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February 12, 2021
Jen Silverman's Playlist for Her Novel "We Play Ourselves"
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.
Jen Silverman's novel We Play Ourselves is smart, inventive, and impossible to put down.
Booklist wrote of the book:
"[A] beautifully realized novel about choice, ambition, and revelation . . . This memorable novel deserves a standing ovation."
In her words, here is Jen Silverman's Book Notes music playlist for her novel We Play Ourselves:
We Play Ourselves is a novel about the aftermath of a scandal. Or about what happens when you realize that the “come-back” story probably doesn’t apply to you. Or about making art and the ways in which other things get mixed up in it: ambition, fame, the commodification of identity. (America is crazed for stories about / called Girls, but it doesn’t much care for its women.) We Play Ourselves follows Cass, a playwright who flees New York in the wake of a major public humiliation, and falls in with a charismatic filmmaker and the posse of teenage girls she’s filming. As things begin to spin out of control, Cass must finally ask herself how far she’ll go for her ambition. I moved from New York to LA to start a TV job, at the same time that I began writing the first draft of We Play Ourselves. The songs below are from that time.
1. Los Ageless - St Vincent
My first few weeks in LA, I listened to this again and again – at first ironically, then less so.
2. Hallo Spaceboy - David Bowie
David Bowie has given me so much as an artist – an example of constant, hungry reinvention alongside unapologetic queer glam. In WPO, both Cass and Dylan navigate what it means to be fluidly queer, and David Bowie was the soundtrack to that (and to my adolescence, uncoincidentally.)
3. Fame - Kohh
Something that fascinated me about writing Cass was her desire to be famous. This is a place where we diverge – receiving concentrated attention makes me nervous. Kohh has a lot of swagger but he’s also sort of a sad philosopher, and that always appeals to me.
4. Ain’t Gonna Drown - Elle King
Cass keeps finding herself in situations where she feels like she’s drowning, and so she holds onto the wrong things to keep herself afloat. I’m always fascinated by what we think will save us, and the moments in which we have to see those things anew.
5. Be The One - Dua Lipa
This makes me think of the way Cass feels about Hélène, and B.B. feels about Cass.
6. Chelsea Hotel - Leonard Cohen
I finished the second draft of WPO in Echo Park. This was after my TV job ended; my partner and one of my closest friends were doing a play together in LA, and I was living with them. During the days they’d go to the theatre to tech the show, and I’d play Leonard Cohen over and over again on the impressive AirBnB sound system.
7. New Religion - NSTASIA
Theatre can be an intense religion for its practitioners, and Cass falls on the wrong side of that; when scandal alienates her from both the art form and the community, she is stripped of something far greater than a career.
8. New York - St Vincent
A playwright friend sent me this song when I first moved to LA. I imagine it’s the sort of thing Cass would have listened to whenever she got the urge to look over her shoulder.
9. Heathens - Twenty One Pilots
I heard this in the back of a Lyft, going down Sunset. I was writing some of the Caroline sections at the time, and it struck me as something B.B. would respond to.
10. Famous Blue Raincoat - Leonard Cohen
Another one of the Echo Park Draft Two tracks. (“Not this again!” said my partner, who had left for the theatre that morning with FBR playing, and returned close to midnight to find it still on repeat.)
11. I Confess - John William Watkins
This came out while I was in copy-edits for We Play Ourselves, and I played it while I pored over commas and semi-colons, cuts and shifts. The novel feels to me in some ways like Cass’s confession – not just what she’s done, but also what she had hoped for herself, and the awkward, painful truths embedded in that set of aspirations. JWW’s songs always seem to me to have equal parts humor and grace, and I wanted Cass to find some measure of grace by the end.
Jen Silverman is a New York-based writer and playwright. She is the author of the story collection The Island Dwellers, which was longlisted for a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for debut fiction. Her plays have been produced across the United States and internationally, and she also writes for television and film. She is a two-time MacDowell Colony fellow, a member of New Dramatists, and the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Fellowship, the Yale Drama Series Award, and a Playwrights of New York Fellowship.
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