“‘I was coming back, from what seemed like a ruin,’ Matt Berninger sings. That’s how you should feel after you publish a book.”
“As a literary scholar, I live in a world of texts, so thinking about my work through music has been a wonderfully provocative experience. “
“Music for me exists around my writing time, and whatever I’m working on seeps into the music I lean toward when I’m not writing, and vice versa.”
“I need silence when I write. My thoughts are rather shy; they want to know the coast is clear.”
“In deciding to write Remember You Will Die exclusively through linked obituaries, I wanted to tell a story through fragments and negative space, sneakily leaning on the reader’s desire for pattern and coherence. “
“As I wrote my book, I immersed myself in music that my subjects might have listened to – adapting a suggestion made by Marcus Rediker that historians should read poetry from the period they are writing about. Since I was already writing about a poem, I used music to transport myself into their evaporated worlds.”
“Writing fiction has always been a matter of psychological survival for me—as has listening to songs repetitively, obsessively.”
“I managed to write a novel set in the decade (the ’90s) when I was in high school and college without including any of the music I listened to over and over back then…”
“I can see my characters tapping their feet to their chosen song or going through their day while ‘Organon’ or ‘All Alone’ plays as incidental music.”
The year’s best and most interesting year-end book lists.