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August 17, 2021
Jonathan Wells' Playlist for His Memoir "The Skinny"
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.
Jonathan Wells' memoir The Skinny is a memoir both poignant and unforgettable.
Foreword Review wrote of the book:
"Jonathan Wells was small as a child―short, but also quite thin. That trait, the way others reacted to it, and its nonconformity with perceived male norms led to a painful chain reaction of events...The Skinny is gripping in its wonderful articulation of an underrepresented perspective on masculinity."
In his own words, here is Jonathan Wells' Book Notes music playlist for his memoir The Skinny:
My memoir, The Skinny, on the surface is a history of my weight from the age of eleven to twenty-three. On another level, it addresses what weight means and what it meant for me and my place within my family. For boys, weight stands in for other things: maturity, confidence, and stature.
I have had a strong reaction to the book from men who did not fit the conventional definition of masculinity and suffered for it. The book shows how nonconformity affected me in the world and in my relationships with other men and women. Women who did not know what body issues could mean for men also reacted strongly.
A soundtrack runs through the book comprised of the songs I heard at the moment and how they are interwoven within the narrative.
“The Sound of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkel
This is one of the first albums I remember buying as a kid. Every time I visited New York City from the suburbs where I lived, I walked around the corner from my father’s office in the Pan Am building to the Sam Goody’s on Lexington & 43rd Street. The store stocked a broad array of records – especially folk and rock that they kept in the basement. For me, it was like descending to heaven.
In the book after I recount my purchase of this album because I had heard the song so often on the radio, it is woven into my thoughts as I return home on the train by myself. Lonely, upset due to difficult medical news, the lyrics of the song repeat in my mind. As they replay, I inhabit the opening lines, “Hello darkness my old friend…”
“You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” by The Beatles
Although I was too young to have been a Beatles fan from the beginning, I came across this song in my early teens as I became familiar with their music. Instantly, it was my favorite song. I sang the chorus to myself so often that it became a mantra. Its vulnerability connected me to John Lennon cutting through space, time, and all of the other differences between us.
In the narrative, I experience a humiliating moment. Since my bed was stationed against the wall of my room, it was obvious, according to the lyric, that the only possibility for solace lay in my turning myself toward it, resting my forehead on its cool surface and repeating the chorus to myself.
“The Weight” by The Band
“Music from Big Pink” was a revelatory album for me. The lyrics, especially, pointed me to how songs could have the texture of poems even if I was too young to articulate that to myself at that age. In particular, I was moved by the song’s different moods: exhaustion, dread, obligation. Together and apart, these elements perfectly encapsulated the dilemma of weight for me and its place in my life.
Since weight is the central theme of my book, this song represents those emotions more than any other piece of music in the book. In the book, as I think about my father and others pushing me to eat more, criticizing my eating habits and the body that showed how thin I was, these comments felt like a tremendous and inescapable burden. I imagine “the weight” as an iron anvil that is pressed on me over and over at different times and in different forms.
“Castles Made of Sand” by Jimi Hendrix
I heard “Axis Bold as Love” soon after it came out. I remember the lead guitar parts on this song for their sweet yet vertiginous quality. In this song, Jimi bends the guitar strings so much that it almost sounds like a sitar.
In the book, I have just been sent away to school in Lausanne, Switzerland and all my classes were taught in French, a language I barely knew when I arrived. That sense of alienation made me cling to the records I had brought with me and played on my portable stereo. When new friends gave me hash to smoke, the feeling of it went perfectly with the woozy quality of the music.
“Like A Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan
Like many Bob Dylan songs of the sixties that I came to as a young adolescent, this one took me years to get used to. At the same time, it seemed both vengeful and aggressive, as well as hurt and poignant. It was difficult for me to reconcile those two seemingly opposed emotions until I played them for a new friend at my Swiss school whose reaction was, “Who is this singer? He has a terrible voice!” That was all it took to make me feel angry and homesick and decide that he and I would never be friends.
“Midnight Rambler” by The Rolling Stones
From “Between the Buttons” onward, I had a love/hate relationship with The Rolling Stones. Their barely concealed rage made me uncomfortable at the time and when that verged on chaos, I realized how little I liked them. I owned their albums but didn’t play them.
Part of the problem with the band was that their fans scared me. They seemed dangerous and attracted to the danger that the band embodied. It took me years or perhaps even decades to get over those first impressions. And, unlike Bob Dylan, they lacked an aching, emotional side. My chief adversary in the book – and finally my betrayer – is a big Rolling Stones fan. When I go into his room for the first time, he has just bought Let It Bleed and is playing “Midnight Rambler.” It’s a song that spooked me every time I listened to it, until I eventually got over my fear of it.
“Lucky Man” by Emerson, Lake and Palmer
This was one of my favorite songs of the era. Its sweetness and optimism stood out without being insipid. The voice and the instruments had a gritty quality that made me wonder how “lucky” he truly was.
This was another song I listened to repeatedly in my Swiss school bedroom. But once after I was returning from a brutal encounter with the school’s bullies, I heard it being played from the hall, and then realized that it was coming from my room. An inhabitant of the asylum adjacent to the dorm had apparently snuck into my room, turned on the stereo and was playing this song. I imagined that he would be aggressive and braced myself for a confrontation with him but when I entered, he was swaying calmly to the rhythm, enraptured, and there was nothing threatening about him. Compared to the bullies, he was angelic.
“Crimson and Clover” by Tommy James and the Shondells
This was, with “Crystal Blue Persuasion,” one of the most popular top 40 songs on the radio in 1969. They played so constantly that it seemed like brainwashing. My brother and I found ourselves singing it so often that to try and get it out of our heads and resist the catchy melody we made up our own lyrics. The more inane and scatological, the better.
In the book, my brother and I are listening to the radio on a long drive. When we reach our destination, a ski mountain in Northern Vermont, I still can’t get the tune out of my head while I’m skiing. Even when I fall and break my leg, I can hear the chorus. When I played it recently to my younger kids, I was amazed by how much I liked hearing it again, and how much they liked it too.
Jonathan Wells has published two collections with Four Way Books, Train Dance and The Man With Many Pens. His third Debris is forthcoming in 2021. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, AGNI and The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day program and many other journals. His memoir, The Skinny, is forthcoming from Ze Books.
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