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January 27, 2021
Tatiana Ryckman's Playlist for Her Novel "The Ancestry of Objects"
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.
Tatiana Ryckman's novel The Ancestry of Objects is inventive, lyrical, and engrossing.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
"Ryckman writes with cool, tightly packed precision on the futile ways people try to fill the emptiness and absence of life with objects and religion and desperate acts. … A hypnotizing, bleak account of the ways people trap themselves in their own minds."
In her words, here is Tatiana Ryckman's Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Ancestry of Objects:
I’ve been thinking about time. The possibility that we’re all experiencing our whole lives at once. That maybe we’re just moving too slow to see it. This is also called memory. But I find myself constantly responding to present moments in light of the past. I guess that’s also called learning. And sometimes when trying to make new worlds and new people, those characters and places become fragments of a remembered past. Which is not to say they ever existed, but that they transmute. That across space and time, all things change… but they start somewhere.
Seasons in the Sun, Black Box Recorder
Sometime around November of 2006, Black Box Recorder was playing over the speakers at a coffeeshop in Lincoln, Nebraska. It was sexy and dark and somehow pretty at the same time. Foreign but familiar. I asked the guy who’d put the CD on while he worked behind the counter on a date. We met at a diner and then he built me a bike with my name on it and taught me about beer and music and literature, and while I have only impossibly fond memories of our year and a half together—impossible because I left of my own volition which I probably wouldn’t have done if things were as perfect as I remember them—I have memories separate from him, of driving roads that wound between cornfields and wondering matter-of-factly if the sadness would kill me.
Criminal, Fiona Apple
In a song that is, ostensibly about being “careless with a delicate man,” I find it comical that Fiona Apple opens by flirting with the listener in this hyper-sexualized cliché way: “I’ve been a bad, bad girl.”
When I first heard the song as a preteen it felt unmistakably like sin, which is to say decadent and wrong. And while my 12-year-old sins were likely very different from the ones Apple was singing about, or hinting at while sprawled among limbs in the music video, I identified with the slavish sentiment: “I need to be redeemed to the one I’ve sinned against.” If you didn’t know the song, you might think the line came from a hymn.
In either case, it seems worth contemplating whose judgement one needs to be able to live with. Maybe now I identify more with the line “what would an angle say? The devil wants to know,” because sin and notsin aren’t as clear as they used to be. Whatever our sins, we all want to be good. I’m just wondering who gets to decide, because ultimately, I’m the only person I have to live with.
Two Weeks, FKA Twigs
When I left Nebraska I was on my own for the first time. I don’t think I realized until this very moment how scared I was those first few years learning to be an adult. When I got to Austin, I would joke at the beginning of a new relationship, “give it two weeks.” At first the joke was just in my head, a reminder to temper expectations. It seemed like two weeks was the maximum amount of time both parties could remain equally deluded, before the veil was pulled back and one or the other discovered the other was not so great, and that inevitable pulling away would make the other all the more interested, until one person was suffocated and the other abandoned and there was nothing left but resentment. But then it felt like developing a personality to be outwardly cynical, and more than once, when I woke up on the morning of two weeks stunned with disillusionment and disinterest in the person who lay next to me, what seemed to hurt them the most wasn’t my leaving, but finding out they were just like everyone else.
But those first two weeks. They were always too good to be true.
Fade into You, Mazy Star
The idea of disappearing inside the beloved is an idea that I return to a lot. Before I knew that that was a tic of mine, I asked a friend what he thought about authors coming back to the same phrase or image or theme in different works. I thought maybe it meant that the writer was washed up and couldn’t think of anything new. My friend had a more forgiving perspective: that it was interesting to see an artist continue to work through an idea through their life’s work. We all have things that haunt us, and while people claim it’s cathartic, I suppose there’s no guarantee that writing a book will solve anything.
You Are What You Love, Jenny Lewis
I met one of my best friends when we discovered we were dating the same guy at the same time. It’s been a long time since I’ve introduced her that way, but there was a time, after he decided it was good that we knew about each other and became friends and cleared the air, when he decided it was not good for us to be so close, to compare timelines and intimacies shared, and he forbade her from talking to me. Forbade her only because he’d chosen her and stopped talking to me, and when we all showed up at to the same Rilo Kiley show in Omaha and she and I stared openly, longingly at each other from across the auditorium, he nudged her with his elbow and I could see him tell her to stop. And I don’t know what happened to him, but she and I still send each other pictures and videos of Jenny Lewis and even if it’s just a musician we both like, it’s always loaded with this other meaning. Something like love.
Ease Your Feet Into the Sea, Belle and Sebastian
Someone I didn’t know very well asked me to move in with him while we watched Belle and Sebastian at a music festival. By didn’t know him very well, I mean I don’t even remember his name, or if we kissed later in the night after getting high. He was newly single in his studio apartment and I guess it was just too much space for him. Or maybe too much time alone in that space, just across a parking lot from the converted garage where we worked together stuffing cabbage into jars. But the thing that’s always struck me about Belle and Sebastian is how well they mask a sad message with a catchy tune.
Icebox, Nada Surf
There can be moments of aggressive optimism in depression. A feeling like clawing out of a coffin. A fleeting acknowledgement that if there is a middle “normal” state of being, then as bad as a feeling is there must be an equivalent “good” opposite it. Not that it’s within reach. Not that it’s possible, or maybe even desirable. Just that it’s there.
Fast Car, Tracy Chapman
The comments on the music video for this song on Youtube are, surprisingly not-shitty. They are tender and nostalgic and vulnerable. Maybe it’s her voice. Or the line “your arm felt nice wrapped around my shoulder / and I had the feeling I could be someone.”
The comments on the comments for this song, however, are pretty much just mean. And while I understand everyone in the world feels like this is the most heartrending disillusionment song of all time, I don’t understand people getting mad about other peoples’ wistfulness. Let’s put the haters out of our collective mind for a moment. Let’s remember instead the feeling that we could be someone.
She’s Got You, Patsy Cline
Early in my time in Austin I found a Patsy Cline cassette at a thrift store. I listened to it endlessly. When I got a car without a tape deck, I bequeathed it to my sister, and she listened to it endlessly. On family gatherings we’ll break into song. Usually something like “Round and around and around / Stop the world and let me off! / I’m tired of goin’ round and round.” I’m sure I’m not saying anything new when I say her performative heartache captures the imagination…and everything else. I suspect no matter which side of the affair one is one, one always hopes to be chosen. Partly because it feels good to be wanted, and partly because it feels bad to be abandoned by the person you love and left to your imagination’s worst proclivities.
Bobby’s Girl
There was once a Bobby. In elementary school. I assume every school had one. Bobby and I never got along particularly well. He played sports with the other boys and I wore oversized panda t-shirts and wrote sad poems. For about six months after watching A League of Their Own I tried to improve my social standing by collecting baseball cards and attempting to play catch with myself. This was met with little success, but I was in a class of nine kids and for the most part we all got along as well as we could with the options we had. But once, while throwing a basketball generally in the direction of the hoop after school and waiting for my mother to pick me up, Bobby, who lived next to the school, came out and talked to me and it seemed… normal. Fine. Like we were friends. And then, as I turned to walk toward the hoop, he did that thing with his hands that sleezy guys in movies do when they’re demonstrating the curves of a woman. I had no context for the gesture. I didn’t know what he was trying to tell me. I made him explain it to me. I was nine and wearing highwater pants, and it felt good to feel like I might be likeable. It was a revelation. It’s one of those moments I can look back on and see how mislead I was by flattery. A mistake it seems we’re all susceptible to.
The next day at school I tried to make eye contact—not because I thought he’d be my boyfriend but because I thought we shared some very adult secret—but everything went back to normal. On my list of romantic disappointments Bobby is very close to the very bottom. If ever I wrote I <3 SOME BOY’S NAME on my Trapper Keeper, it wasn’t Bobby’s. Still, there’s a tenderness in the innocuousness of the interaction that makes it hard to forget. The mutual ignorance about what sort of response might be appropriate following such a gesture now seems enviably simple.
Running up That Hill, Chromatics
I once sent this song to a friend because it perfectly described a recent romantic frustration. She wrote back that she recognized it as a Kate Bush cover. Later I learned the First Aid Kit version on guitar. Someone once told me that Sagittarius’ don’t like change, so I applauded my ability to shirk the original for the one that met me where I was, musically speaking, which is to say just past nowhere. But the line “You don’t want to hurt me / but see how deep the bullet lies” still translates my righteous indignation perfectly in every variation.
Good Woman, Cat Power
Someone on Youtube made a video for this song from old footage of beat poets. The video description reads, “Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lucian Carr, and others in New York 1959… + What I thought was a necessary soundtrack.”
Have you ever had an affair? Have you ever had an affair, or stopped yourself from having an affair, or had something that for reasons technical you never had to call an affair? Have you ever and not sent this song to the someone out of reach and impossible? Maybe with a casual line like “Not our situation, exactly. But it’s a great song.”
These Days, Nico
This song is a sort of epilogue. The feeling you have after the end—when you don’t dare be hopeful, but at least you can get out of bed in the morning.
Tatiana Ryckman is the author of I Don't Think of You (Until I Do) (Future Tense), and two chapbooks of prose; and the editor of Austin-based publisher Awst Press. She has been a writer in residence at Yaddo, Arthub, and 100W. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Lit Hub, Paper Darts, Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, and other publications. Tatiana can be found on airplanes or at tatianaryckman.com.
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