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October 22, 2021
Lara Stapleton's Playlist for Her Story Collection "The Ruin of Everything"
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.
Lara Stapleton's book The Ruin of Everything is unnerving and masterfully told, one of the strongest short fiction collections I have read in years.
Gina Apostol wrote of the book:
"An Anaïs Nin of late capitalism's bohemia, Lara Stapleton writes like an oracle of an underworld-of miscegenated loves and translocated broken souls-of characters unaware or ruinously conscious-and she inscribes that world in us with lust and wit and always that deep joy that encompasses sorrows bred in the bone, the race, the colors of one's skin, the heart, and of course the tongue: the word."
In her own words, here is Lara Stapleton's Book Notes music playlist for her story collection The Ruin of Everything:
I miss the years of the smokey little jazz club. My relationship with music is an odd one. I don’t listen to much of it in my home and haven’t for many years because I am always looking for the silence that allows for epiphany, the “eureka” of language congealed. Many in my world would be shocked to hear of this lack of song in my home because I spent years seeing live music out in New York, a few nights a week. It’s one of my favorite things to do; mostly I saw jazz and Latin music. I love the aesthetics of the two intertwining genres, the rhythms, deeply layered, like boisterous community in conversation: communing, passions, aligned conspiratorial whispering, laughter, weeping, arguing, lovemaking. I love the way the genres are deeply seamlessly emotional, the sophistication of dissonance, anxiety in dance with harmony. The music I know best, to where I know the lyrics and with which I associate my own Rustbelt teen longings, is classic rock, which we listened to in my town in Michigan up until punk rock hit, all years after these things happened in the coast. But if I hear a Doors or Hendrix in a café I might well up, and I think that’s because these are the years in which our emotions are so unbridled, we long and love so recklessly. That this was the era of working-class White musicians profoundly influenced by Black American musicians was something I didn’t understand then, but is deeply important to the tale, a parable of this country; these are the anthems of my youth. It makes sense I learned them in the Rustbelt.
When I began with this playlist, I was afraid I couldn’t do it because I feel as if don’t have that much music in my life anymore. I even started working with friends to ask for help, as if I’d let them do it for me. But then, I discovered, I did have much more knowledge of songs I knew and loved than I’d realized. It was emotionally difficult to accumulate so many songs about loss and longing and grief that are appropriate to The Ruin of Everything. It made me sad, sadder than when I wrote the stories. It was also beautiful. Ultimately, I’m happy with what I came up with.
“Glory Box” Portishead for the book
The collection has been described as tales of abandoned children in adult bodies. It’s also about the moment in which fear takes over. My narrators believe their relationships come to an inevitable end as their partners shift, the inevitable callousness that comes to the heart of the Great Love. But in actuality, the characters are the ones who shift on their fears, and they let their panic destroy the relationships. I see the stories as full of lugubrious sorrow and longing, mostly by women, though there are men too, and so I believe “Glory Box” is a fit for the entire book. It also refers to perspective, “We’re all looking at a different picture;” something the book investigates with its permutations on The Loss. I think “Glory Box” is a song about that terrible longing, that aching, wounded love which may have one person, or the world, as an object.
“Creep” Radiohead for “Alpha Male”
The story is about a man who is seen as very special by much of the world, a very successful actor. This is my slick Hollywood story, but that is not how he sees himself. His success has been driven by a need to prove himself worthy after a youth of family rejection both distinct and subtle. So, there comes a point, when he is madly in love, thinking he’s found this unbelievably perfect woman, that he begins to see the world as that abandoned child. He’s the creep, he doesn’t deserve her. His fear poisons the relationship.
“When the Levee Breaks” Led Zeppelin for “Intention Neglect”
People should also check out the first recorded version by Kansas City Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie. As I mentioned, classic rock songs from the '70s were a massive part of my teen years, for some reason we looked back that way before my community in Michigan got into punk in the late '80s, much later than the coasts. Of course, this blues song is rooted in African-American music, and the meaning shifts when interpreted by White artists. The Zeppelin version is gorgeous, haunting, full of desire and regret and terrible choices. We shouldn’t forget that these internationally known White bands were considered rebellious, sexy and daring because they studied Black music so intensely. And it’s a blues song that appears to be about a supernatural force, “If it keeps on rainin, levees goin to break,” but as so often in the genre, it’s also about human cruelty. It’s a song about the Great Migration, and having to go to Chicago, and leave one’s loved ones because there’s no work in the South, but also because of the inhumane conditions: violence and poverty experienced by the narrator’s people. “Intention Neglect” is about how poverty forced the main character’s mother to leave the Philippines and make choices that destroyed her brother. She has a sense that she and her mother survived their own dislocation because her father is White, but her full Filipino brother was abandoned. We are so often talking about race in subtle ways we might not recognize. It keeps on raining, the brother can’t overcome his wounds, and the family breaks. In the blues tradition, the lyrics describe a “mean ol’ levee,” but it’s not an inanimate object that is truly the force of cruelty.
“People Are Strange” Eric Lewis for “New”
Lewis is a contemporary pianist whom I’d describe as rooted in jazz, but he does all kinds of contemporary music as well. I’ve seen him live many times, and he does this fascinating thing where he’ll take a 21st or 20th century song, and unwind it seamlessly to its roots in older, African-American music. It’s very post-modern, though that makes it sound clinical and it’s truly very organic and seamless. He does this more live, saw him do it with Coldplay and others, but the best recorded version of this is probably this song. I pick it for “New” because it’s a story set in New Orleans. It’s kind of essayistic, and at least in part about transculturation and the way US cultural roots, our aesthetic, are so rooted in that city.
“Tusk” Fleetwood Mack for “Glory Of”
This song makes me think of triumph, the build, the expanse, though the lyrics are about sex, and loss. “Glory Of” contemplates the loss of that expanse.
“They Don’t Care about Us” Michael Jackson for “The Other Realm”
This is my favorite MJ song. It can be interpreted politically, and I prefer that interpretation, but I attach it here because it expresses the point of view of the narrator who feels disconnected, that the world is entirely cruel, while she spins off into fear and isolation.
“El Gato Tiene Tres Patas” Machito and Graciela for “Godspeed”
I love Spanish Caribbean music. So much of it has this intense feeling of looking back with longing, like leaving a place you love forever. The saying “don’t search for the cat with three paws” means, from what I understand, don’t insist recklessly on things that damage, like looking for trouble, but I think sadder and heavier. It also seems very sexual. This story is about responding to pain with a sexual recklessness.
“Strange Relationship” Prince for “Arrythmia”
This song nicely describes a bizarre, painful, non-relationship, but it’s from the pov of the the man in the story, not the narrator. That person who is more powerful in the equation is just as broken and in pain as the mistress. “I didn’t like the way you were, so I had to make you mine.” My god, who is so honest about such things?
“World Gong Crazy” Han Han x Datu x Hataw for “Until It Comes to You”
I cannot imagine a more perfect song for this story. Han Han is a Canadian-Filipino musician and nurse (a very common profession for Filipinos in the US and Canada, the way many of our families immigrate). The story is both very western lounge and rap and pre-Hispanic gong music; it’s nuts how intellectually interesting this song is while being hot as fuck too. Like the Eric Lewis song, very historically referential and post-modern. The story is about another wounded soul, a Filipino-American wandering the club scene in Manila, and then kind of releasing into madness that may or may not be rehearsed. The song uses both Tagalog and Cebuano. “World Gong Crazy,” the title, also refers to the loss of the colonized culture.
“A Night in Tunisia” Dizzy Gillespie featuring Charlie Parker for “Flesh and Blood”
I had wanted to make this the anthem of the entire book. I see the song as about this exquisite night with a lover who was never seen again, this perfect memory that will remain for life, but truth is, it’s too upbeat of a song to match the entire book. It feels a warm nostalgia, not excruciating longing. My wanting to choose it has to do with how I’d like to be seen, I think, ha ha. I imagine this newly met couple wandering around to chic lounges through the night until their exquisite hours alone in some hotel, sun coming up. This perfect memory, and the longing looking back is not too painful. “Flesh and Blood” is the one story in which the narrator is not broken by her loss (or at least so she thinks, for now). She liked her relationship, but she also is deeply in love with life, or trying to learn to be, so it doesn’t ruin her. This is not the Ruin of Everything, it’s the Fight for Life, Love in the sense of non-possessive world love, magnanimity (but also, the narrator may be delusional).
Lara Stapleton is the writer of a television series 1850 set in New Orleans before the Civil War, about mixed people, mixed couples, taboo and the color line. She is partnered with producer and co-creator Rachel Watanabe-Batton and producer Djaka Soare. Lara is also the author of the short story collection The Lowest Blue Flame Before Nothing (Aunt Lute, 1998), an Independent Booksellers' Selection, and a Pen Open Book Committee Selection. She edited The Thirdest World (Factory School, 2004) and co-edited Juncture (Soft Skull, 2007). Her work has appeared in dozens of periodicals, including The Los Angeles Review of Books, Ms., Poets and Writers, Glimmer Train, and The Indiana Review. She was born and raised in East Lansing, Michigan. New York City has long been her home. A graduate of NYU's creative writing program, she teaches for Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York.
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