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February 14, 2020
Kathleen Donohoe's Playlist for Her Novel "Ghosts of the Missing"
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, Heidi Julavits, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Kathleen Donohoe's Ghosts of the Missing is a smart and engaging literary thriller.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
"Donohoe is skilled at cultivating the pervasively disconcerting and melancholy atmosphere that surrounds both Culleton and Adair. There is an impressive weaving of science and mysticism so that when the reader realizes the 'fact' behind a family's curse, it stays just as foreboding as it was when it was just fantastical...A meditation on loss and the power of memory and tradition. A reflective tale of a town's and a girl's histories through the lens of rumor, storytelling, and ghosts"
In her own words, here is Kathleen Donohoe's Book Notes music playlist for her novel Ghosts of the Missing:
Ghosts of the Missing began as the story of a disappearance. In October 1995, twelve-year-old Rowan vanishes from a small town in the Hudson Valley and fifteen years later, the case is not just cold, but unsolved. The novel is about what is like to live with no answers, for her mother, for the half-brother she barely knew and for her best friend, Adair.
Though the novel is centered on Rowan’s disappearance, in the course of writing the book, its universe expanded. Ghosts of the Missing moves through different eras to tell the story of the town of Culleton and its legacy.
1. “Seoithín Seó” by Roisin Elsafty
Culleton, New York was founded by Irish immigrants who came to the Hudson Valley to work, the men in the foundry and the women as domestic servants in the beautiful estates along the river. Early in the book, there is a scene where the young Irish women leave their attic rooms to meet in the dark woods and practice an old folk custom remembered from Ireland.
“After entering the woods, they called up a song in Irish, the first language, the one they rarely spoke anymore.”
The song is intentionally not named in the book because I liked the idea of the women, years, later, telling the story and each one remembering a different song. Seoithín seó is one of the many I imagined it might be. The title, (pronounced sho-een show) translates as basically hushaby, hush. It’s a lullaby about the changeling myth, in which a mother vows to protect her sleeping baby from being taken away by the fairies.
2. “Dream” by John Cage
Adair’s father was a talented artist (as is Adair). A hemophiliac who contracted HIV from blood products, he dies of AIDS when Adair is very young. Years later, her mother succumbs to AIDS as well. All of her father’s paintings and sketches have come to Adair, and she studies them, trying to understand who they were when they first fell in love. It would be this music, light as water, that played in the background as he worked and she posed, artist and subject, both unaware that an illness they haven’t yet heard of will take their lives.
3. “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” (Cyndi Lauper) by Rosie Carney
I often listened to this as I was getting ready to write. Cyndi Lauper’s version and its iconic video were released in 1983, the year Rowan and Adair were born. They would have grown up knowing this song. But if it was a sense of the ‘80’s I wanted, I’d have chosen Lauper’s voice. Instead, it’s this mournful version by Rosie Carney that I turned to, again and again. In particular, there’s a line in the song that I never noticed in Lauper’s girl-anthem: “Some boys take a beautiful girl. And hide her away from the rest of the world.”
With any novel, there are scenes that are in the writer’s mind and not in the book and this is one of them. Though it’s time-bending since this video wasn’t on YouTube until 2015, after the events of the novel, I still envisioned Adair, around her early twenties, discovering Carney’s song and thinking of Rowan, fate unknown. And wondering. Is that what happened? Is she alive, somewhere?
4. “Return to Innocence” by Enigma
My So-Called Life was a critically acclaimed television show that was famously cancelled after one season because of low ratings. Its very ardent fans were left reeling. Rowan and Adair would have been nearly eleven when the show first aired, in August of 1994. On the young side for it and I think absolutely Rowan would not have had the patience for it. (The X-Files would have been her show). But Adair would have loved it. The show debuted a month after she lost her mother and went to live with her uncle, who did not police the shows she watched.
My So-Called Life is about high school, and crushes and friendship, but it’s also about a family with two parents and a little sister. Much space was given to the fraught relationship between Angela and her mother. In one episode, Angela’s mother wants her to participate in a mother-daughter fashion show and Angela does not want to. This song is played at the end when the conflict has been resolved. It’s a peaceful moment, when everyone is content. Adair, who has always known she was born HIV positive, would have watched like an anthropologist.
5. “X-Files Theme” by Mark Snow
See above. Rowan would have watched the X-Files religiously, definitely a Mulder and not a Scully. The music is instantly recognizable to anyone even slightly familiar with the show. Hear it and you pause. You look around. This music would have cued Rowan’s senses. She believed there was a world besides the one she could see. My own favorite episode, and not coincidentally, Rowan’s, is the one where Mulder and Scully are after a serial killer who has been murdering fake psychics—and they encounter a real one, though his sole ‘gift’ is that he can predict your death.
6. “As I Lay Me Down” by Sophie B. Hawkins
"As I Lay Me Down" was released in 1995 and became a big hit that summer, just months before Rowan vanished. She and Adair would have heard it on the radio constantly. The song is about loss and about sensing the nearness of the person who is gone. Before Rowan disappeared, Adair would have thought of her parents when she heard it. After Rowan, it would have taken on a kind of prescience.
7. “Dreaming of the Bones” by Sinead O’Connor
I don’t link this song to any one scene but instead see it as an overall expression of one of the book’s major themes, and that is loss through death, which is different than mourning someone who has disappeared. A parent is calling out to their child, promising that though they’re gone, they will always be near. It speaks to the comfort that can be found in the belief that the dead are watching over the living and conversely, to the pain of not knowing whether a loved one is dead or alive.
8. “The Ballinasloe Fair” by Joe Burke
Traditional Irish music was a constant as I wrote the book, given the Irish roots of the characters. There is a pub in the town of Culleton that holds seisúns (pronounced sessions) where musicians play traditional Irish music together. Often they’re informal. Adair’s grandfather played the button accordion. The musicians would play songs like this reel, which all of them would know.
9. “Nowhere Man” by the Beatles
This song is for Janus, Catholic priest turned former priest and AIDS activist. He became a close friend of Adair’s mother. They met when she became the first woman to attend his support group for those who were HIV positive. He remains in Adair’s life, functioning almost as guardian angel, though he’d reject that comparison. Nowhere Man was released in the U.S. in 1966. Janus was a seminarian. I think of him in the summer, listening to this song, the first one the Beatles sang that was not about romantic love, and connecting to the lyrics, aware on some level that the priesthood was the wrong choice.
10. “I Know You by Heart” by Eva Cassidy
Rowan’s mother, Evelyn, not only loses her daughter—to what exactly she doesn’t know—but she is blamed. Blamed for not calling the police sooner. Blamed by those who believe she is responsible. Evelyn is not sentimental or self-pitying. Probably, she would never admit to listening to this song. But she would, alone, late at night.
Kathleen Donohoe and Ghosts of the Missing links:
Kirkus review
Publishers Weekly review
also at Largehearted Boy:
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