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May 24, 2022
Diana Goetsch's Playlist for Her Memoir "This Body I Wore"
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.
Diana Goetsch's memoir This Body I Wore is a profound and eloquent story of transitioning later in life.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Goetsch fashions a brilliant and tapestried story of her late-in-life gender transition . . . A gorgeous self-portrait that defies categorization. The result obliterates binary confines around gender with breathtaking finesse."
In her own words, here is Diana Goetsch's Book Notes music playlist for her memoir This Body I Wore:
Long before I was invited to submit this playlist for This Body I Wore, I put together my own playlist, consisting of songs mentioned or quoted in the book—and there were over fifty songs on it. That makes sense for a memoir: everyone’s life has a good-size soundtrack. Even though my memoir chronicles a life of being trans and not knowing it, like any young person, I looked to music for my mythology of love and identity. Later, as a poet, I drew much inspiration from this sister art, and I hope you enjoy this playlist.
1. Sinéad O’Connor, “The Healing Room”
“If you don’t know my name,” James Baldwin said, “you don’t know your name.” He was addressing white people about race, and the centrality of the Black experience in American history and culture. The same goes for the trans experience—If you don’t see us, you can’t see yourselves. In this song Sinéad O’Connor takes that sentiment to the inner child we so often turn away from. I first heard “The Healing Room” driving into Seattle on a book tour. The soundscape of children’s whispers, in back of Sinéad’s magnificent Celtic voice, transported me to a primal place I never want to leave. I used her refrain—“You’re not free if you don’t know me”—as the epilogue for This Body I Wore.
2. Bruce Springsteen, “Thunder Road”
Bruce Springsteen was my first poet, the one who showed me that a poetry can be found in the suburbs (and suburban Long Island, when you fold a map, lands right on top of suburban New Jersey). He sang with so much heart and guts and wisdom that he redeemed the soulless, saved us from the catastrophe of disco, while consecrating strip malls and cul-de-sacs and 7-Eleven parking lots full of broken glass—if only as a place to get the hell out of. Even for me, “Thunder Road” was an anthem of masculine dreams, of heading out to “case the promised land” with a girl who’s almost beautiful.
3. Lou Reed, “Walk on the Wild Side”
This siren song of femininity rivaled Springsteen’s masculine drumbeat and was far more mysterious: a tune about transsexuals that shot into me like a hypodermic every time it came on the radio. “Walk on the Wild Side” is a one-off in the history of rock ’n roll, a masterpiece of tossed-off perfection, each element so distinct, yet so congruent in its insouciance—the brush snare, the muffled and skittery sax, the back-up singers floating in and out like an apparition. And Reed’s nonchalant, half-spoken, cigarette-dangling-from-the-lips performance, so frank it had to be true—but how could it?
4. The Who, “Who Are You”
Every day of high school, before the first period bell, some unknown student DJ played music over the loudspeaker where we gathered in the commons to socialize, gawk and say clever and stupid things. More often than not during my junior year that DJ played “Who Are You,” a song that was equal parts statement and question. I shut my mouth and listened, every time, to Keith Moon riding that high hat like a fast horse, the repeated chorus in harmonized fourths, Pete Townsend scratching his guitar like an delicious itch, Roger Daltrey busting in with a deep vocal fry aimed at the heavens. I couldn’t make out the lyrics—just Who, who the fuck are you.
5. Carole King, “So Far Away”
As a child riding in the back seat of the car during the late '60s and early '70s, I was exposed to the best music ever to play on AM: Bob Dylan, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, the Beatles, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Rod Stewart, the Jackson Five, the Rolling Stones, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. In our house there was no love, but thank God for the car radio. No wonder I was a goner for Carole King’s “So Far Away” the very first time I heard it.
6. The Vapors, “Turning Japanese”
I don’t know which of my high school theater friends turned us on to New Clear Days, the 1980 Vapors album with the psychedelic news weather man on the cover. In the spring of senior year we’d gather at the house of a boy whose parents were never home, blast “Turning Japanese,” and dance our crazy dance of youth, art, desire, and fear of forever feeling incomplete. Even if the song had a rumored hidden meaning (masturbation?), we loved the energy, and used it to be mindless. Nothing could have been more complete.
7. Neil Young, “Thrasher”
I love when my favorite song by a famous artist is one of the obscure ones. Neil Young’s “Thrasher” felt like a song written just for me. I sang it as I walked the shoulders of the roads of my town, Northport, Long Island, without a hope, a ride, or a destination. The poetry—“crystal canyons” and “motels of lost companions” is gorgeous, and Young’s lines about leaving his friends behind and heading out “to the land of truth,” gave a shape to my loneliness, and a righteousness I could live on (for a while).
8. Pink Floyd, “Brain Damage”
This song contains the title line of one of the best-selling rock albums ever, though it wasn’t until a couple decades after its release—in my thirties—that it took up residence in my head. A depression had kept me company most of my life; something had to give, but nothing did. I’d often walk the streets of Manhattan at night singing the chorus over and over—the way, in movies, they tell a soldier bleeding out to keep talking in order to stay alive. Maybe it’s crazy to attempt to stay sane using a song called “Brain Damage.” Then again, the song needs to meet you where you are, and there’s something triumphant in the sung declaration, “I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.”
9. Mark Murphy, “Ballad of the Sad Young Men”
At 18, working the night shift at a failing Northport delicatessen, I had the radio tuned to WYRS (96.7 FM), a jazz station which came in clear across the water from Stamford, CT. They played a lot of great artists, but there was nothing better than Mark Murphy’s wildly original rendition of “Ballad of the Sad Young Men,” where he reads the last page of Kerouac’s On the Road—before launching into song. At the time I identified as a sad young man, I identified with Kerouac, who once lived in Northport, and I wanted to get the hell out of there and become an artist of some kind. I later learned that Murphy, a nomadic virtuoso, spent much of his life as a closeted gay man.
10. Laura Jane Grace, “True Trans Soul Rebel”
Laura Jane Grace, who fronts the punk band Against Me!, transitioned a couple years before me, in time to make an impactful series of AOL Original video shorts documenting trans lives, and to write a song called “True Trans Soul Rebel.” I love that Grace hasn’t altered her booming singing voice. I too was a visible and successful artist prior to transitioning, and wanted my voice to be genuine as a female. “I doubt you’re gonna find a successful social movement that doesn’t have a soundtrack,” Laura Jane Grace has said, and this song belongs on it.
Diana Goetsch is an American poet and essayist. Her poems have appeared widely, in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, The Best American Poetry, and the Pushcart Prize anthology, and in the collections Nameless Boy and In America, among others. She also wrote the "Life in Transition" blog at The American Scholar. Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the New School, where she served as the Grace Paley Teaching Fellow. For twenty-one years Goetsch was a New York City public school teacher, at Stuyvesant High School and at Passages Academy in the Bronx, where she ran a creative writing program for incarcerated teens.
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