very best. Anonymity must make you blue,” she might as well be talking about Wesley. But beyond that, we’ve got all this imagery of things ending: obviously, heads are gonna roll, but we also have the ringing bell, heaven and hell, a graveyard, bookends, skulls. Part of WCOSO deals with a sheltered population having to reckon with the certainty of death and doom—we can’t escape the things, and the control and security we cherish are illusory. So might as well drink until they close because heads gonna roll, baby.
“Seventeen” by Sharon Van Etten
The mothers in Alice’s neighborhood who narrate the story of her disappearance often remark how glad they are to be where, and who, they are now—grown-up, mature women with lovely homes and husbands and children, years removed from the pain and insecurity of being a teenager. But every now and then we get a glimpse of wistfulness and nostalgia for who they used to be. Here, Sharon Van Etten addresses her younger self, marveling that she “used to be seventeen.” “Now you’re just like me,” she sings to herself. “My shadow…[you’re] afraid that you’ll be just like me.” The mothers worry about the missing Alice but also resent her for choosing a different life, for insisting on a freedom they themselves have traded in for a more grown-up life, for being afraid of ending up like them. Like everything, there’s a trade-off for being seventeen. There’s freedom but insecurity, adventure but instability. As it turns out, no matter how old you are, there’s always something you find yourself longing for.
“Geyser” by Mitski
This is a song about obsession and a loss of control, which makes it perfect for WCOSO. It begins almost dirge-like, Mitski’s voice faraway and otherworldly, but the song’s smoothness is suddenly interrupted by a jarring screech. Mitski keeps singing, professing her dedication to her love, but it’s too late—that interruption signals something isn’t right here. Something bad is coming. The song builds from there, as the lyrics change from “you’re the one I want” to “you’re the one I’ve got,” and the emotion swells, an eruption, as things begin to spiral; there’s a sense of danger that accompanies her commitment and love. At the beginning of the novel, Alice watches a film in her high school class about Mt. Vesuvius, and she finds it horrible to think about the destruction, but there’s something alluring about the power of it as well. Once a volcano—or a geyser—erupts, there’s no undoing it. It’s a marvel and a horror all at once. There’s something in Alice that wants to lose control, and she finds that opportunity in her relationship with Wesley: the volcano erupts, the geyser goes off, and Alice is lost to it.
“American Weekend” by Waxahatchee
“You’re magnetic, and I cannot keep up…you’re a figment,” Katie sings, “I believed it,” and it’s hard not to think of a different version of Alice, one who sees through Wesley’s bullshit and understands the world he has conjured for his girls: “It’s dark now,” she says, “but we made it that way, with what we drink and how we think and what we say.” People who have read the book ask me if Wesley corrupted Alice or if Alice was always “bad” from the start; I think the answer is that Alice has always had a darkness inside her, and Wesley just brought it out. He’s no good for the girls, and together they make choices they might not have made without his influence—he tells them that the outside world is bad and dark, that they alone are the embodiment of goodness, but the truth is that together they are the ones who create the darkness, and eventually they’ll take that darkness outside of the bungalow, out of the desert they escape to, and let it grow.
“Summer’s End” by John Prine
Even though they don’t share too many scenes together, one of the central relationships in the book is the one between Mrs. Lange and Alice; in fact, they spend most of the book apart, with Mrs. Lange missing her daughter, wondering what she did wrong as a mother, and feeling alienated from the other mothers in her neighborhood who still have their children at home. In John Prine’s poignant “Summer’s End,” summer is ending—“the swimming suits are on the line just drying”—and he, too, like Mrs. Lange is missing someone. “Come on home,” he says. “No, you don’t have to be alone, just come on home.” The song is heartbreaking (made even more so by Prine’s death last year), but Prine sings it good-naturedly; there’s no shame or judgment in his voice—he knows the person is gone for their own complicated reasons. Instead, there is only the sincere desire for his listener to come on home. Similarly, Mrs. Lange doesn’t understand why Alice has gone, but she decides it doesn’t matter. The only things that does is Alice coming back to her.
Born, raised, and based in Houston, Texas, Alison Wisdom has an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, received a novel-writing grant from Wedgwood Circle, and was a finalist for this year's Rona Jaffe Award. She has attended Tin House and the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, where she was a finalist for the Emerging Writers Fellowship. Alison's short stories have been published in Ploughshares, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Indiana Review, and more.
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