« older | Main Largehearted Boy Page | newer »
February 17, 2021
Patricia Ann McNair's Playlist for Her Story Collection "Responsible Adults"
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.
The stories in Patricia Ann McNair's engrossing collection Responsible Adults are solidly set in the Midwest and feature compassionately drawn and intriguing characters.
Bonnie Jo Campbell wrote of the book:
"Responsible Adults is devastating, in the best possible way. McNair guides us through domestic worlds where we might fear to tread alone, revealing truths and exposing worlds peopled with want, kitchens with empty refrigerators and strange men. Children eat grape jelly with a spoon and long for ordinary lives as they negotiate adult problems as best they can. Readers are wiser and more compassionate for knowing these stories."
In her words, here is Patricia Ann McNair's Book Notes music playlist for her story collection Responsible Adults:
The stories in Responsible Adults span decades, introduce a number of different characters, and create a variety of experiences and situations. And yet. There is something that drives each of these stories, something that lured me into writing them. Longing. I think that’s it. Each of my characters longs for something—something lost, something imagined, something that never was, something just out of reach. I should say that I believe all stories, by their nature, are about some sort of longing. But I am drawn to longing not fulfilled, that particular, exquisite ache of yearning. That, the underlying ache, is what I want to explore. That, and bad behavior. And grief. And childhood and aging and parents and lovers and small towns and magic and faith and survival. And longing. Did I say longing?
The Wallflowers' Bringing Down the Horse album is one I play often to get into the feel of the stories I want to tell. A number of the pieces in Responsible Adults take place in or near the imaginary Midwestern town of New Hope where my first collection, The Temple of Air, was set. When I wrote that book, I would play a few tracks from BDtH and a few games of Free Cell just to loosen things up before I turned to the writing. The album’s quiet, folksy sound helped me to imagine walking around New Hope then, and it helped again with this book. Another record I found myself singing along to as I worked on Responsible Adults was the tribute album to Cole Porter, Red, Hot & Blue (you’ll see why soon). These two albums recur in my playlist, and they are flanked by a range of other songs that speak to the stories’ eras, key phrases, characters, and, yes—longing.
“Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” performed by Annie Lennox
This is the first of the songs from the Cole Porter tribute album I mentioned above. My collection opens with a micro fiction called “What Was To Come.” It would take more words to explain what the story is about than it took to write it, so I will let Annie’s rendition of the song do the work for me. This track drips with a sensation of impending and continuous loss. Her breathy and low-pitched voice is so beautiful, it vibrates in my heart. My story isn’t about lovers, as the song is, but it is—like the song—about anticipatory grief and the mourning that floods the void left when a loved one is gone. The characters. Dorothy and Edna, in “What Was To Come” appear in a few of these stories, and Cole Porter inspires each of them.
“6th Avenue Heartache” performed by The Wallflowers
There’s an essential moment in the story “My Mother’s Daughter” when the teenaged narrator talks about making out with boys in the dark corners of a roller-skating rink. When I was her age and doing just that sort of thing, the roller rink I went to had live organ music played by some slicked-back-hair dude who ran his hands over the keys with a flourish. That sound, the round, rich, haunting, sliding glide up the scale played on an organ, is in this melancholy track. The setting told in the song’s lyrics is more urban than what I imagine in my story, but the idea of walking lonely, empty streets, catching glimpses of strangers when they are unaware and unguarded is essential to what I hope to capture on the page.
“Danny Boy” performed by The Pogues
A classic, this song, no matter who sings it. In “Salvage,” it is the father of the narrator who does. Why do I choose The Pogues’ version now? Shane MacGowan’s voice here does not sound trained nor overly inflected like in some covers; he just sounds like a dude singing a song that matters to him, like the character in my story does. “Salvage” gathers canned goods in its paragraphs, dented and unlabeled tins. The performance of “Danny Boy” by The Pogues has a bit of a metallic rattle and clatter to it, too. This performance reverberates with a kind of gritty realism, even more so when you look at the iconic black and white photo of the band while you listen to the piece.
“Is That All There Is?” performed by Peggy Lee
This song might just as well stand for the whole of Responsible Adults, but in particular, the story “Things You Know But Would Rather Not.” Another mother daughter story, this one is told from the point of view of the thirteen-year-old daughter. Peggy Lee’s song came out when I was almost the narrator’s age, and I remember how sad I thought it was then. What did I have to look forward to if adults felt this sort of disillusionment? This yearning for something more and a sort of irresponsible acceptance of how little we might actually expect? So much of the narrative of this song is the recollection of the singer’s little girlhood, and how these crappy things happen, and how nothing really matters. As an adult, the singer decides the best way to deal with this—what? Nihilism? Ennui? Both?—is to get drunk and dance and have a ball. I can imagine the mother in “Things You Know…” playing this song loudly in her photography studio, smoking, drinking, and screwing the neighbor while her daughter tries to sleep in the bedroom above.
“Purple Haze” performed by Jimi Hendrix
The story is “Tommy On the Roof.” “’Scuse me, while I kiss the sky.” Nuff said.
“What Girls Want” performed by Material Issue
“What Girls Want” is the name of my story, too. I can’t help singing the refrain: what girls want, what girls want, whenever I read my story title in the table of contents. Once when I was on a run, bouncing along, the rhythm of my strides turned into the song’s lyrics, and the play between the lyrics and the story brought me home to the page. I thought the song’s name would make a great title for a collection of stories, and before I discovered Responsible Adults from another story, “What Girls Want” was my working title. There is something innocent in the poppy execution of Material Issue’s performance, and while the narrator—a damaged, philandering drunk—is certainly not innocent, others in the story are. The narrator alludes to a song he used to play for his step-daughter, and in my mind, this is that song.
“One Headlight” performed by The Wallflowers
Dark roads, broken-down beaters, “I turn the engine but the engine doesn’t turn.” In “Responsible Adults,” the title story of the collection, two siblings are found in an abandoned car in the woods. All they have, really, is one another. “One Headlight” rumbles with grief and loss, with the longing for something else, for something better. The narrator’s brother in my story promises that things will be all right, but she (and we) suspects otherwise.
“Down to One” performed by Melissa Etheridge
Oh, man. This song. Long story not entirely short, “Regarding Alix” is a piece about a teacher working at a boarding school just after 9/11. This might be the most autobiographical of any of my stories; I was writer-in-residence at a boarding school when the towers went down. That time was so wrought for all of us, and my situation was further complicated by a mother who was dying three hundred miles away, a relatively recent divorce and the leaving of the man I had since come to love, a sick cat who had to be put to sleep. I was down to one. I would play this song and dance by myself in a mildew-smelling cabin in the woods and cry. And later, a few years later, I used the whole brutal experience to make “Regarding Alix.”
“From This Moment On” performed by Jimmy Somerville
Perhaps it is becoming clear that I am not big on happy stories. There is one in this collection, though, that has a glimmer of brightness. “No Worries” is a story about a man who has fallen into the lazy loneliness of widowhood. He meets a woman (Dorothy) in a store one morning, and from this moment on, things begin to look promising. They make a date. Will she show?
“Too Darn Hot” performed by Ella Fitzgerald
The final story in the collection is called “At the Corner of Cole and Porter.” Not too long ago, my husband and I had a house in a small town, and it was at the t-section of the streets Cole and Porter. It was impossible to look out the window at the street signs and not sing some sort of Cole Porter in my head. Midwestern summers and no central air and it was often, indeed, too darn hot. The song (this best version, IMHO, sung by the inimitable Ella Fitzgerald) is about wanting but not doing. All of that Cole Porter cleverness, dirty talk without dirty words, sexy and funny, play through the verses. I set my story in a small town like the one I knew, and put my old street signs out the front window of the main character, Edna. She is suffering with a creeping dementia, and one of her coping mechanisms is to remember lyrics, and because of the visual cue of those street signs, the memories are usually from Cole Porter songs. These lyrics lead to memories and connections, good and bad: sort-of affairs, death of a child, nasty arguments between mother and daughter, peppermint flavored kisses. The overarching memory is a painful one about when she and Dorothy (her daughter) and husband and son first moved into the house at the corner of Cole and Porter, on a too darn hot day. There is longing here, longing to remember, to make right, to turn back time, to have what never was. But just like in the song, the desire and the reality are not easily reconciled. Still, these Cole Porter songs play on in Edna’s head, and in her humming. It is the music, finally, that begins to lessen the longing and to ease the pain she and her daughter carry between them.
Patricia Ann McNair has managed a gas station, served as a medical volunteer in Honduras, sold pots and pans door to door, tended bar and breaded mushrooms, worked on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and now teaches in the English and Creative Writing Department of Columbia College Chicago. McNair’s The Temple of Air received Southern Illinois University’s Devil’s Kitchen Readers Award and the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award. And These Are The Good Times was a Montaigne Medal finalist. She lives in Chicago with her husband, visual artist Philip Hartigan. https://patriciaannmcnair.com/
If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider making a donation.
