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December 17, 2021
Erika Schickel's Playlist for Her Memoir "The Big Hurt"
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.
Erika Schickel's memoir The Big Hurt is fierce and intelligent, an unforgettable book.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"[A] stirring...memoir...the probing examination of love and acceptance crackles with intensity. Schickel’s raw honesty makes this hard to put down."
In her own words, here is Erika Schickel's Book Notes music playlist for her memoir The Big Hurt:
The Greatest – Cat Power
"The Greatest" was like a permission slip for sadness for me. This song came to me in 2008, just as I was figuring out that the funny memoir I wanted to write about boarding school, was not comedy, but tragedy. I had been kicked out of school for sleeping with a teacher, and the shame that resulted dogged me my whole life and shaped my choices.
It took me twelve years to write The Big Hurt and this song has been on my writing playlist the time. If I ever sat down to work and wasn’t sure what I was writing about, I could put this song on and immediately reconnect with that feeling I had, in 2008, when this song cracked me open.
Diamonds and Rust – Joan Baez
Emily introduced me to this album, in 1975, when we were eleven. Emily looked like Joan Baez; she had dark, center-parted hair, bottomless brown eyes and perfect pitch. She could sing this song just like Baez. She was my best friend.
Emily told me the song was about Bob Dylan – and that was the first time I understood how personal art could be. We lay on the rug in her parents’ living room and listened to this anthem for women who have loved and lost, dreaming of the day we would have our own painful, romantic pasts.
A year later my parents divorced, then Emily’s parents split, then her dad started dating my mom, and then he moved in with us. After that, Emily never spoke to me again. I had no idea, lying on Emily’s living room rug, listening to this song, that the first big heartbreak of my life would be her.
Rock Lobster – The B52's
When I was fourteen, my parents packed me off to The Buxton School, a tiny, progressive boarding school housed on an old summer in the Berkshires. It was a place where the sixties hadn’t yet ended. Kids there were listening to Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell. A lot of that music was new to me, so I’ll admit, I embraced a lot of it, and Joni Mitchell’s Blue should be on this list, because she means way more to me than the B52's. But when the B52’s finally found us up in the Berkshires, it changed everything. It was like the school exploded. There was a strict headphone policy all week, but on the weekends, we were allowed to use our speakers. We stuck them in our open windows and blasted "Rock Lobster" clear across the Housatonic Valley. This band blew all the stale air out of those old buildings. It felt like the future was finally happening.
John Sinclair – John Lennon
One day at school, in the spring of my senior year at Buxton, I heard music coming from the empty dining room. I went to have a look, and there was Henry, the mild-mannered music teacher, leg up on a chair, guitar on his thigh, Coricidin bottle on his slide finger, just playing the ever-loving shit out of this protest song, “John Sinclair.” I had just turned eighteen and had no idea what the song was about or who wrote it, just that I suddenly saw that Henry was a stone fox and a badass. Instant crush, duh. Having a crush on a married music teacher felt like a totally safe thing to do.
Alas for me, it wasn’t, and the teacher started writing me love letters. Then we had sex one time in the woods. His wife found our letters and that is how I got kicked out of boarding school. Honestly, now that I think of it, if I had never heard this goddamned song I might have made it to my own graduation and my life would have been completely different. So fuck this fucking song.
But I will say this: the slide guitar still holds up.
Good Houses – Madeline
This is such a sweet, kind-hearted song about how we fall in and out of love and marriage. “Good houses, decisions, you're married with children,” pretty much sums up the chain of events in my early adult life. I made a lot of decisions based on the premise that I was damaged goods.
After I left Buxton I lived with the teacher for a few weeks, until he dumped me. I entered adulthood completely broken and sure that I was worthless. I married the first harmless man who would have me. I didn’t want passion anymore; I just wanted the okey-doke.
“This is not what I had in mind,” is the song’s refrain, and it nails how duped I felt in the dawn of my forties. I could see where the whole thing was going, the children, the best part of the union, would fledge, and I would be left alone with a husband who had become a stranger.
“Sweet cages, I thought you were mine,” Madeline sings, a lazy snare in the background, and that’s exactly how it felt to me. I had built this cage with my own flesh and best hopes. The okey-doke made me want to chew my own leg off.
Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat Op. 106 “Hammerlkavier” - Played by Emil Gilels
The Hammerklavier was the piece that Spade used to woo me out of my marriage. Specifically, it was the adagio sostenuto that he said best described the fatefulness and import of our love. Spade was an odd mix of grandiosity and genuine sweetness. He said I was his Immortal Beloved.
Being Sam Spade’s immortal beloved was an exciting opportunity. It gave me something to be other than an old, washed-up bad girl, or a sad housewife, or a writer who couldn’t figure out how to write her book.
I Go to Sleep - Sia
The summer that I was falling in love with Spade, I also fell in love with Sia’s album, Some People Have Real Problems. The sensual album swept me off my feet at the same time Sam Spade did, and it was the soundtrack to many of my fantasies about him.
Sam said we couldn’t become lovers until I was “free and clear” of my marriage. He would not besmirch our love with cheap adultery, so we spent long afternoons lying side-by-side on his bed, not touching, playing music we loved for each other off my phone. I remember playing “I Go to Sleep” for him, the insomniac who wouldn’t sleep with me, feeling the caress of Sia’s creamy voice and being close enough to smell him. It was one of the most sensual experiences of my life.
Walking the Cow –Daniel Johnston
I wanted to have a song on this list that represents my (now grown) kids, who were there for it all, and who are the true loves of my life.
They had just begun middle and high school when the shit hit the fan in our family. Just because you are someone’s Immortal Beloved doesn’t mean you still don’t have to drive your kids to school.
And thank God for that. The car was a safe space for us. A place where we shared music and had the kinds of conversations we couldn’t have while facing each other at home.
I asked my kids what song brings back that era most poignantly for them. They batted forth a lot of good suggestions: “Miss Ohio’ by Gillian Welch, and all of Yankee, Hotel, Foxtrot by Wilco but (particularly “Heavy Metal Drummer”), “Doorbell” by the White Stripes. But the surprise winner they came back with was “Walking the Cow” by Daniel Johnston.
My eldest said any time they eat magic mushrooms this song plays in their head at some point in the trip, which seems like a genuine nightmare to me. My youngest said the song makes her cry whenever she hears it. Neither of these responses reflects well on my parenting, clearly between life events and this song, I traumatized my children.
But, in spite of all that, they turned out just fine and are living productive adult lives and both have excellent taste in music. Best of all, we three survived as a unit and are more bonded in love than ever. I am eternally grateful for them.
Pissing in a River – Patti Smith
We were about to go out for a smoke when Rhea pointed her camera at me and said, “Smile!” so naturally I gave her the finger. I was wearing her sunglasses and Patti Smith t-shirt I had bought in London. I was sixteen years old. This photograph became the cover of The Big Hurt.
“Pissing in a River” has always been, to me, the ultimate anthem of unrequited love. “What more can I give you to make this thing grow,” Patti wails. At fifteen, banished by her mother into boarding school, I already knew what Patti was signing about.
What about it, you’re going to leave me,
What about it you don’t need me,
What about it I can’t live without you.
What about it I never doubted you
"Defeated and gifted” could have been another title for my memoir.
Muscle, Bone & Blood – Mia Doi Todd
Heartbreak is reductive, infantilizing, and visceral. Every thought you have is of the lost beloved. Your body, robbed of its partner, becomes lumpen and irrelevant, no longer of interest to you or anyone else. It was like being removed from the nipple – I wanted to suck my thumb again for the first time in forty years.
Heartbreak is unrelenting. It robs the future of promise and renders the present too painful to be awake for. Mia Doi Todd knows what I’m talking about. This song gets at the self-hatred inside of heartbreak, and at the feeling of frantic desperation to glue the broken relationship back together at any cost, because you don’t want to face the fact that if left alone, you will see that the broken thing is you.
Sonido Del Charango – Don Evangelino Murayay
A friend introduced me to a shaman who was holding an Ayuhuasca ceremony in Santa Monica. Ayuhuasca is a psychedelic plant medicine concocted from a vine and a shrub that grow in the Amazon. I had heard Ayuhuasca made your barf, but my purge came in tears.
I experienced the kind of pure sadness that I had only ever felt before in dreams and I wept without pause for close to five hours, as I roamed the dark rooms of my own benighted soul.
The shaman understood the rhythms of the medicine and kept the sounds subtle and organic through the deepest most strenuous parts of the journey. I was only dimly aware of the room around me as I journeyed through the dark, experiencing visions and revelations that brought me back to tears again.
Then, just as the darkness was beginning to thin, I heard these crisp, sweet notes in the air, ringing like a morning bell, and I found myself stepping lightly into a new dawn.
What I was hearing, I found out later, was an Ikaro, played by the legendary curandero Don Evangelino Murayay. The brightness of his strings were almost thirst-quenching, and I felt flooded with light and the most perfect, effortless love I had ever experienced in my life. That love that has lit my path ever since.
Erika Schickel is the author of You're Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom (2007). Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, LA Weekly, Bust Magazine, Salon, The Daily Beast, HuffPost, The Chicago Tribune and more. She lives and writes in Los Angeles.
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