« older | Main Largehearted Boy Page | newer »
February 8, 2021
Dantiel W. Moniz's Playlist for Her Story Collection "Milk Blood Heat"
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.
Dantiel W. Moniz's Milk Blood Heat is the most striking debut story collection I have read since Claire Vaye Watkins' Battleborn. Lyrical, profound, and atmospheric, this is one of the year's best books.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
"Life’s inflection points, mundane but universal, mark the Black and brown Floridians who populate these stories . . . But in Moniz’s collection, the ordinary experience of being female is laced with a kind of enchantment. . . . Entire stories seem bathed in a warm radiance . . . One can glow with both love and rage."
In her words, here is Dantiel W. Moniz's Book Notes music playlist for her story collection Milk Blood Heat:
I love the idea of making a playlist for Milk Blood Heat. I listen to music while I write--whatever’s playing in the coffee shops (back when such environments were possible) or lo-fi beats without lyrics when I work from home. When I’m feeling down or not quite myself, I bump something danceable through the house real loud, and get to the business of shaking out my feelings. When a new tune catches me, I often listen on repeat for hours at a time. Music is at the heart of much of my emotional understanding, and a collection is already quite like an album. In the same family. A curated sampling of different melodies and through-lines all coalescing to produce one angle of a larger picture. For me, sonics are a critical tool in crafting compelling stories; the sound of a sentence is as important as its meaning. It makes sense to me. So I’m picking a song for each story that embodies mood, character, or theme. Or maybe you’ll find it just enhances your experience of what’s on the page. I used to be self-conscious about my taste; always worried people were looking down their nose at what I liked. But in the last years of my twenties, heightened while surviving and creating during the Trump administration, I found opportunities to sit with myself and distinguish who I am—and what I want to make of my life—from my conditioning. It’s a work-in-progress, for sure, forever, but I’m getting better at just being. So here’s this: what I’ve allowed to move me. <3
1. Milk Blood Heat – “Boats & Birds” (Demo Version) / Gregory and the Hawk
I remember my girlhood friendships vividly, especially those that occurred around thirteen and younger. Even if the relationships were brief, they left their marks on me. We were mirrors for each other, and there’s this burning intensity in coming to understand yourself through another person. What Ava and Kiera have is gripping, all-consuming, and though they barely have the language for it, they understand each other. I think there’s a sense in the story that there’s real love between them, but it can’t last.
2. Feast – “Bag Lady” (Radio Edit) / Erykah Badu
When I was younger listening to this song on the radio in the backseat of my mother’s Honda Civic as she drove me to school, I thought Badu was singing about actual bags. Especially because there’re those verses where she lists them: garbage bags, Gucci bags, bookbags… But obviously she’s talking about all of those experiences and hurts people—and women specifically—carry throughout their lives because they’re unable to put them down, and how that impedes acceptance and healing. In this story, Rayna’s carrying so much grief, it’s all she has room for, and she’s projecting that fullness (or the need for fullness) into every aspect of her life.
3. Tongues – “Chamber of Reflection” / Mac DeMarco
Spend some time away / Getting ready for the day you’re born again
This song is atmospheric, functions like liquid, and captures Zey’s yearning to understand the world she’s living in past what her family and community are teaching her. The organ is a nice hat tip to Sunday Service.
4. The Loss of Heaven – “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” / Etta James
This Etta James cover feels perfect for this story for several reasons. “Heaven” is the only story that features a male protagonist, so we’re firmly planted in that world view, however, the focus is still very much the lives of the women in Fred’s life. We see the ways in which Fred performs his masculinity, the sense of purpose he derives from it, in having capital, but the reader is privy to glimpses beneath those layers that the character himself is not aware of. We’re able to see how his ideas and misconceptions about Gloria and Hilda prop up his mask. It begs the question: If your sense of power is derived from power over others, is it real?
5. The Hearts of Our Enemies – “Sex and Candy” / Unions
This cover is more melancholy and hard-hitting than the original, in my opinion, and there’s something ominous and enticing happening in the chords. Something possibly predatory. There’s heat and desire running all through the music, as in this story.
6. Outside the Raft – “Best Friends” / Little Dragon
For a lot of us, our cousins were our first friends. That was the case with me and mine, as with the cousins in this story. This song has a poppy, summery feel, but at its depths there’s loss and mourning. A reckoning with how such close connections can fade.
7. Snow – “Crave You” / Flight Facilities (Adventure Club Remix)
This whole song swells with complicated desire and the power of gaze, and completely overtakes me when I listen to it, especially back in olden times, surrounded by dancing bodies in the dark of a club. The feeling is reminiscent of Trinity’s need to be swept up in her daily tasks to avoid facing the issues she’s experiencing in her marriage. I like the original too, but the remix is sexier.
8. Necessary Bodies ¬– “Lullaby” / Tasha
One of my good friends sent this song to me during a moment last year when the weight of the pandemic and political terror were crushing down on me, and I became numb to my own needs and feelings. When I listened to it, I was able to cry for the first time—for everything we’d lost as a country, and all the loss to come, but also in acknowledgment for what we might stand to gain. In this story, Billie is weighing the pros and cons of parenthood, but also evaluating the worth of her own life as inferred by the world around her. This song made me feel precious and held, and I’d want this same feeling for her, and anyone else who needs it.
9. Thicker Than Water – “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” / Nancy Sinatra
I know this song was intended for lovers, but there’s something terrifying and compelling in thinking about it in relation to a child and a parent. Our parents are responsible for so much of how we come to understand and accept love in our lives. How we know to love ourselves. And if the love you received from your parents was inconsistent or harmful, you carry the wound of that imperfect love in your body, as memory, as barrier. I can see so much of Cecelia’s love for her father in this song, and in her relationship with Lucas.
10. Exotics – “Zombie” / The Cranberries
I mean—the haunting yawp of Niall Quinn’s voice, the title, the message. Thinking about the machine of war and of capitalism, self-cannibalism (what we do to others, we do to ourselves), and the mindless/automatic way we are complicit in these systems. With the song and this story, there’s a lot to unpack from such a slim space.
11. An Almanac of Bones – “Where My Girls At” / 702
The late '90s/early 2000s had so many great Black girl groups. TLC, Destiny’s Child, En Vogue, Blaque…but this song felt so specifically 7th grade—when you’re peering into the future of womanhood and possible romantic entanglements, but still have no idea what it means. You and your girls can’t stop talking about it, whatever it is, and you think you’ll always be friends. I think Sylvie would have latched onto this song as an anthem.
12. Bonus Track – "F**k Donald Trump" / Dropz, Mobby
I don’t really need to explain this one, do I? A+ sentiment plus highly danceable.
Dantiel W. Moniz is the recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction, the Cecelia Joyce Johnson Emerging Writer Award by the Key West Literary Seminar, and a Tin House Scholarship. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, One Story, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and elsewhere. Milk Blood Heat is her first book. She lives in Northeast Florida.
If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider making a donation.
