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April 11, 2022
Erika Krouse's Playlist for Her Memoir "Tell Me 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.
Erika Krouse's Tell Me Everything is an insightful and compelling melding of true crime and memoir.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
"[A] beautifully written, disturbing and affecting memoir. This is literary nonfiction at a high level."
In her own words, here is Erika Krouse's Book Notes music playlist for her memoir Tell Me Everything:
When I first thought about creating a playlist/soundtrack for Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation, I couldn’t think of a single song. But then I started listing them and ended up with over sixty. This is a much-reduced list, and it’s still too long! So I’ll try to be brief.
Writing a playlist for a memoir is pretty much like writing a playlist for your life, and many of these songs guided me through the particular periods that I covered in my book. My memoir is about my first big case as a private investigator, working a Title IX football sexual assault lawsuit amidst my own memories of sexual violence. Ours was the first Title IX sexual assault lawsuit in history, so there was no map, not that I would have even known how to follow one as a rookie PI. I often had to figure out who I was inside this bewildering case, which was hard because I didn’t know who I was outside the case. I often relied on music (among other things) just to get through the day. Below are some of the songs that helped me out.
1. “Paper Dolls,” by Innocence Mission. Part of my trouble with the case was also the trouble with my life—I had reached a dangerous level of disillusionment.
2. “I Wanna Get Better,” by Bleachers. In the beginning of the story (and the middle, and the end), I was running at light speed in every direction. I wasn’t addicted to a substance, but I was definitely some kind of an addict—adrenaline, danger, chaos, disintegration. The only thing that glued my life together was this: “I wanna get better, better, better, better, I wanna get better.”
3. “Sharkey’s Night,” by Laurie Anderson. This song embodies what people expect a PI to be, some fedora-ed Burroughs-esque character with nicotine fingers and a flask half-full of something brown. My professional identity ended up being a reflection: “I can see two tiny pictures of myself, and there's one in each of your eyes. And they're doing everything I do. Every time I light a cigarette, they light up theirs. I take a drink and I look in and they're drinking too. It's driving me crazy, it’s driving me nuts.”
4. “That’s Not My Name,” by The Ting Tings. It’s difficult to be a feminist rape survivor investigating an institutional rape case without getting pissed off. Most of the time over the five-year case, I was spoiling for a fight. This song is so badass: “They call me hell. They call me Stacey. They call me her. They call me Jane. That’s not my name. That’s not my name. That’s not my name. That’s not my…name.”
5. “Crazy,” by Gnarls Barkley. This song combines absurdity and pain with the steady beat, like, everything is so messed up but we’re still marching through the actual insanity like it’s normal. He knows the emperor has no clothes, but that makes him the “crazy” one. “And when you're out there without care, yeah, I was out of touch. But it wasn't because I didn't know enough. I just knew too much. Does that make me crazy?”
6. “Sinnerman,” by Nina Simone. This song was written by Les Baxter and Will Holt in the 50’s, but nobody sang it like Nina Simone did (nobody sang anything like Nina Simone did). I felt like this when I was chasing after the bad guys, with the relentless righteousness of my outrage running behind me. “Oh Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?” And at other times I felt like I was Sinnerman, on the run from everyone, especially myself.
7. “Hide and Seek,” by Imogen Heap. This song has its own meaning, but it also captures the way I felt much of the time that I worked this case: cold and feverish and shivery and separate. Multiple dissonant but nearly-identical voices sounded in my head as I kept smashing into the wall of institutional indifference. “You don't care a bit. Ransom notes keep falling out your mouth.” I first came across this song via its instrumental cover by Time for Three—also beautiful.
8. “Every Little Bit,” by Patty Griffin. Patty Griffin is exploring how our past narratives disfigure and disguise our present lives. We’re “untold by the truth…sold by a lie,” but we’ll take that trade if it’ll make our memories quit. But it doesn’t work; we remember everything anyway.
9. “Anywhere I Lay My Head,” by Tom Waits. There are probably 25+ Tom Waits songs I could list here, but this is the one I eventually settled on. This song followed me through more than half my life. It’s hard for me to write about, probably because this is always where I’m trying to get to, in my life and my writing: home.
10. “Silent All These Years,” by Tori Amos. I never wrote about my own past history with sexual violence until Tell Me Everything. The way I coaxed myself out of silence was to write about the case I worked on; my personal history was mostly a subplot except for significant moments, like it is in this song. I like the way Tori Amos blends her past and present in this way, how the music holds more of her secrets than the lyrics do.
11. “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. This song is about giving up on someone you love, but it’s not sad—it’s firm and angry and somehow a little joyful? Or rueful? The emotion at the end is impossible for me to define, which makes this song feel true. I’ve felt this feeling, even if I can’t describe it.
12. “O-o-h Child,” by The Five Stairsteps. If “O-o-h Child” doesn’t get you through the day, nothing will. “Ooh child, things are gonna get easier.” Maybe it’s a lie, but I don’t care.
13. “Rise,” by Eddie Vedder. “Rise” made me ask my husband to give me a mandolin for my birthday (I still can’t play it). I love this: “Gonna rise up, turning mistakes into gold.” It’s about finding faith in yourself, not regretting your past but letting it teach you how to have a future. The song is a verb, an action, and through action we find our purpose.
14 “Feeling Good,” by Nina Simone. One more Nina Simone song! I love her. Nina’s feeling good with the birds and the butterflies and all that crap, but there’s weight to this “good” feeling—a terrible cost in her voice. She’s free, but getting there wasn’t free.
15. “El Porvenir,” by Kevin Zoernig. I first heard this song 30 years ago at a concert given by the composer, and I played it on a raggedy cassette tape until it warped and Kevin recorded a CD. I frequently return to this piece for comfort. The chord progression cycles and evolves, and that’s how it was with the case. Events repeated but they evolved, finding their own logic, ultimately transforming toward resolution.
16. “If Ever I Stray,” by Frank Turner. Writing is a difficult commitment, and so is crime investigation. Both professions require a single-mindedness that is difficult to maintain over long periods. You burn out and have to remind yourself of your purpose over and over again. It’s often tempting to quit and just get a job at a convenience store, but you have to do the thing you’re called to do or it’s a kind of death. Your life really is at stake—this is how you spend your life, or waste it. But either way, you can’t make it on your own.
Erika Krouse is the author of Come Up and See Me Sometime, a New York Times Notable Book, and Contenders, a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Erika's fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, One Story, and more. She teaches creative writing at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop and lives in Colorado. Her debut memoir, Tell Me Everything, has been optioned for TV adaptation by Playground Entertainment.
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