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April 5, 2022
Candice Wuehle's Playlist for Her Novel "Monarch"
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.
Candice Wuehle's novel Monarch is wholly original and brilliantly bizarre.
NPR Books wrote of the book:
"Candice Wuehle's irresistibly weird debut novel MONARCH is the kind of book that you want to start reading again immediately after turning the last page—not just to trace the conspiracy at its heart, but to appreciate how its kaleidoscope of beauty pageants, Y2K anxieties, famous dead girls, and deep state machinations synthesizes into an exploration of what makes up a self . . . Poetic, haunting."
In her own words, here is Candice Wuehle's Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Monarch:
Monarch is a book about figuring out who you really are. This quest unfolds as a thriller—a sleepwalking teen’s investigation in to what she’s doing while sleepwalking leads to the discovery of a deep state government program. She finds out that everything she believed to be true about herself was programmed, incepted, baked-in to her personality before she ever had a chance to develop her own opinions. Radio in the ‘90s was my own personal (much less thrilling) journey to figure out who I was.
Unless you had a cool older sibling or skills with Napster, MTV and Top 40 pop stations were all encompassing back then. With the total assurance of a flat earther, I believed the world of music simply ended after whatever Carson Daly showed on Total Request Live. Like Monarch's main character, Jessica, I didn’t even know I didn’t like what I thought I liked. Then, in the summer of ’99, I met a girl from a distant high school at Shakespeare camp. She wore combat boots, made an excellent Shrew (in The Taming of), and wore so much black my dad referred to her as Johnny Cash. She burned me a CD of songs she’d recorded right off the college radio station—many of those songs listed here—and that was, for me, the beginning of becoming a new person. Or, maybe, not so much a “new” person as simply “a person.”
“Stranger Things Vol. 1” Kyle Dixon & Michael Stein
I wrote most of Monarch in a windowless basement office that I shared with other teaching assistants at a university in Kansas. On weekends and holidays, I was usually the only person in the entire building, an imposing concrete box totally out of tune with the rest of the campus. (Lots of campus humanities buildings were built in the sixties and thus erected to be riot proof. The University of Kansas feels doubly protected because it’s somewhat remote—so much so, in fact, that a portion of Andy Warhol’s collection was housed there during the cold war because his estate theorized this location was too far from a city of significance to be bombed.) It was in this building reminiscent of the anonymous institute Eleven escapes from in Stranger Things that I worked. I drowned out the silence with the soundtrack to Stranger Things, which is what I was thinking of every time something is described as “synthed up” in Monarch.
“Teenage FBI” by Guided by Voices
This song just so captures where The X Files-ish conspiracy vibe of Monarch meets sheer teen paranoia.
“Dreams” by The Cranberries
I guess I’m not the only writer this song imprinted on as the crystallization of whist and angst and beauty in the ‘90s. I feel like I see it mentioned all the time. Most recently, I watched the episode of Yellowjackets this song is used on the same day I read the scene in The Idiot by Elif Batuman where this plays on the jukebox in the Harvard bar. I think the very sound of this song captures the irreality of the era, the paradoxical sense of achieving an ideal that gets decimated by the very acts one has to perform to get there. I.e., obsession with dieting or the specifically ‘90s fear of being a “poser.” Like, the only thing worse than not getting what you dreamed or cared about was letting people know you cared enough to dream to begin with.
“Violet” by Hole
Monarch's main character, Jessica, has a riot grrrl babysitter who burns her a CD to take to college with her. Throughout the novel, Jessica treats it as a soundtrack for survival. The reader never finds out what’s on it, but I can tell you this song definitely is.
“Genie in a Bottle” by Christina Aguilera
As Christine, Jessica’s aforementioned babysitter, points out: genies are actual slaves. And yet—the year this song came out, my best friend and I rushed home from high school to make sure we didn't miss it on the TRL countdown. I very specifically remember my friend showing me how to do the “rub me the right way” dance move. I watched this music video so many times while writing Monarch and just sort of marveled that there was a time not very long ago when teens who had been Disney child stars the week before performed choreographed sex acts in the middle of the afternoon on MTV.
“Barbie Girl” by Aqua
I owned this album and listened to this song unironically in junior high. The note on the back of the CD case, "The song 'Barbie Girl' is a social comment and was not created or approved by the makers of the doll," was utterly lost on me and every other teen I knew. It feels perfectly late ‘90s America to be so certain of the era’s patriarchal values as to totally miss the point of a Danish pop song that satirizes treating women like objects.
“Natural’s Not In It” by Gang of Four
“The body is good business/ sell out, maintain the interest” is a line that could be the dialogue of any of Monarch's villains.
“Pretty Girls Make Graves” by The Smiths
At one point in Monarch, Jessica replaces the Christina Aguilera CD the sleeping teen girl sitting next to her on flight is playing with The Smiths. Specifically, she sets it to “Pretty Girls Make Graves” so the song loops on repeat to try to reverse program the cultural messaging coming from the pop music the girl usually listens to. Of course, there’s the additional layer that this is a song about a closeted gay man whose girlfriend is pressuring him to have sex with her. So much of Monarch is about suppressed desire and the longing that comes from believing “I could have been wild and I could have been free/ But nature played this trick on me.”
“Ask” by The Smiths
I grew up in a town with a bar built from a boxcar rumored to have been bought for one dollar. It’s where everyone went all summer long after we graduated and it was the only place with a jukebox and (if you steered clear of pool cues) the only place we danced other than people’s kitchens. Mostly, I remember dancing to this song. I love the wild swing it takes from cheesy fake waves and seagull sounds to the jaunty verses to the slow motion shift from shyness to the A-bomb to what is my favorite line of any song, ever: “Nature is a language/ can’t you read?” Like “Pretty Girls Make Graves,” this is a song about desire and the ways we try and fail to stifle it, about the undeniable self-realizations that can only be discovered for some people through a yearning that dissolves cultural conditioning or societal expectations or even internalized beliefs.
“Love Shack” by The B-52s
While I was working on Monarch, my partner was finishing up a memoir that is in part about being raised in an ultra religious household. While a lot of his story is really dark, his memories of being taught censored pop songs in church youth group are hilarious. I transplanted some of that onto a scene in Monarch where Jessica and her secret girlfriend, Veronica, revise the words of this song to “Love Shack, a little place where we can get with Jesus” as a way to tease Veronica’s extremely Catholic mother.
“Riders on the Storm” by The Doors
Well, there’s a character in the book that I wanted to be really stereotypically masculine and this just felt to me like the song he plays on repeat. A significant portion of the action of one chapter involves skipping back to this track on the CD of L.A. Woman.
“Everybody (Backstreets Back)” by The Backstreet Boys
The Backstreet Boys was the first concert I begged my parents to let me go to. Mandy Moore opened and it was awesome. This song cracks me up now because it is, ostensibly, a song about a triumphant comeback (hilariously, I can remember AJ singing “Oh my god, were back again” with what seemed like genuine shock to be “back again”) but this comeback is on…a debut album. It also feels symptomatic of a larger cultural obsession with being not just The Best, but The Best Of All Time. There’s a point in Monarch when Jessica finds out she has some dormant super skills and it’s mentioned that a Backstreet Boys song is playing from a boom box—this is that Backstreet Boys song.
“Atrocity Exhibition” by Joy Division
All of Joy Division’s music is like an invitation to another world—a confirmation of a suspicion I’ve had since I was a kid listening at the top of the steps to whatever my parents did after I was supposed to go to sleep that there’s another, truer, layer underneath the surface. For this reason, one of the most emotionally important scenes of Monarch centers around listening to Joy Division. Here’s a brief excerpt:
Silently, Christine put the disc in my boom box. We sat next to each other on my bedroom floor, our backs against my bed, and listened. Sometimes, I thought it sounded like the instruments were committing suicide and sometimes I thought it sounded like they were deciding to live. Some of them shrieked and burned but there was always at least one sound like a heartbeat underlying it all; discordant and efficient as a mob. The lead singer’s voice was flat, his mouth so close to the microphone and then suddenly so far away.
This is the way, step inside, he repeated again and again. A broadcast from a radio at the bottom of the ocean.
“Say Yes” by Elliott Smith
“Crooked spin can’t come to rest/ I’m damaged bad at best.”
There’s a chapter of Monarch that begins “I became a perv for oblivion after that” that my partner said made him think of this line. Elliott Smith is certainly the emotional undertrack of the nineties for me. Like Smith was, Monarch is obsessed with the tension between the desire to be seen and the desire to disappear. It's a book propelled by Jessica’s suspicion that she’s too damaged to ever rest, to do anything but the work of trying to forget.
“2:45 AM” by Elliott Smith
“Going out sleepwalking/ where mute memories start talking.”
I could quote almost every line from “2:45 AM” in reference to Monarch. In fact, I think it’s possible the plot of the book—which involves sleepwalking, resurfaced memories, and trying to “split back in two”—could have been incepted in me by this song.
Candice Wuehle is the author of the poetry collections Fidelitoria: Fixed or Fluxed, BOUND, and Death Industrial Complex, shortlisted for the Believer Book Award. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she holds a PhD in literary studies and creative writing from the University of Kansas.
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