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August 4, 2020
Jill McCorkle's Playlist for Her Novel "Hieroglyphics"
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.
Jill McCorkle's Hieroglyphics is a powerful and evocative novel.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Engrossing . . . McCorkle finds an elegant mix of wistfulness and appreciation for life . . . Throughout, McCorkle weaves a powerful narrative web, with empathy for her characters and keen insight on their motivations. This is a gem."
In her own words, here is Jill McCorkle's Book Notes music playlist for her novel Hieroglyphics:
This novel spans from the early forties to present day, though I found that the music I was drawn to while working and the songs I associate with these characters never really venture far beyond those early years. Two of the characters (husband and wife) both lost parents as children and there is particular focus on those memories as well as the early years of their courtship. The mother of the wife (Lil) died in the Cocoanut Grove Nightclub fire in 1942 and so the background of big band was a constant: Glenn Miller, the Dorseys, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Artie Shaw and Louis Armstrong. With a whole lot of Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland and Nat King Cole.
This listening was in keeping with two of my favorite go to albums: Coltrane’s Stardust and Linda Ronstadt’s What’s New with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra (I love every track with emphasis on the title song and “What’ll I Do”).
The novel is a lot about memory and in particular memories of what these characters think of as “home” and so many of the songs I was listening to that don’t fit the above cluster have to do with home- Randy Newman’s “Feels Like Home” (his version as well as Bonnie Raitt’s) Merle Haggard’s “Sing Me Back Home” and “The Green Green Grass of Home” (Johnny Darrell) which was one that always made me cry as a kid. I add to this list, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (Judy Garland version- love the word “muddle”) and “I’ll Be Home For Christmas.”
I also had stuck in my mind the song “Try to Remember” from the Fantasticks—(covered way too many times to count) but it’s hard to beat the original Jerry Orbach version. I love the line: “without a hurt, the heart is hollow.” In many ways, that would sum up my characters as they are all locating (or avoiding) the hurt. And finally, the contemporary song that I have played over and over by now, is on John Prine’s wonderful last album, The Tree of Forgiveness- the song “Summer’s End” is a little bit of everything above- memory/ home/ loss/ the passage of time. When I heard that song for the first time, I told a good friend that Prine had done in the emotional tone of that one song what I was attempting in three hundred plus pages of a novel.
Some favorites: Sinatra—“How About You?” “People Will Say We’re in Love” and “Young At Heart” / Ella Fitzgerald, “Every Time We Say Goodbye” and “Blue Moon” /
“I Can’t Get Started” Bunny Berigan /“You Belong to Me” Jo Stafford (Patsy Cline version as well—Dylan, too for that matter) / “God Bless the Child” and “I’ll Be Seeing You” Billie Holiday /“At Last” and “Sunday Kind of Love” Etta James/ "Dream a Little Dream" Armstrong and Fitzgerald/ “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” The Ink Spots
Jill McCorkle’s first two novels were released simultaneously when she was just out of college, and the New York Times called her “a born novelist.” Since then, she has published six novels and four collections of short stories, and her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories several times, as well as The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Five of her books have been New York Times Notable books, and her most recent novel, Life After Life, was a New York Times bestseller. She has received the New England Booksellers Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. She has written for the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Garden and Gun, the Atlantic, and other publications. She was a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard, where she also chaired the department of creative writing. She is currently a faculty member of the Bennington College Writing Seminars and is affiliated with the MFA program at North Carolina State University.
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