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August 31, 2020
David James Poissant's Playlist for His Novel "Lake Life"
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.
David James Poissant's first book, The Heaven of Animals, was impressive, and his debut novel Lake Life is a tour de force. Heartbreaking and filled with characters that will haunt you long after you read the book, this is one of the year's finest novels.
Booklist wrote of the book:
"Masterfully crafted...Simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious, the novel's brisk pace and perfectly executed moments make for a stunning, unforgettable story...Poissant's compassion for his characters generates empathy for even their most disastrous actions. A totally engrossing story of the long shadows cast by troubled relationships and the glimmer of hope that dawns after painful confrontation."
In his own words, here is David James Poissant's Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Lake Life:
Lake Life is a novel about what it means to be a family. It’s also a snapshot of life on a lake in North Carolina in 2018, that haunted slice of the Trump administration when we knew things were bad and getting worse, but before we knew how bad things would get. And it’s my love letter to a lake and a region of the country that, despite its complications, I love deeply.
The songs I leaned on, as I wrote, vary in style and sound. For me, some of these songs evoke a character. Others speak to a sense of place. Some match a mood I tried to capture in a particular scene. All are among my all-time favorite songs, those I return to, again and again, in writing and in life.
1. R.E.M., “Nightswimming,” Automatic for the People
Growing up between Atlanta and Athens, Georgia in the 80s and 90s, the choice of favorite band was more or less made for me. Decades later, R.E.M. remains my favorite band, and “Nightswimming” remains my favorite song by that band. Hearing it, I’m transported to a time when my closest friend and I snuck out at night to swim at the beach, at lakes, or in the neighborhood pool, with or without clothes. Young as we were, I was already attuned to singer and lyricist Michael Stipe’s interpretation of the act not as something rebellious, but as something sacred. “It’s not like years ago,” he sings, “the fear of getting caught, the recklessness and water.” At the center of Lake Life are two brothers divided by politics but bound by love. In one scene, they recollect their own night swims, and, writing that scene, this song was very much on my mind.
2. Sufjan Stevens, “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!,” Illinois
This feels like cheating, as I referenced this song in my Book Notes for my first book, The Heaven of Animals, but the song is imbedded in my imagination, and its essence continues to burrow its way into my fiction. Michael and Thad, the brothers in Lake Life, may as well be the brothers in this song. As Stevens sings, “Though we have sparred, wrestled and raged, I can tell you I love him each day.” I can imagine Thad thinking these very words about his brother.
3. Great Lake Swimmers, “Your Rocky Spine,” Ongiara
“I was lost in the lakes and the shapes that your body makes.” So opens my favorite Great Lake Swimmers song, the first track on the third album of this Canadian folk group. The song is an extended metaphor that tangles in on itself, so that, lost in the song, you’re no longer sure whether the body is a metaphor for a landscape or the landscape is a metaphor for a body. Of course, that’s the point. Lake Life opens with a drowning, a body tethered to water from the first chapter. Throughout the novel, characters wait for the body to rise. But, whether the body rises or not, the water’s had its way, the two forever, now, inseparable.
4. State Radio, “Keepsake,” Simmer Kane
One subject of Lake Life is depression. Several of the characters are depressed. Some know they’re depressed. Others are sure they aren’t. One self-medicates with alcohol, one with marijuana, one with sex. Thad struggles with suicidal ideation. His head can be a tough place to be, and “Keepsake” became a way for me to access his voice, especially if I hadn’t written from his character’s point of view for a few weeks. In time, I came to think of “Keepsake” as “Thad’s Song,” and I’d give it a listen when I needed to climb into his head. When it came time to consider Thad’s past suicide attempts, I looked no further than the song for his backstory: “I’m gonna buckle my belt around the ceiling pipe. I’m gonna buckle my knees and I’m gonna lock them up tight.” Thad’s first attempt grew into a belt buckled to a pipe. Here, though, my story diverges from the song. In the novel, the belt breaks, and Thad’s life is spared.
5. Lin-Manuel Miranda, Mandy Gonzalez, “Breathe,” In the Heights
Lake Life took me nine years to write and might have taken longer had I not zeroed in, at the end, and committed to writing twelve hours a day until the book was done. Mornings, I drove my daughters to school, then wrote for six hours. Evenings, I put my family to bed, then wrote another six. These two-a-days provoked plenty of good pages, but also plenty of anxiety, and, driving my daughters to school, I would play “Breathe” from the In the Heights soundtrack. The song focused me, and served as a kind of invocation. When I worried, wondering if I would ever finish the novel, I reminded myself, as Nina does, in the musical, to breathe.
This idea found its way into the novel as well. Chapter four finds Diane, Michael’s wife, in an ambulance. He’s hurt himself. She’s panicking, and the chapter opens in a stream-of-conscious interior rant that is my best shot at representing how it feels to be in my head when my worry builds and builds. Finally, after two pages of this, “Diane breathes,” and we return to something approaching a more familiar prose style. This line no doubt sprang from Miranda’s song, and while the advice to calm oneself by taking a deep breath might sound simple, I find it no less profound for being so.
6. Radiohead, “High and Dry,” The Bends
Thom Yorke has never said what this song is about, except to say that he no longer likes it. But it remains my favorite Radiohead song. Several of the characters in my novel abuse drugs, and, to me, “High and Dry” is a song about the kind of substance abuse that leaves you high and dry, “turning into something you are not.” Whatever else this song is about, it seems to speak to chemical dependency, and I thought of it often when wrestling with my characters’ addictions.
7. Nina Simone, “Stars,” Live at Montreux (after Janis Ian)
I’m obsessed with the night sky. Images of the night sky find their way into most of my work, and Lake Life is no exception. Early in the writing of the novel, I had Thad dig an old telescope out of the garage, and I knew that the novel would end with someone looking through that telescope. I wasn’t sure why, or how I’d get there, but that image became my endpoint, my goal, and, in time, I reached it. I could not have been happier when I saw Rodrigo Corral’s design for the novel’s dustjacket. The novel opens with a boy in the water and ends with the night sky. Lake Life's cover features the silhouette of a boy’s face, the night sky superimposed over his features. There was no need for another mockup or shot at the cover. Everyone—author, agent, editor, publisher, marketing—agreed this was it, which, when that happens, is wonderful and rare.
But Ian’s song isn’t just about the night sky. It’s about the “lust for fame.” “Some of us are drowned. Some of us are crowned. And some are lost and never found.” I considered these words when I wrote the novel’s difficult drowning scene, but I also considered them for Jake, Thad’ boyfriend, a famous New York City painter whose lust for fame has begun to consume him. He’s approaching terminal velocity, and, if he’s not careful, he’ll burn out. As a character, he’s too self-absorbed, and simultaneously too un-self-aware, to appreciate Ian’s lyrics. But, if he could, they’d certainly resonate with him.
8. R.E.M., “Find the River,” Automatic for the People
Who can say no to a double-helping of R.E.M.? Automatic for the People is a masterpiece, Stipe’s lyrics on “Find the River” further evidence of his genius: “Me, my thoughts are flower strewn, ocean storm, bayberry moon. I have got to leave to find my way.” Even when Stipe is just listing things, he does so with a rhythm and syllabic precision that stuns: “There is nothing left to throw of ginger, lemon, indigo / coriander stem and rose of hay.” A list, carefully crafted, is a poem. If “Nightswimming” evokes a time in one’s life, “Find the River” evokes a place. Lake Life is a meditation on place. If I’ve done my job half as well as Stipe, then I consider it a job well done.
9. Townes Van Zandt, “I’ll Be Here in the Morning,” Townes Van Zandt
Lake Life is a novel about love: love between siblings, between boyfriends, between husband and wives, between parents and children. “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” is maybe the greatest love song ever written, and while it speaks to romantic love, the lyrics might just as easily speak to the love of a mother for her sons. I struggled to represent that love in Lake Life. I got it right, at last, when I realized that Lisa’s love for her sons is no different than my love for my daughters, and that there was a lot of me in Lisa, the mother at the heart of the book. When I think of Lisa tucking her boys into bed, I hear Van Zandt’s words: “Close your eyes, I’ll be here in the morning. Close your eyes, I’ll be here for a while.”
10. The Avett Brothers, “No Hard Feelings,” True Sadness
I don’t listen to “No Hard Feelings” often because, in truth, listening always ends with me in tears. There’s so much I wanted to say with Lake Life, and I’m still not sure I’ve expressed in 300 pages what The Avett Brothers transmit in five minutes. Family is hard. Because we love each other, we’re doomed to hurt each other. If there’s one takeaway from life on Earth, it might be the need to learn to forgive those we love, to offer grace and keep going, with the goal of leaving this life with no hard feelings. It’s a lesson I’m struggling to learn, so it’s one my characters are forced to learn again and again. As The Avett Brothers sing: “Under the curving sky, I’m finally learning why / It matters for me and you to say it, and mean it too / For life and its loveliness, and all of its ugliness / Good as it’s been to me: I have no enemies.”
David James Poissant is the author of The Heaven of Animals: Stories, in print in five languages, winner of the GLCA New Writers Award and a Florida Book Award, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, One Story, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and in numerous anthologies including New Stories from the South, Best New American Voices, and Best American Experimental Writing. A recipient of scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Tin House, Wesleyan, and Longleaf writers’ conferences, he teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida and lives in Orlando with his wife and daughters. Lake Life is his first novel.
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