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August 20, 2020
Claire Phillips' Playlist for Her Memoir "A Room with a Darker View"
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.
Claire Phillips' A Room with a Darker View is an inventively told and wholly original memoir.
Steve Erickson wrote of the book:
"As heroic as it is original....Reading A Room With a Darker View, you won’t shake it from your mind; finishing it, you won’t shake it from your memory."
In her own words, here is Claire Phillips's Book Notes music playlist for her memoir A Room with a Darker View:
My mother struggled from an undisclosed mental health disorder most of her adult life. She taught me to read when I was three. She was the classic bored housewife, an Oxford graduate in law, with not much to occupy her mind while my astrophysicist father, a lucky contestant of the 1960s brain drain, worked with Nobel Prize winners on superconductivity at Bell Labs the fabled research arm of AT&T in New Jersey. Without her determination, this memoir would not exist.
Our relationship was contentious from the start. Her animosity toward her eldest child had no name. It wasn’t until I was twenty-five that I discovered the extent of her troubles. Paranoid schizophrenia is no longer listed in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder). Despite the unfortunate lack of treatment of her illness, she worked for several years as a criminal defense lawyer primarily in NYC and New Jersey, until post-divorce she could not longer manage a persistent psychosis without treatment.
For decades, she managed to live independently in New Jersey, enduring several relapses, typically the consequence of the lowered dosage of her medication ordered by a well-meaning, naive psychiatrist. Separated from us, due to the high cost of health insurance for pre-existing conditions, it wasn’t until 2011 that she would come to live with us in California. However her time with her adult children would be brief.
This playlist reflects on our tumultuous past, on those secrets that separated us and bound us together in an inexorable struggle for light.
1. “Rose Garden,” by Lynn Anderson
In 1970 shortly after my family emigrated from England to the Garden State, Lynn Anderson’s crossover version of Joe South’s country song climbed the charts. The mellifluous sound of Anderson’s voice playing on the AM Radio of our blue Ford station wagon, as our mother shepherded us about the white suburban enclave of Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, came to represent this nearly idyllic time. Peering out the windows of the Ford station wagon, I would exalt in the green hilly scenery, pondering hetero-normative defying lines like: “I could promise you things like a big diamond ring.” At home hot pink rhododendrons framed our two-story neocolonial tract home, a substitute for roses. Wafting in and out of the frame in bright pink lipstick and a Marlo Thomas hair flip, my mother completed the picture. Years later I would discover the song had been based on the semi-autobiographical novel, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, by Joanne Greenberg, that helped popularize treatment for mental illness at a time when it was strongly stigmatized. If only, we were to heed the call of this song.
2. “Bridge Under Troubled Water,” by Simon and Garfunkel
Music was taboo in my family, until about 1976, when a stereo system suddenly appeared in our stark living room with its modern chrome and glass, white leather furniture, off limits to my brother and me. My father would relax to his favorites, lounging between long stints at work: Blood Sweat & Tears, Tom Jones. But it was the title track of S&G’s fifth album that made the biggest impression. At 2 am, in defiance of our mother’s rigid social prohibitions — no music, no friends, no booze — my strikingly handsome father would return from a local bar, to turn the volume way up on this gospel-inspired song, the orchestral crescendo blasting through the house, loud treble jolting everyone awake. “Like a bridge over troubled water…” Simon’s signature falsetto blared defiantly throughout our tract house. The source of the trouble in our home appeared obvious. Less apparent, however, was which discordant member would be the one to “lay it down.”
3. “Always Crashing in the Same Car,” by David Bowie
My relationship with my mother was a sinister one. From time that I was 8, she would assault me with strange crude remarks: “All you have are your eyes and hair. Without that you are nothing.” Then later: “Don’t let a boy stick himself inside of you.” The obstacles she faced at 35 in an effort to find work as a criminal defense lawyer, first in England for two difficult years, and then later in NYC and NJ, only served to intensify her illness. To counter my mother’s verbal and occasional physical assaults, I found a violent language of my own. Upper-middle class family violence rarely makes the family tree. In the late '70s while my mother and I were at home, repeatedly “crashing in the same car,” my father was fine tuning his experimental equipment in the terahertz or submillimeter range: a frequency band that lies between the regions easily observed by radio telescopes and optical telescopes used. Bowie’s experimental album Low and its defining use of low-frequency oscillators coupled with Tony Visconti’s use of an Eventide Harmonizer, altering and playing back sounds simultaneously captures both the intensity of my family’s machinations and the technology of the era.
4. “Rapper’s Delight” by Sugar Hill Gang
Ronald Reagan was campaigning for the US Presidency. My best friend at Kent Place, an all-girls private day school, was thrilled that finally “someone with class was running for office.” “He looks good in a suit,” I was informed when I asked about her parent’s excitement for this regressive campaigner. This didn’t exactly square with my idea of an expensive analytical education. By my junior year, I was suicidally depressed. If I wasn’t being accused of stealing my mother’s legal secrets and selling them to district attorney on weekends, I was failing to assimilate into a social reality that I could not afford—vacations to Vail or Switzerland during spring break, for example. I rarely slept at night. After school, I would crash for hours, reanimating before midnight, when I had the house to myself. A chink of light would flood my disaffected chamber. Tuning my radio alarm clock to WHBI of Newark, NJ, smoking Marlboro Lights and listening ecstatically to Mr. Magic’s radio show, I inoculated myself from my woes through the joyous sounds of the Sugar Hill Gang: hip-hop artists introduced to me by a Black student at Kent Place, whose willingness to bring a “boom box” to school and enlighten us white spoiled girls about the novelties of “ghetto life” provided some reprieve from the endless replay of '70s rock on almost every turntable and from every radio station in white suburbia.
5. “Christine” by Siouxsie and the Banshees
Music is a gift bestowed upon us by others. Artist and media critic Mark Taylor, who has kept me in music from the time we met at S.F.S.U., first introduced me to punk music icon Siouxsie Sioux. We listened to her endlessly, during moody encounters in the respective rooms of our shared Victorian flats or out at clubs. Mark’s fearlessness in the face of depression, suicidal feelings, the gamut of what outliers come to feel growing up queer, trans, biracial or “lunatic,” as Esmé Weijun Wang describes the “collected schizophrenias,” was always rooted in his embrace of singular artists. We were entranced with the layered liquid sounds of the electronic organ and strong flanging effect produced by delayed signals of Siouxies’s kaleidoscopic tribute to disintegration and the female dark arts. A romanticized view of illness perhaps, my mother’s battle with schizophrenia, like Siouxie’s confronting lyrics, read to me like the hellscape of female agency denied.
6. “Pop Life,” by Prince
Later when I went to live with my father in California, the possibilities of music burst open, from the early punk of the Clash, to the Slits, to the Gang of Four, nothing would be the same. Whether I was hanging out at the trans friendly 181 Club in the Tenderloin on Thursday nights, dancing to Prince awkwardly in my uniform then of a gray pencil skirt and red plaid shirt, taking classes from Angela Davis at San Francisco State University or writing surrealist poetry under the aegis of the Language poets, a kind of louche, semi-ecstatic experimentation undergirded most of my undertakings. During these years, moving back and forth between SF and LA, systematically avoiding my mother as she sought medical treatment in the wake of a devastating divorce, the extended version of this psychedelic synth by the artist whose defiance of easy racial and gender categories is just as relevant today as when the song was first produced in 1985: a call to joy-making that can never be denied.
7. “Varombo Kuvarombo,” by Thomas Mapfumo and The Blacks Unlimited
My mother had an adversarial relationship with her father, Mike Gelfand, a doctor who specialized in subtropical diseases. Born in then-Rhodesia, my mother she left to go to boarding school at eleven, never to return. Despite my mother’s clear disappointment in a father who seemed oddly competitive with his first-born, after his death in 1990, I determined a way to spend three months in Zimbabwe. Here I discovered that all around his house were gifts from patients and friends. A number of mbira, a musical instrument made of wood with staggered metal tines, played during traditional ceremonies by N’anga, Shona healers, caught my attention. During my three-month visit, wherever I went was the mbira-based music of the activist Thomas Mapfumo, credited for elevating the status of this traditional music integral to Shona ritual. With this song, The Poor to the Poor (1989), Mapfumo criticized whites for holding onto economic power, making it impossible for Black independence to succeed, while lamenting black political corruption. Muagabe’s stranglehold on the country would soon become legendary. Traveling alone throughout the countryside, meeting with local activists, these months were among my happiest.
8. "Nessun dorma" from Turandot (The Three Tenors in Concert 1994), by Luciano Pavarotti
For a long while, my mother’s harrowing relapses into psychosis would end with a startling victory. A new antipsychotic or understanding doctor would pave the way for a fresh start. After one particularly long episode that resulted in her being prescribed anti-depressants for the first time, she was no longer anhedonic, and was finally able to take pleasure in music. She was endlessly reaching out to us kids, giddy with the pleasure of her latest pop culture find: the Italian operatic tenor, Luciano Pavarroti. She found utter joy in listening to his operas and arias, replaying her VHS tapes of his performances multiple times a week. I have little affection for opera but in honor of my mother, I chose this aria for its obvious passion, celebratory meaning and great popularity with Puccini music fans.
9. “How To Disappear Completely,” by Radiohead
Each time my mother became hospitalized for her illness, I was beside myself. Invariably doctors would administer the wrong medicine and she would be required to begin a precarious treatment all over again. Despite having purchased insurance with a million dollar indemnity clause, she would routinely be ousted from the psychiatric hospital before she was well enough to live on her own. Over the course of these harrowing months, I often felt that Mom might never recover and would feel intensely undone. My angst was no secret. Luckily, she would recover and as a family we would go on. Then finally the treatment no longer worked. After being dispensed the wrong dose of her prescription, she relapsed and did not recover. Her time was coming, despite many medical interventions. The spectral wail of York’s craftily recorded voice, layered with an eerie guitar riff and accompanied by the ethereal wavering sounds of the early electronic instrument, the ondes marentot, reminds me that departure can be a long one. For those we don’t fully see until they are faded from view, there could be no better paean.
10. “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is,” by Irma Thomas
A chronic illness can take its toll. In the end the symptoms of my mother’s illness were roughly the same. Everything smelled bad. She was ashamed to be seen in public. Someone was out to get her. Eating, too, was extremely harrowing for a variety of reasons. The symptoms of her illness from the time of her first episode had not changed in 50 years. Despite the lack of treatment for her disease, my mother endeavored to make a difference. Working on behalf of immigrant clients to become citizens under Amnesty. Appearing in court on behalf of hundreds as a public defender. Raising two children as best she could. Loving her only grandchild. I struggled to love her as well as I should have. Not understanding that she would soon be gone. Revising this memoir, I must’ve listened to the rendition of this R&B made famous by Irma Thomas dozens of times, mesmerized by the hypnotic glockenspiel intro and antiphonic gospel led chorus.
Claire Phillips is the author of the novella Black Market Babies and recipient of the American Academy of Poets, First Prize. Her writing has appeared in Black Clock magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, and MotherBoard-Vice, among other places. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and given a notable mention in The Best American Essays 2015. She teaches writing at CalArts, the Southern California Institute for Architecture (SCI-Arc), University of California Irvine, and is Director of the Los Angeles Writers Reading Series at Glendale College. She holds a M.A. in Creative Writing from New York University, and a B.A. in English from San Francisco State University.
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