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April 15, 2020
Gina Fattore's Playlist for Her Novel "The Spinster Diaries"
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.
Gina Fattore's novel The Spinster Diaries is a fast-paced, funny, and moving debut.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
"Fattore's lightning-fast prose shines… A humorous and heartfelt look at the expectations women have lived with, and triumphed over, across the centuries."
In her own words, here is Gina Fattore's Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Spinster Diaries:
My comic novel The Spinster Diaries begins when an unemployed, 37-year-old TV writer picks up the phone and gets some bad news … it’s a tumor! Thankfully, it’s benign. But if it’s pressing on the frontal lobe of her brain shouldn’t it really be removed ASAP? Bummed out, swimming in anxiety, and totally not up for brain surgery, she finds herself confined to a level of medical purgatory known as “watch and wait.” This is the most existential option offered by modern medicine, the one we’re all basically doing anyway, watching and waiting, waiting and watching… until eventually we just keel over and die. Anxious thoughts like these plague the narrator of The Spinster Diaries throughout the book, and what better to salve an anxious brain than music?
“Back to the Apple,” Count Basie
Upon first discovering that she has a brain tumor, the TV-writer heroine of The Spinster Diaries finds comfort in rewatching Woody’s Allen Hannah and Her Sisters – a comedy about a stressed-out, overworked TV writer who mistakenly thinks he has a brain tumor. In 2020, post #metoo, it’s hugely complicated to rewatch a Woody Allen movie, but that wasn’t necessarily true 14 years ago in 2006, when the book takes place. And in 1986, when Hannah and Her Sisters was originally released? Back then I was just about ready to pack up and leave Indiana to go to college at Columbia in New York City, and my love for Hannah and Her Sisters was so pure and uncomplicated that I bought the soundtrack – on cassette tape. “Back to the Apple” is the first track on Side 2 of that tape. In the movie, it introduces Mickey, the stressed-out, overworked TV writer character, as he’s besieged by network suits, petulant writers, and misbehaving actors. Mickey is well-known to Hannah (and her sisters) as a hypochondriac, and a second fun, jazzy Count Basie number (“The Trot”) takes over while he undergoes a series of hearing tests at a doctor’s office. The uptempo big-band energy of these numbers instantly tells the audience: “For god’s sake, there’s no need to panic. Everything’s going to be fine! We’re in a Woody Allen movie.”
“Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” The Smiths
As the book’s title implies, the heroine of The Spinster Diaries is perennially single. Not to mention isolated, alienated, and unwilling to try a newfangled thing called JDate. Who better to represent this demographic than The Smiths? So much of the best rock ‘n’ roll music ever made is about relationships gone awry, but what if you’re one of those people who can’t even get to the relationship part? The Smiths will always be there for you.
Music for the Royal Fireworks, Georg Friedrich Handel
In addition to her love for mid-'80s Woody Allen and romantic comedies in general, the narrator of The Spinster Diaries is obsessed with the life and work of 18th century novelist and diarist Frances Burney. Though little known today, Burney was hugely successful in her own time, and her diaries and letters – all 24 volumes of them – document that she spent her 20s and 30s in much the same way most women today spend them: working, hanging out with friends, and getting emotionally fucked around by a wide variety of men who could not commit. The narrator would love to immortalize Burney – whom Virginia Woolf once called The Mother of English Fiction – with a six-part Masterpiece Theatre-style miniseries chronicling her career struggles, financial woes, and romantic difficulties. It’s never explicitly stated in the book, but if this fictional miniseries were ever produced, the music in it would obviously have to be Handel. All Handel. As Burney herself once wrote of a typical day in the late 18th century: “Nothing was played but Handel.”
“Holiday,” Green Day
In a valiant attempt to end her state of unemployment, the narrator endures the agony of “staffing season”– a frantic, four-week period in which established TV writers race around town interviewing for jobs on new and returning network shows. Picture the moment when the chum gets dumped in the water at SeaWorld. Only with driving. A lot of driving. That’s where Green Day comes in. There were no podcasts back then, and NPR just doesn’t cut it when you’re trying to psych yourself up for a job interview, so at some point during the 2006 staffing season, when I was valiantly trying to end my own state of unemployment, I put American Idiot in the CD player of my Volkswagen Beetle convertible, and then it just stayed there until the lease was up and I had to turn the car back in. “Holiday” was a particular favorite because it was obnoxious and rousing enough to make you want to put the top down, but why stop there? Let’s not kid ourselves. If you’re trying to make it from West LA all the way to the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank during rush hour, you’ve got time for a 57-minute rock opera.
“Where You Lead,” Carole King
Success! In June 2006 the narrator leaves the ranks of the unemployed and starts working on a long-running TV show that is particularly beloved by female television viewers. Like the narrator herself, the TV show remains unnamed throughout the book, but I’m just going to leave this here in case it reminds anybody of anything.
“Coles Corner,” Richard Hawley
Now gainfully employed, the narrator swiftly acquires an office crush who loans her a Richard Hawley CD. This song -- the opening track on Hawley’s 2005 album of the same name -- is so melancholy, so nostalgic, so redolent of the past that it’s probably safe to assume that the people on both sides of this transaction – the person loaning the CD and the person borrowing it – are suffering from some sort of undiagnosed, low-grade depression.
Concerto for Harpsichord in F Minor, Second Movement, J.S. Bach
In movies, discussing and sharing music always seems to work like gangbusters as a form of flirtation, and the narrator’s much-beloved Hannah and Her Sisters – wherein an 18th century harpsichord concerto is used to help a middle-aged business manager seduce his sister-in-law – provides a textbook, pre-High Fidelity example of this phenomenon. “I bought that Mozart trio you recommended,” says Lee (Barbara Hershey), moving closer to her trusty turntable. “And the man in the record shop showed me another one that I think you’d love.” Seconds after she drops the needle, Elliot (Michael Caine) identifies this concerto as a favorite, and then, voila… thirteen minutes later they are in bed together.
“Church on White” by Stephen Malkmus
“One Big Holiday” by My Morning Jacket
Unreliable and self-involved, the narrator of The Spinster Diaries doesn’t always do the very best job of describing the people who are guest-starring in her diaries. However, this one sentence tells readers pretty much everything they need to know about Dave, her office crush: “When I asked him what he was doing this weekend, he said he was driving to San Diego to see Stephen Malkmus, and when I asked him why he didn’t just see Stephen Malkmus last week at the El Rey, he said he couldn’t because that exact same night he had to see My Morning Jacket at the Wiltern.” It’s probably also worth noting that if Dave were an actual real person, he would be horrified that I have chosen two very well-known, painfully obvious songs to represent these artists, rather than going for deep cuts.
“Landslide,” Fleetwood Mac
Speaking of painfully obvious… getting older? Afraid of change? Stevie Nicks has a song for you! Since it’s sung by a woman and contains the word “love,” people often assume that it’s about a man, with the most logical candidate being Stevie’s then music-and-life partner Lindsey Buckingham. But in a 2013 interview she clarified that the song, written when she was only 25, was actually about her career – specifically about the soul-searching she did after the face-planting failure of her first record with Buckingham, Buckingham-Nicks. Career indecision and self-doubt have never sounded this good!
“All Over Again,” Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings
This sweet, soulful paean to the pleasures of long-term romantic love warmed my cold, dead spinster heart back in 2006 – and so did the later-in-life success story of soul singer Sharon Jones, who toiled on the fringes of the music industry for decades and only emerged as a frontwoman in her 40s. I was 38 back then and just beginning work on The Spinster Diaries. It was my first novel, my first attempt to be funny on my own terms, and while I didn’t know back then that it would take me 14 years to see it published, I guess somewhere in the back of my mind, I must have known that eventually I was going to need Jones’ story –– the story of a female artist who devoted her life to her craft, who believed in herself when others didn’t, who persevered until the bitter end. Jones died at 60 from pancreatic cancer, but before she passed away, Barbara Kopple made a documentary about her life called Miss Sharon Jones! While promoting the doc, Jones told an interviewer, “Humor, it gets you through a lot of stuff. Just like music to me, it soothes us, it heals us.” My sentiments exactly.
Gina Fattore is executive producer of the USA network series Dare Me. She's also written for Masters of Sex, Parenthood, Californication, Gilmore Girls, and Dawson’s Creek. Before moving to Los Angeles to become a TV writer, she was an assistant editor at the Chicago Reader. Her essays and reviews have appeared there and also in the Millions, Salon, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. In 2015 she delivered a TEDx talk about spinsterhood called “Become What You Believe.” Learn more at ginafattore.com.
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