“Fiction writers always reveal themselves in their work, whether they mean to or not. I’m obsessed with music, and it’s the main way I have shown my hand in all three of my novels…”
“You know happy-sad songs? Songs that sound happy but, if you pay attention to the lyrics at all, will completely devastate you? This is a happy-sad book. Sounds sparkly and upbeat. Is in fact a total downer.”
“I don’t listen to music while I write, but it plays a big part in my process while I’m away from my desk—both in teaching me about my characters (what they might have been listening to at the time) and in helping me sink into the mood of a scene.”
“When you’ve had genuinely diverse playlists in constant rotation for as long as you can remember, it’s hard to associate the writing of a piece of fiction with a single piece of music. On the other hand, people like me are happy to suggest a song for every occasion or for, in this case, each story in a collection…”
“This playlist features both English- and Arabic-language songs to represent the dichotomy of the two cultures and what it’s like living in between.”
“After some friends learned I was making a playlist for my memoir A Silent Treatment, they asked if John Cage’s ‘4’33’ would be included. But my mom’s silent treatment seems more like noise music. It’s aggressive. The distortion shifts unpredictably. It feels punishing.”
“These songs are a combination of soundtrack, characterization, and glimpses into what didn’t make it on the page—as important for my novel-in-omissions as what the reader does get to see.”
“To make this playlist, I wondered what the characters in my stories – mostly women yearning for a life that contained some version of agency within it – would enjoy listening to. I realized after I’d put the playlist together that many of these songs have a story behind them of a woman triumphing (sometimes the woman triumphing is me, as you’ll read below).”
“At a time in which many people are asking how to make their voices heard in the face of large-scale injustice, I hope that the book’s themes and sensibility will resonate (and that the music included here will, too).”
“I spent nearly a decade writing and re-writing this book, and in that time I racked up thousands of records and ticket stubs and hours streamed on the six or seven road trips I took all the way across the country and back between 2019 and 2024. There was no other way to write a novel about a cross-country concert tour.”