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April 5, 2022
Rebecca Scherm's Playlist for Her Novel "A House Between Earth and the Moon"
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.
Rebecca Scherm's novel A House Between Earth and the Moon blends science fiction and climate fiction to brilliant effect.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
"A high-concept domestic novel that merges science fiction and eco-fiction tropes. . . . Scherm [gives] the climate change novel a wider yet still realistic scope and . . . nuanced characters in Alex and Mary Agnes, who are both eager to do the right thing but undone by humanity, its fickle nature, and its allegedly liberating but often self-imprisoning technologies. . . . An ambitious . . . dystopian tale."
In her own words, here is Rebecca Scherm's Book Notes music playlist for her novel A House Between Earth and the Moon:
With this book, especially, I asked the music I listened to while writing to help me inhabit the world of the book and then later, to help me cope with the world I’d created. The first five years of music was a desperate buffet, but the last two years feel right, bound up tight with the atmosphere. Often, I credit the music itself for opening the world that I’m writing, leading me further into an atmosphere or an emotion—or, in this case, a space station that’s shaped like a wheel, a loop that’s shut tight, where some rooms look like Ikea As-Is departments and some rooms like caverns carved from hard candy.
1. Perfume Genius, “Slip Away,” from No Shape
When I hear No Shape now, I feel a rush of gratitude that can get a little heavy and emotional for everyday life. This book was a beast, and from 2016-17 I was pretty lost. I was already past my deadline but nowhere close to finished, and the world I was writing kept expanding out-out-out but it wouldn’t go forward. I’d had a rough miscarriage, a sudden change in editors, and I was living in a place that gave me a bad teenage feeling of being simultaneously bored and unsuccessful and wrong in my surroundings. Then came No Shape. It’s tempting to make this a tidy story, and I know it wasn’t, but I do know that soaking myself in this album opened up a door that I couldn’t find before. The hugeness of the sound and the tightness of his aesthetic, how it’s lush and cool at the same time—it gave me a clue about how Mary Agnes might be on Parallaxis, and that was the beginning of, you know, getting a grip.
2. The Aluminum Group, “Impress Me”
This song was on a treasured mix CD given to me in high school; I’ve loved it for close to twenty years. I resist lyrics generally—I’d rather not understand the words, if there are words—but I’ve been listening this song too long to have missed them. You know how some people say that something’s “impressive” in a way that makes clear how difficult they believe they are to impress? That’s the set up for this song, which still makes me laugh even though I’ve heard it a thousand times. Anyway, here this song is about Tess and Katherine, trying to keep their egos inflated while they negotiate.
3. Tierra Whack, “Pretty Ugly”
This one’s for Magnes—or any teenager, really. Tierra Whack is incomparable, an artist like no other, and yet this song is familiar to me in that it makes me feel fifteen again, frantically toggling between self-loathing and grandeur, trying to perform something acceptable between them.
4. Amo Amo, “Closer to You”
5. Esme Patterson, “Light in your Window”
There were a few drafts of this book narrated entirely by Tess, and when pressed to define the reality of the narratives she gave us about all the other characters, I would ask my frustrated reader why that was so important. In one draft, I killed her off at the 2/3 mark to get around her point of view. Eventually, I found another way. I like pairing these two songs as a Tess arc—her smugness and ecstasy when she gets closer and closer to her subjects; her desperation when her limits and her overreach simultaneously become clear.
6. “Time Will Tell,” Blood Orange
Meg and Alex’s story is messy, and that it stays messy and unresolved will probably be frustrating to some people. Sorry! Theirs is a long marriage, before and after the book. Nothing stays resolved! Two people who want to work it out are going to try, and keep trying, and see what happens. Should they have split up? They didn’t want to. Is that enough?
7. Phillip Glass: Piano Works, Phillip Glass performed by Jenny Lin, and The Orphee Suite performed by Paul Barnes
For the last few months before I turned in the final revision, there was only Philip Glass piano music. Putting it on each day in my headphones was like putting on blinkers. I loved it, and I hated it, and I couldn’t go without it. This relentlessly precise music makes my pulse race and also makes me a little nuts. I haven’t listened to it since I turned the book in. I need some time apart.
8. 100 Gecs, “Money Machine”
For the couple of years, this song has played a pretty crucial role in hanging onto my mental health. When I get a big surge of adrenaline in my work life—like if I just banged out first draft of a scene that was really hard to write, or I got a rejection or an acceptance (or both at the same time!), and everything feels a little too hot in a way that could turn bad if not immediately managed, I listen to this song, usually twice, followed by some New Age choral music to come back down. A pretty good recipe.
Rebecca Scherm is the author of Unbecoming. She lives in California with her family.
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