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August 21, 2020
Helen Cullen's Playlist for Her Novel "The Dazzling Truth"
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.
Helen Cullen's novel The Dazzling Truth is a bittersweet epic that spans almost 40 years of one Irish family's history.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Cullen’s lyrical prose drives the immersive and heart-wrenching narrative. This complex study of depression and its impact on family dynamics will lure readers."
In her own words, here is Helen Cullen's Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel The Dazzling Truth:
One of my favourite elements of the writing process is creating a soundtrack to accompany the narrative. It was something I discovered almost by accident when writing my debut novel, The Lost Letters of William Woolf – how the curation of a book’s playlist allowed me to indulge in the perfect intersection of my two great loves, music and literature.
Writers invest time off the page getting to know their characters intimately; imagining the backstories that readers don’t hear, considering what they dream about by night, or fantasise by day. Characters evolve slowly as the writer begins to understand their habits, neuroses and the minutiae that constitutes a fully realised life. How that knowledge is acquired is different for every author. For me, one of the most revelatory moments in my relationship with each character comes with the realisation of who their favourite artists are; what music they chose to listen to at pivotal moments in the narrative. Knowing that William Woolf, the protagonist in my debut, was listening to The Smiths as he strolled through a rainy Dublin city made the whole scene crackle with life for me - I could place myself in the very heart of him. Understanding that Clare’s musical heroine was Kate Bush gave me insight into the longings she nursed in private; the artistic instincts that she was working hard to oppress. Discovering that Winter’s favourite band was The Cure reinforced in me her melancholic disposition, and how art could articulate sadness for her in a way that was restorative, uplifting and ultimately joyful. Placing the book in 1989/1990 allowed me to indulge in a playlist that was the soundtrack to my own youth. It was my tribute to the characters I grew to love, offering them musical elixir to help ease their sufferings as it had mine over the years. I still daydream about the artists I would ask to compose a song for an album called “The Lost Songs of William Woolf” – maybe one day!
There is little in my novels that is biographical or inspired by events from my own life. The one thing that is borne of my own bones, however, is the importance of music in the world of the novel. Scoring a scene with the perfect song to reflect and reinforce its mood helped me to have faith in the emotional truth of those scenes and deepened my connection with them.
Every day, before I begin to write, I choose a song to listen to that encapsulates for me the energy or the feeling of the scene I want to work on. Sinking into the music, the physical world around me slips away, and I am able to cross the bridge from reality to the wonderland of the imagination. When one of the songs that accompanies my writing creeps up on me on the radio, or in a bar, or the supermarket, I am immediately drawn back into the world of my books. This is the power of music to summon memory and transform the ordinary world into an extraordinary sensory otherworld. Like the mixtapes we made and listened to in times gone by, the songs from the soundtrack and the novels themselves are intrinsically linked now for me.
The playlists for both my novels are eclectic; I believe the soundtrack to any rich life should be. I don’t believe in guilty pleasures – embrace whatever gets you through the night. I would love to think that as readers follow the narratives, they might pause and look up the songs that are mentioned and play them as they read, to experience the music as the characters do, and activate their aural senses as their imaginations conjure the world before them. If they do, I hope they enjoy the musical rollercoaster and that it deepens their connection with the narrative. The playlist for The Lost Letters of William Woolf is here on Spotify.
What follows is a soundtrack for my second novel, published as The Dazzling Truth in America and as The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually on my side of the pond – it is a combination of songs that feature in the book, and music that I listened to while writing. I hope you enjoy it – this one’s for you.
The Dazzling Truth/ The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually playlist
Leonard Cohen – Anthem
The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually was partly inspired by the Japanese art of kintsugi – the practise of repairing broken pottery with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. The breakage, and the repair, remains visible to show the history of an object rather than something to be disguised, and so the pots become even more beautiful than before they were broken.
As any family spans decades, both hairline fractures and critical breaks, can damage its foundations. Some tragedies seem insurmountable; we can’t go on, and yet we do. Some cracks feel irreparable, but then often reveal themselves to be the gap we squeeze through so that we can find a way to keep moving.
The Moone family of my new book are no exception and as their narrative revealed itself to me, I became more and more convinced of how powerful it can be to confront the past, to stop burying inconvenient, uncomfortable or hurtful truths. Telling the story of Maeve, an actor from Brooklyn who arrived in Dublin in the '70s, her husband, Murtagh, and their four children, Nollaig, Mossy, Dillon and Sive, I was inspired by the power of the truth – how it can give your legs the power to keep walking, your heart to keep beating.
This book forced me consider how our personal truths may not always chime with those that are felt to be universal, and how sometimes that realisation creeps up on us gradually, and leaves us dazzled by its beauty.
As is so often the case, Leonard Cohen said it best: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in."
Henry Mancini Orchestra - Moon River
The prologue for the book reads: “And from the record player, through the crackling, Henry Mancini’s orchestra began to play. The opening notes of ‘Moon River’, at once so familiar and yet newly revelatory, broke through the cracks, and with them came the light.”
I played Moon River from the Breakfast at Tiffany’s soundtrack on my record player every day before I began writing this book. It perfectly encapsulated for me the melancholic tone of the protagonist Murtagh Moone’s affairs of the heart, and the unexpected world waiting around the bend for him. Those strings get me every single time.
The first time Murtagh sees Maeve Moretti in the grounds of Trinity College Dublin, it is 1978 and she is jetlagged having just arrived from Brooklyn. Maeve is singing along to Patti Smith who, I believe, remained a musical godmother to her throughout her lifetime. Long before I wrote this book, I stumbled upon a public remembrance mass for Jim Carroll in St. Mark’s Church in the East Village. Patti performed ‘People Who Died’ and many of us in the congregation called out the names of those we had loved and lost. I thought of that night often when writing this book and particularly when the Moone children gathered at the funeral pyre for their mother, Maeve – how we honour our dead by naming them.
Phil Lynott – Old Town
In my first draft of the novel, there were about 5000 more words written about the Dublin music scene in the 70s that it killed me to admit needed to be edited away in service to the story. Commencing the novel in 1978 was such a gift for me as Maeve and Murtagh embraced that halcyon time in Ireland’s musical history. Pete Holidai from The Radiators from Space became my unofficial music consultant while I worked on these scenes – I hope he writes a book about the time himself one day. In appreciation, I wrote him in to the novel when Maeve gets her record signed by Pete with a lipstick he finds in the pocket of his fur coat. If you watch the video for Old Town on YouTube you will see Phil walking around Dublin in 1982 and it will give you a sense of the city then – he also sits in The Long Hall pub, which features prominently in The Lost Letters of William Woolf, and is still the exact same today. It is my favourite pub in Dublin and was the setting for much of the narrative of my real life too!
Suede – The 2 of Us
There is a deleted scene from the novel where Maeve escorts her daughter Sive to see Placebo at Brixton Academy in London which alters the course of their relationship. Maeve has a new understanding of her teenage daughter’s psyche when she immerses herself in the music she loves properly for the first time. Backstage, when Sive sees Brian Molko’s perk of interest in her mother, for the first time she gets a glimpse of her mum as an autonomous woman with agency, power and charisma that has nothing to do with her children. It was inspired by an exchange I witnessed at an after show party in 2003 where Brian was very sweet to a shy teenager whose mum approached him to sign a copy of NME with him on the cover for her. In the end I felt squeamish about putting fictional words in the mouth of a non-fictional, living human and cut it but that currency of music between Maeve and Sive was integral to their mother/daughter relationship. This song from Suede’s Dog Man Star album (one of my all-time favourite albums) becomes particularly important to them by the end of the novel. Sive was the perfect age to get carried away on the good ship Britpop but she was never convinced by the sloganistic, laddishness, toxic masculinity of some of the bands – instead her adolescence was drenched in Suede, the Manic Street Preachers, Placebo and Smashing Pumpkins. Having inherited The Cure, David Bowie and The Smiths from her parents, it was inevitable. I listened to Suede on repeat when I was writing the chapter where Murtagh visits Sive in London – nobody does the beauty of council flats and fluorescent lighting better than Brett Anderson.
David Bowie – Five Years
For every scene I write, there is a Bowie track that could accompany it. I became fixated upon this song whilst writing this book because of the lyrics:
I think I saw you in an ice-cream parlour,
Drinking milk shakes cold and long
Smiling and waving and looking so fine,
Don't think you knew you were in this song
His voice when he sings them is just such a blow to the heart but I spent a lot of time thinking about the unknowable ways our lives impress upon each other – the words, touches, glances over our shoulder that we’ve forgotten that remain fixed in the memories of others. And how so often the people in my life have shown up in the pages of my books in forms they will never recognise but I see them there so vividly hidden on the page. I still miss David Bowie every day.
Kim Carnes – Bette Davis Eyes
There is a significant moment in the book when Maeve performs this song at the first ever karaoke night in Dublin. It is all fun and games until the spotlight hits her and then everything becomes very serious. Murtagh, her future husband, understands for the first time who he is dealing with, how much Maeve belongs on the stage – something he may spend a lot of time later in life trying to forget.
Sinead O’Connor – Mandinka
Never underestimate the importance of Sinead O’Connor to the liberation of Irish women. Watching her perform this song and sing her punk heart out at the Grammys in 1987 was a formative experience for all the Moone women, as it was for me. Growing up on such a small island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, it is remarkable that Ireland has produced so many international musicians, writers, artists – witnessing it changes your relationship with the arts and makes extraordinary feats seems possible.
Joy Division – She’s Lost Control
As it says in the book, “for Maeve, music wasn’t entertainment. It was an ointment, a lighthouse, a hot-air balloon. When she sang along with Ian Curtis, she felt legitimate. Like the rage she felt wasn’t unique to her alone; that others suffered, and others survived. The songs allowed her to articulate what she felt but often struggled to find words to express. They could never know it, but on many nights these musicians saved her life.”
Bob Dylan – Forever Young
Dillon Moone was named for his mother’s two great loves, Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan, but the artistic mantle lay heavily on his shoulders – he had the dream of an artistic life, but not the drive or determination. I’m not sure if Dillon will ever discover an appreciation for Dylan, as a teenager he loathed his voice and was obsessed with Fugazi and Dinosaur Junior but I’d like to think the time will come. Although it is never stated in the book, this is Maeve and Murtagh’s song.
The full list of artists featured in The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually are: Suede, Placebo, Manic Street Preachers, the Henry Mancini Orchestra, Patti Smith, The Radiators from Space, The Boomtown Rats, Elliot Smith, Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, The Radiators from Space, Leo Sayer, Joy Division, Rory Gallagher, Thin Lizzy, Horslips, Kate Bush, Blondie, Kim Carnes, The Undertones, Sinead O’Connor, Smashing Pumpkins, Fugazi, Elliot Smith, The Lumineers, The Cure, Arctic Monkeys, Dire Straits.
Helen Cullen wrote her debut novel, The Lost Letters of William Woolf, while completing the Guardian/UEA novel writing program. She holds an MA in Theatre Studies from University College Dublin and is currently studying further at Brunel. Prior to writing full-time, Helen worked in journalism, broadcasting and most recently as a creative events and engagement specialist. Helen is Irish and currently lives in London.
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