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May 21, 2020
Nina Renata Aron's Playlist for Her Memoir "Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls"
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.
Nina Renata Aron's memoir Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls is an affecting look at addiction through the lens of love and family.
Booklist wrote of the book:
"In Aron’s candid and heart-wrenching memoir, the gnarled knots of love and addiction are untied and tangled and tied again. . . . Her compassion for victims of addiction never wavers, and her presentation of the addicted people in her life is dynamic and fair. A beautiful, nuanced portrait of living alongside addiction."
In her own words, here is Nina Renata Aron's Book Notes music playlist for her memoir Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls:
This book is about family, addiction, codependency, history, romance, and obsessive love. It’s about how my idea of love was constructed—all the songs, poems, movies, and family stories that informed it. While writing it, I made one very long playlist called “Make it Feel Like This.” Each song had its mood and I wanted each of those moods to be reflected in the book. I made many others, too, and often entered into the day’s writing by pairing a playlist with a section of the book, as one might pair wine and food.
At the center of the book is my relationship with the man I call K, who was briefly my boyfriend when I was young and impressionable and then became my boyfriend again many years later when I was a young mother. He struggled with heroin addiction and I struggled trying to control him. We met in the late 1990s when I was eighteen and working at Tower Records in San Francisco. Many of these songs were important to me then, in my teens and twenties, and to this day they make me feel the kinds of big feelings I’m still learning how to manage.
Over by Alice Boman
I picture a dilapidated seaside motel in very grey weather when I listen to this song. It’s about the balance between light and darkness and I like to think it’s about a difficult love relationship, though I don’t know for sure. There is a wave-like quality to the music, and it captures the mournful mood of knowing that you will likely be pulled back into the darkness of that dyad. The refrain that it’s not over until it’s over is chased here by the repeated, almost resigned confirmation that “it’s not over.” In that line, the way it’s delivered, I hear the simultaneous hope and heartbreak of knowing this isn’t actually the end, that you’re not getting out yet—you’re going to go another round with that person.
You Are the Sunshine of My Life—Chokebore Cover by Exsonvaldes
I’ve listened to this song hundreds of times while writing this book. It’s a cover of a song by Chokebore, one of the very best bands of my 90s. It’s a heavy, driving, slightly frantic but ultimately miserable song about cheating and lying and continually fucking up your own life by messing with love. Maybe it’s about a certain emptiness at the heart of love. This song works like a drug on me: when I hear it, I can feel viscerally the relentless anxiety of keeping my own lies straight in my mind, the substance-addled recklessness of hurting someone’s feelings and not quite caring. It somehow captures the sick thrill and disappointment of discovering just how selfish a person you are. To me, this song is so sexy that it’s also a little bit evil: it’s about the mundane tragedy of infidelity, but you get the sense that the guy likes it a little bit.
Get Well by Nothing
The first minute of this song may be what made me write this book in the first place. It reminds me of the shoegaze music I listened to as a teenager. I listened to this loud in my car when it first came out and although I don’t know what the song is actually about, I heard the line “can’t find it” and imagined it to be about a vein and the name of the song to be about getting well in the drug sense. The song makes me think about rain and heroin and San Francisco, about feeling trapped in my own life, wanting to drive out of it and into another reality, especially on days when the clouds hung low in the sky. Once, I went to see this band live and I stood right in front of the stage as they played this song, wrapped in the deafening fuzz of distortion pedals. The bassist wasn’t wearing any shoes and jumped around in athletic socks like he was at a sleepover.
A Night in The Nursery by Jonathan Fire*Eater
Jonathan Fire*Eater played a big part in my life in the late '90s in New York City. I saw them play a few times. I loved any band using a vintage organ. I ended up playing a '60s Farfisa in a band a few years later. I thought the sound of the late singer Stewart Lupton’s voice was the sexiest thing I’d ever heard. Drunk, I closed my eyes and imagined him speaking that first “come hither” into my ear. Two of the members of the band were in my college Russian history class and once they asked to borrow my notes. I think they’d missed lecture to play a show. I remember that I was proud of how thorough and neurotic my notes were and how neat my handwriting was. They went on to form other bands I also liked but I’ve always been loyal to Jonathan Fire*Eater. The sound of this song, which sort of twinkles itself on, then ushers in the unruliness of a circus, anchored by bass and a mad catalogue of everyday details, still moves me. And though I’m considerably less depressed or goth than I once was, I will always love the line “I eat my breakfast like the food at a wake.”
Half-Lit by Single Mothers
Nights out careening around the city on drugs have the quality of falling down a well. I don’t drink or take drugs anymore, but I still sometimes miss that feeling.
People joke about “beer goggles” or a sense of lust or romance for another person that’s created by being fucked up but I still sometimes pine for the lusty romance of just getting fucked up—abandoning responsibility, tumbling down, feeling at once enclosed, concealed, protected and liberated by the darkness of nighttime. That terrifying, exhilarating sense that you might be heading toward some disaster. It’s never a certainty (until it is), just a possibility, shimmering just out of sight. This song is kind of obnoxious, which makes it even better. This is a middle of the night song, a showing up on someone’s doorstep when you really shouldn’t be there song.
Let Me Come Back by Girls Against Boys
I remember listening to this during the first phase of my relationship with K when I was 18. I don’t know if it was on a mixtape he made me or was just a song that was around at that time. I looked it up—it came out in 1993. It’s a guy enumerating the things he’ll do just to “come back,” and the refrain “let me come back” is deep and rumbling and menacing. He’s admitting he was wrong, but he leans on the word “back” to convince you and it’s almost desperate. I’ve heard a lot of apologies and I like a song where a man is begging, but here you get the slightly scary sense that he’s coming back whether you want him to or not. It sounds like his foot is already wedged in the door.
They Live by Night by The Makeup
This is a different kind of night out song, a big, wild song to shimmy to or put your makeup on to. It makes me feel cool and like I’m going to a party. This record came out when I was finishing high school and when I heard it I thought I wanted my whole life to feel like this. They Live by Night makes it sound like it’s about monsters or some kind of creatures, but it’s also the name of a 1940s film about a bank robber and his lover who go on the run. It was considered a forerunner of Bonnie and Clyde, and I like that this song is named after it. The backup vocals on this one have a trashy glamour and the whole thing makes me want to wear sequins and make unhealthy choices.
What She Said by The Smiths
Morrissey has been rightly canceled but Johnny Marr’s still great and I’m stubbornly hanging on to this 1985 track. This song, about a misanthrope who smokes because she’s “hoping for an early death,” was one that defined my relationship with K. At the time, I was somehow fond of the idea that a certain kind of bad boy partner could show a bookish person like me something about “real” life. The song goes, “What she read, all heavy books she’d sit and prophesize; it took a tattooed boy from Birkenhead to really, really open her eyes.” The “Live in Boston” version of the song is arguably superior, but on this one you can better hear just how delightfully the jaunty guitars are at odds with the overwrought, suicidal lyrics.
Axemen by Heavens to Betsy
It’s always wild to hear this song. I feel like a teenager again. This is an anti-high school song about alienation, rage, white privilege, feeling crazy, and wanting to burn your school down and get the fuck out of town. The summer before senior year, I worked in a weird café run by two handsy brothers. I saved up my tips and bought a dying 1981 Volkswagen Rabbit with no stereo, so I brought my boom box on longer drives and lay it face up in the driver’s seat. It was unwieldy and could suck the juice out of a couple D batteries in the two hours it took to get to Philly. But I listened to this Heavens to Betsy tape and rewound this song over and over. It’s a riot grrrl anthem that made me feel like it was okay to be really angry. In the book, I write about leaving home after senior year to drive across the country with my two best friends. This is one of the songs that powered my departure from New Jersey.
Twisting the Knife by Sorcha Richardson
Writing a memoir made me feel at times like I was turning my life into a movie. I read old journals, old descriptions of my life and played certain scenes back over and over in my mind, summoning greater clarity, figuring out how to describe them. I found myself drawn to music that felt cinematic during this time. Some of it was grand, but some was quieter like Sorcha Richardson, an Irish singer-songwriter whose songs are about small moments of aching and connection. “Would it feel the same, your mouth around my name,” she sings. This one felt readymade for a party scene or for the moment when my old lover reappeared and upended the life I’d made.
Parallels by Big Thief
We make the same mistakes over and over again, but it’s not always because we can’t see that we’re making them. Sometimes we have self-awareness but it’s uneven or grasping or gets diverted or diluted by other needs, desires, compulsions. We just can’t do anything different until we can. I don’t know quite what this song is about, but the questions at the beginning are crushing: “Don’t I make you feel alive? Don’t I give you a good home?” I used to shout questions like those; I wanted my love to fix the person I loved. This song makes me think about wanting to transform out of the reality you’re in but being stuck, and second guessing yourself, thinking maybe the love you have is enough. The plaintive repetition of the line “I see all the parallels” makes me think of the times when we can see the damage we’re doing. We see all the ways we’re messing up but for a long time we can’t stop. It also feels like it could be in a movie.
Tonight by Sybille Baier
When I first discovered German folk singer Sybille Baier, I became a bit obsessed with her. She made reel-to-reel recordings of her quiet, Nico-style songs in the early 1970s but they weren’t released until 2006. I remember reading that she made the recordings after her husband and kids went to bed, a detail I loved, maybe because I know the feeling (and I know many women artists who do too) of stealing away to remind yourself of yourself late at night while the family sleeps. I relate to this song, even though I don’t know its backstory. But I can keenly recall the feeling of returning home from work to find K, this man who, for all his faults, I felt really understood me. Just the banality of a woman coming home from work and finding a man sitting in the kitchen buttering a piece of bread with the cat on his knee—I find it lovely. He can understand the woman’s sorrow. The song is about the quiet pleasure of being legible and known in a way that’s all the more special for going unacknowledged by the world outside your own small home at night.
Anteroom by EMA
For a while, I found this song almost too sad to listen to. A friend put it on a mix for me and it destroyed me. It sounds like Elliott Smith but it’s not. “You know me, I’ll be fine” is a great people-pleaser’s refrain, but the song is mostly stunning for the harmonies at the end, and the line, “If this time through we don’t get it right, I’ll come back to you in another life.” It has always made me think of the deep loves in my life, the aching wish that you could have another chance, and the heavy, bottom-of-the-ocean sadness of the knowledge that you won’t. You might have to wait for another life. That offers a sliver of levity, and yet it’s also hopeless. Beyond hopeless and into absurd—or is it? The idea of the spectral return of an old lover or a reunion, a chance, in some future life is exciting.
Nina Renata Aron is a writer and editor living in Oakland, California. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.
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