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October 12, 2020
Sarah McCraw Crow's Playlist for Her Novel "The Wrong Kind of Woman"
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.
Sarah McCraw Crow's novel The Wrong Kind of Woman is a strong debut, one that brings the feminist movement of the 1970s alive.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"In her entrancing debut, McCraw Crow traces the impact of second-wave feminism and the antiwar movement in the early 1970s on a New Hampshire college campus. . . . The choice to present the characters’ desperate actions in shades of gray makes for engrossing reading."
In her own words, here is Sarah McCraw Crow's Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel The Wrong Kind of Woman:
When I started writing the pages that would become The Wrong Kind of Woman, music was one of the ways I accessed the novel’s time period, 1970-71. I don’t usually listen to music when I’m writing, but early on, I made a playlist of songs that my characters might have loved, performed, or heard on the radio.
The Wrong Kind of Woman has three main characters: Virginia Desmarais, who’s a 39-year-old widow; Virginia’s 13-year-old daughter Rebecca; and college student Sam Waxman. All three are grieving the sudden death of Oliver, who was Virginia’s husband, Rebecca’s dad, and Sam’s jazz bandmate. Oliver was a European history professor at Clarendon College, an all-male, liberal arts school in New Hampshire, and a traditional place (it’s loosely based on Dartmouth College).
The novel is set in 1970 and 1971, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, student strikes and protests, radical groups like the Weather Underground, and the second wave of the women’s movement, all of which have seemed far away from conservative Clarendon College and its little town, Westfield, until now. Trying to move through her fog of grief, Virginia finds unexpected friendship with the four women faculty members at Clarendon, women that her husband didn’t like. Virginia finds purpose in helping them bring the women’s movement to Clarendon College and Westfield, efforts that lead to some surprising backlashes.
1) “I Say a Little Prayer,” Aretha Franklin
“I Say a Little “Prayer” is one of the songs I associate with Virginia, who’s grappling with Oliver’s sudden death. At the beginning of the novel, Virginia thinks she’s a failed wife/widow and a failed academic, someone who doesn’t fit in anywhere. I love the yearning in “I Say a Little Prayer,” and the way Aretha Franklin’s gorgeous arrangement takes this lovely Burt Bachrach-Hal David song to a whole other level. Virginia, like this song’s narrator, thinks of herself in fairly traditional terms. (Incidentally, during Virginia and Oliver’s marriage, Oliver was the more musical partner—long ago, he wooed Virginia with late-night visits to jazz clubs, and later on, he played clarinet for Clarendon’s student-faculty jazz band. He was also a musical snob who thought Burt Bachrach was too pop, while Virginia is fond of Bachrach-David songs like “What the World Needs Now is Love.”)
2) “The Only Living Boy in New York,” Simon & Garfunkel
Another song full of yearning. The first chapter refers briefly to this song, when Virginia hears it playing the night after Oliver’s funeral—her daughter Rebecca’s best friend Molly has brought over albums to cheer Rebecca up. The song’s lines “Half the time we’re gone and we don’t know where and we don’t know where,” with Paul Simon’s plaintive young voice taking the lead, and Art Garfunkel’s answering lines “Here I am,” are quite haunting. But this song really belongs to my character Sam Waxman, a lonely college student who’s not sure what his grief about Oliver means, what it says about him. Sam is from New York City, and he doesn’t fit in at WASPY, jocky Clarendon. For Sam, music—playing in the school’s jazz band, singing in various school groups, being a general music nerd—is one of his consolations.
3) “Carry On,” Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
Sam claims Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young as one of his favorite new bands, but that’s mainly because he loved the Hollies when he was in high school, and he likes identifying Graham Nash’s voice within Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s harmonies. Sam’s trajectory in the novel changes when he starts to become friends with Jerry, one of the Vietnam vets on campus. Jerry invites Sam to a small party at his commune outside of town, where Sam meets Elodie, a former exchange student and an ardent activist. In the winter of 1970-1971, the album Déjà Vu would have been playing on campuses everywhere, and “Carry On” feels weird and funky enough—like a couple of distinct songs strung together, with different moods—that you could have heard it in the background of that party.
4) “Border Song,” Elton John
Rebecca, Virginia’s daughter, is 13, the worst of all ages, and has fallen apart since her dad died. She was closer to her dad than her mom—at least that’s how she’s begun to think of their relationship, looking back. And her best friend Molly is slipping away, while she can’t figure out how to make new friends. When she goes on an awkward quasi-date with Molly and two boys from school on a spring Saturday, Rebecca and Molly attempt to sing “Border Song,” at least the chorus. (I love how weird and inscrutable those early Bernie Taupin lyrics are, and how Elton John makes them into beautiful, soulful things.) Soon after this outing, Rebecca, angry at her mother’s recent activism, and trying to win back Molly’s friendship, puts herself and Molly into a dangerous situation.
5) “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” Benny Goodman
Virginia and Oliver both had older siblings who were young adults during World War II, and who passed their love of Big Band music, especially Benny Goodman, on to Virginia and Oliver. For Oliver, Benny Goodman was the gateway to his clarinet-playing and his love of 1950s jazz, while for Virginia, hearing an old song like “Stompin’ at the Savoy” makes her nostalgic for dancing with her older sisters and brother at home in Norfolk, back when she was a confident girl who knew who she was. This is all backstory that didn’t make it into the novel, but it’s an example of something I learned to keep in mind when writing about a long-ago time period: the music, books, art, etc. that resonate the most for a character may come from many years before the present time of the novel.
6) “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” Joan Baez
Bob Dylan (even old, pre-electric Dylan) would have been playing in dorm rooms on the Clarendon campus, or if those albums weren’t currently being played, they’d still be in a lot of students’ collections. “Don’t Think Twice” is Dylan’s song, of course, but to my ear, Joan Baez’s version is a lot less mean-sounding. Both the sound of the song and the lyrics fit with a secondary character, Elodie, the young activist who Sam falls for. These lyrics in particular—“It ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe. I’m on the dark side of the road”—apply to Elodie, because her own dark side is a big part of what drives her.
7) “I Am Woman,” Helen Reddy
This is a song that Virginia and her new friends Louise, Helen, Lily, and Corinna would have been gratified to hear, since their efforts to bring the women’s movement to Clarendon and Westfield seem to have failed, and to result only in sanctions and gossip. Helen Reddy put this song on her 1971 album I Don’t Know How to Love Him, but it didn’t get released as a single until 1972, around the same time that the women’s movement entered the culture more generally. When I was little, my sister had the single of “I Am Woman.” We could, and often did, belt out every word, and I still love this song. Rest in peace, Helen Reddy. Thank you for this thrilling, heartfelt anthem.
8) “Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves,” Eurythmics and Aretha Franklin
These last two songs are out of sync, time-wise, with the others—“Sisters” was a huge hit in the mid-Eighties. Who would have guessed that Annie Lennox and Aretha Franklin would sound so perfect together? The celebratory, danceable sound of “Sisters” was on my mind as I revised this novel. But there wasn’t a place in the story for Virginia and her new friends to celebrate change, so the celebrations had to stay offstage, referred to in summary in the epilogue.
9) “Maybe,” Ingrid Michaelson
The Wrong Kind of Woman's epilogue moves into the future, and all three characters have changed; they might not have reached happy endings, but they know themselves better, and they’re stronger than at the beginning of the story. Ingrid Michaelson’s 2009 song “Maybe” is a breakup/please-come-back-to-me song, and it’s more or less the opposite of “Sisters,” but I love the way it hints at something more, not just a future relationship, but at a future happiness for the singer.
Sarah McCraw Crow grew up in Virginia but has lived most of her adult life in New Hampshire. Her short fiction has run in Calyx, Crab Orchard Review, Good Housekeeping, So to Speak, Waccamaw, and Stanford Alumni Magazine. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Stanford University, and is finishing an MFA degree at Vermont College of Fine Arts. When she's not reading or writing, she's probably gardening or snowshoeing (depending on the weather).
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