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April 19, 2022
Adrienne Celt's Playlist for Her Novel "End of the World House"
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.
Adrienne Celt's End of the World House is an inventive reflection on friendship, time, and society.
The Washington Independent Review of Books wrote about the book:
"End of the World House is thoughtful, funny, provocative, and creative.... While there’s a temptation to compare the book’s time-bending elements to pop-culture products like 'Groundhog Day' or the streaming series 'Russian Doll,' there is also in Celt’s never-ending museum an echo of the infinite library of Jorge Luis Borges, and in her ruined world where we can only do the best we can, of Samuel Beckett. The author has triumphed by rendering a personal tale against a backdrop of global significance"
In her own words, here is Adrienne Celt's Book Notes music playlist for her novel End of the World House:
When I graduated from high school, my grandmother gave me a Eurail pass so that I could spend a louche month in Europe with my best friend—or, technically, so that I could better myself through travel, which amounted to the same thing. My friend and I planned the trip diligently, flipping through the Rick Steves travel guide and plotting our routes, haggling over our various must-sees. One thing we agreed on was the need to pack light, each of us filling up a single backpack and then rationing out our limited supply of clean underwear, which we washed in the sinks of various hostels in Paris, Siena, Venice, Prague, Munich, and Frankfurt. Apparently more than five days’ worth of underwear was a spatial burden to great to bear.
Another of our key frugalities was related to music. It was 2002, so there were no iPhones, and even iPods barely existed. We didn’t want the hassle of bringing Discmen and a bunch of giant CD jewel cases, so instead we decided on Walkmen and allowed ourselves one mixtape each, which we periodically exchanged, for variety. These tapes became the soundtrack to our journey, listened to countless times on trains, in coffee shops, at night in bed, whenever we needed a moment to ourselves. The song order grew familiar, but somehow never bored me; each tape was a room I could walk into for a bit of privacy, no matter how many people were around. That I shared these songs with my best friend only made them paradoxically more personal.
I made my own mix, while my friend brought one curated by her then-boyfriend (also a close friend of mine.) We knew that the tastes on each tape would overlap just enough to be enjoyable to both of us, while also feeling like distinct experiences. They were the same, but not. Alike, but different. As in a friendship, the tapes complemented one another, and together felt greater than the sum of their parts.
My new novel End of the World House follows two women, Bertie and Kate, who once dreamed of going on a similar vacation, but who don’t actually make it to Paris until their thirties, when the world and their friendship are both falling apart. While writing the book, I spent a lot of time revisiting my high school friendships, and that trip through Europe in particular. There was something complementary about this as well, the real and the imagined in conversation with one another, expanding dialectically until both were larger and richer in my mind. As such, the songs I’ve chosen for this playlist are ones that I am either certain were included on the mixtapes my friend and I carried through Europe with us, or else are close enough that they may as well have been. Not because I played them very much while I was writing, but because I played them on my own trip years ago, without which the book would not exist.
As you listen, imagine sitting on a high-speed train drinking orange Fanta, and watching fields of sunflowers whip by out the window. Imagine being with your best friend in the world, and having no idea who or what or where either one of you would be twenty years later. Imagine not really caring—or, rather, caring very much, but not being worried about it. Imagine trying to throw peanuts into each other’s mouths, and celebrating the exact moment you leave Italy and enter Switzerland on your way north to Prague. Imagine being bored but happy, the two states of being exactly the same. Imagine a hard mechanical click when the tape runs out, and the feeling of tapping your friend’s warm shoulder and asking, “Time to switch?”
1. “Cheap Reward” (Honky Tonk demo) — Elvis Costello, My Aim is True, 2001 reissue
2. “Don’t Know Why” — Norah Jones, Come Away With Me, 2002
3. “The Piano Has Been Drinking" — Tom Waits, Small Change, 1976
4. “Mr. Zebra” — Tori Amos, Boys for Pele, 1996
5. “The Boxer” — Simon & Garfunkel, Bridge Over Troubled Water, 1970
6. “You Are Invited” — The Dismemberment Plan, Emergency & I, 1999
7. “Fast Car” — Tracy Chapman, Tracy Chapman, 1988
8. “Killing Me Softly” — The Fugees, The Score, 1996
9. “Me & Bobby McGee” — Janis Joplin, Pearl, 1971
10. “Buddy Holly” — Weezer, The Blue Album, 1994
11. “Out of Range” — Ani DiFranco, Out of Range, 1994
12. “The Fox in the Snow” — Belle and Sebastian, If You’re Feeling Sinister, 1996
Adrienne Celt is originally from Seattle, but now lives in Tucson, Arizona. She is the author of two previous novels: Invitation to a Bonfire, currently being adapted for TV by AMC, and The Daughters, which won the 2015 PEN Southwest Book Award for Fiction and was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR. Adrienne is also a cartoonist, and she publishes a weekly webcomic at LoveAmongtheLampreys.com.
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