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August 16, 2021
Ashley Nelson Levy's Playlist for Her Novel "Immediate Family"
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.
Ashley Nelson Levy's novel Immediate Family is an eloquently told, moving, and complex debut.
Booklist wrote of the book:
"Touching and tightly crafted . . . Gifted with a lifelike finesse, the narrator's piercing tales of family and self are love-wrought, delivered in Levy's honed, beautiful writing."
In her own words, here is Ashley Nelson Levy's Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Immediate Family:
I didn’t listen to much in the first five years that I worked on Immediate Family. I’m this kind of person: I own multiple pairs of construction headphones that I wear in the house to eliminate sound while I write. What I’ve historically listened to outside of working hours has rarely been anything cool or current; music has never given depth to my character. I grew up in a house where my mother played disco most nights in the kitchen while cooking, and the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever, chased with the pop music of the nineties, made up the repertoire of my youth. These genres have followed me into adulthood, pumped high when driving alone in the car or taking a run or dancing in my own kitchen.
Then in 2019, music found its way into my writing life. I sold my first book and had my first baby within the same six-week period. My son cried inconsolably for most of the twenty-four-hour cycle—though the days had stopped feeling like separate entities at that point—and I wondered, hazily, how I might get through the next year of edits. It was my dad who discovered, one rock-bottom night, that the seventies folk band Bread was the one thing in the world that could quell the baby’s tears. We turned up the volume on my mom’s phone, the screen illuminating my son’s blissful face, and it was the closest I’ve come to witnessing a miracle. From there we developed a playlist that provided some respite through the edits, but this took time to curate because my son didn’t like just anything. The list below is an honest account of the soundtrack that accompanied the last year of this book, songs that must have encoded themselves in the book’s DNA. Some of them still haunt me but I’m indebted to them forever.
“Aubrey” by Bread
I have learned to lead a life apart from all the rest
If I can't have the one I want, I'll do without the best
But how I miss the girl
And I'd go a million times around the world just to say
She had been mine for a day
This song was the only thing that would put my son to sleep for the first six months of his life. At a certain point my husband and I stopped measuring time by minutes or hours but by the number of times we had to listen to “Aubrey.” How long did it take for him to go down? Four Aubreys. Still, I can appreciate my son’s sensibilities. There’s a longing in the lyrics and the instrumentals that I think also resonates in the book, in the narrator’s case a longing for a child, a longing to reconnect with her husband, her brother, and even with her own body.
“Barbara Ann” by the Beach Boys
I never realized, as I listened to this song on one continuous, beachy loop, that it was a cover. It was written by Fred Fassert who gave the song to his brother, Charles Fassert, a member of The Regents, who first performed it. The song is named after their younger sister. I can’t help but like this strange sibling tie-in since so much of the book is about the bond between a sister and brother. One night my son began to shuffle his foot from side to side when this came on, and I realized he had picked up the twist.
“The Sound of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkel
Paul Simon wrote this when he was twenty-one years old and is said to have composed the song in his bathroom, in the dark, because the tiles gave the effect of an echo chamber. Silence is one of the central themes of the book, between loved ones, between strangers, and hovering over the family dinner table. I was surprised when my son took to this song, but it’s one of his favorites from Simon & Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits.
“Only You” by Yaz
The narrator and her brother are nineties’ kids in the book, so it’s only fitting that a song like this made it on here—released in 1982 but popularly featured at the end of the 1998 film Can’t Hardly Wait. My son typically prefers to listen to this one first thing in the morning.
“Fake Empire” by The National
This song feels tonally aligned with the book, though I can’t explain why. I think they both strike the same note of hope and melancholy. It’s one of the few songs I didn’t mind listening to over and over.
“Orinoco Flow (Sail Away)” by Enya
In 2020, right around the time I was listening to this 10-20 times a day, The Guardian ranked “Orinoco Flow” at number 77 in its list of the 100 greatest UK number-one singles of all time. Maybe one day I’ll finally be able to give it the appreciation it deserves. For now it summons images of postpartum sleeplessness and those nineties commercials for calming CD compilations. The narrator and her brother would have probably caught those commercials while watching TV together at home.
“Party” by Trevor Dickson
This is from Dickson’s fantastic album Passion Fruits, and I picture it as a wedding song at the end of the book, one that captures some of the happiness to be found in those final scenes, with her brother married and the family together again. It always makes my son smile. The right one to end on, I think.
Ashley Nelson Levy received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was awarded the Clein-Lemann Esperanza Fellowship. Her work has been a notable mention in Best American Nonrequired Reading, and she’s the recipient of the Bambi Holmes Award for Emerging Writers. In 2015, she cofounded Transit Books, an independent publishing house with a focus on international literature. Immediate Family is her first book.
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