“I wish I had a magic wand to wave over the compositions listed here, plucking and splicing the relevant phrase or movement from each, marrying the key of one to the next, neatening without sanitizing.”
“‘The Hills are Alive’ tinkles away under the opening of my second memoir, Hitler and My Mother-in-Law, part of which takes place in Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s snug home-away-from-home high in the Alps. But it’s not your dull and boring dip into WWII. My mother-in-law Patricia Lochridge climbed 6,017 feet to his redoubt just after the hills were alive – with furious defeated Germans.”
“Another Bone-Swapping Event tells the story of an unlikely year when I found myself stuck, due to Peru’s draconian lockdown, in the jungles of the upper Amazon.”
“Like my stories, the songs are pulled from a lot of different genres and time periods. But I think (I hope) they work together to make something weird and pleasing, rather the way I think (I hope!) my collection ultimately does.”
“…music is all over my book—from Judy and Liza to Tori Amos and The Verve Pipe.”
“Making a playlist that feels like the book I’m writing is the very first thing I do – even before I’ve started writing the book itself. Getting the playlist right opens the world I’m writing about up to me, and so it’s as much a part of the worldbuilding as sketching out a character or figuring out what the hell happens in act three.”
“My writing playlist for this book was very much dictated by the December-through-February release of Beach House’s Once Twice Melody. They’re my favorite band, and an 18-track, near-90-minute behemoth from them was of course going to take over my life.”
“I like to think I’m directing a story, just on paper and I sadly don’t have a multi-million dollar budget.”
“Wreck is technically a novel but it’s really just a semi-autobiographical collection of feelings:”
“Because the composition of this book spans over 15 years, my choices are less about remembering what song shaped the writing than thinking about what musical analogue the story evokes.”