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June 7, 2022
Jules Ohman's Playlist for Her Novel "Body Grammar"
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.
Jules Ohman's novel Body Grammar is a moving and captivating debut.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Perceptive. . . . Ohman captures the uncertainties of early adulthood and queer love with a clear eye. . . . Ohman is a talented writer."
In her own words, here is Jules Ohman's Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Body Grammar:
My debut novel Body Grammar is about a genderqueer teenager, Lou, navigating first love, grief, and her own creative path. Most of the novel’s characters are coming of age into something -- their artistic identity, their gender, their selfhood after loss. The novel is set against the backdrop of both the international modeling world and the Pacific Northwest indie music scene, both of which were influential in my own coming of age. The novelist Andrea Lawlor recently described Body Grammar as having “that indie rock frisson,” which delighted me, and this playlist reflects that. I grew up going to house shows and all ages venues in Portland, Oregon and my wife is a musician who has played guitar and drums in bands since she was a teenaged punk. The first time I ever saw her was on a stage, which has always felt to me like a metaphor for the distance you have to bridge when you’re falling in love, especially with another artist. Some of the songs on this playlist appear in the book, but others played on a loop on my headphones in libraries and coffee shops as I was writing it, forming the emotional landscape of the book. The soundtrack of Body Grammar is queer as hell, eclectic, and full of equal parts longing and joy. Like all my favorite love stories.
abyss kiss by Adrianne Lenker
I heavily associate Adrianne Lenker’s songwriting, both her solo albums and as the frontperson of the band Big Thief, with falling in love. The song “abyss kiss” is about that almost-moment of being with someone, on the verge of committing to its possibility, which feels true to the central love story of the novel between Lou and her friend Ivy, who is an Adrianne Lenker-like songwriter and guitarist in the book. The lyrics, “In the hour I loved you/Like a dream it was true/In the base of my pine” conjures both the disbelief of getting to love someone in a real way and how it can be something both ethereal and sturdy.
Screwed by Janelle Monae
Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer was a huge album for me. As soon as “Make Me Feel” broke the gay internet, I knew it was going to live on my playlists for a long time. Lou’s friend Catherine blasts “Screwed” at a memorial right before they both leave home for the first time. In the scene, it’s meant to be disruptive, but it’s also meant to convey a larger disillusionment. Janelle Monae is a brilliant writer, and the building frustration and wildness of the song feels like that desire to change something in a big way and change it now. But to also go sex crazy. I like to imagine Catherine and Lou blasting Dirty Computer while driving around the Portland suburbs the summer after their senior year, wanting so badly to be in the next phase of their lives.
Ivy by Frank Ocean
Now that I’m seeing them in such close proximity, I’m realizing just how much Frank Ocean’s lyric “I thought that I was dreamin’ when you said you loved me” echoes the earlier Adrianne Lenker line from “abyss kiss.” I think it’s a queer experience, but also just a larger human one, to feel like you must be outside of reality to finally be receiving love you couldn’t have even let yourself imagine. Frank Ocean’s songs continue to be the soundtrack of a million queer adolescences. After Lou leaves Portland to live in New York, this song starts playing in her modeling friend’s apartment, and I imagine everyone in the room stopping whatever they’re doing to listen to it together, and sit in the feeling of it. Lou imagines Ivy, of course, but everyone else imagines their Ivy too.
Shine On by Air Waves
My wife introduced me to Air Waves the summer I started writing the final draft of Body Grammar, and Nicole Schneit’s sound felt like Lou discovering New York for the first time. It reminds me of being young in the summer and that momentum of possibility that comes with being in a new place, specifically a place like New York City. The song was released in 2008, when I was in high school, and so maybe there’s a sound to it that reminds me of that period of time, the first time I went to New York alone for a fashion shoot and felt like I was leaving one world for another.
Be Your Own 3am by Adult Mom
Coming of age, queer or not, means a lot of learning to hold your own hand. When Adult Mom’s frontperson Stevie Knipe sings the line, “You gotta be your own 3AM” you believe them. It’s a melancholic but cozy song, the kind Lou would put on at 3AM on her way back home from an afterparty, maybe a little lonely, but also full of quiet joy at being her own shepherd and finding her own way.
Halah by Mazzy Star
I wrote most of the middle section of Body Grammar with this song on a loop. It captures a dreamy and atmospheric longing that is being nineteen and heartbroken for the first time. Hope Sandoval’s voice singing “Surely don’t stay long/I’m missing you now” and “I need to hear you say goodbye/Baby won’t you change your mind” encompass that contradiction of both wanting someone and wanting to move beyond them.
Girl from the North Country - Dear Nora’s cover of Bob Dylan
I imagine Ivy playing this song to Lou and it sounding something like Dear Nora’s version. I love Katy Davidson’s songwriting, and one of their other songs is featured later on in this playlist. But I love their covers too. Bob Dylan writes songs that can shapeshift into anything when sung by other people. It’s a song about being away from someone you love, and knowing you might not ever be with them again. I love the tenderness of wanting them to be warm, even in your absence. It’s the core of the love between Ivy and Lou to me, that they still want the other to be living in a way that makes them happy, even when they’re apart.
See A Light by Palehound
Any and all Palehound could go on this list. Palehound’s Ellen Kempner writes queer love so beautifully, and with such pristine guitar. Body Grammar is about seeing and being seen for the first time, sometimes totally incorrectly, and sometimes as your truest and weirdest self. I imagine Lou feeling this lyric -- “Now I’m looking at old pictures, and burning for that baby/But you see a light in me” -- whenever Ivy looks at her. Like she can’t hide and, for the first time, doesn’t want to.
The Julia Loop by Sand Duney
During the pandemic, my wife went into our unfinished basement, which she soundproofed and built into a mini recording studio, and I went into our attic, and we both worked on our projects. I finished Body Grammar, and she wrote dozens of songs. It turned out we both wrote about Forest Park, the forest of hiking trails on the edge of the city of Portland, where I grew up. Her song “The Julia Loop” is a companion piece to Body Grammar in many ways. It’s named after a trail a friend of ours takes us walking on sometimes, and was recorded on synchronized loop pedals. In the early part of the book, Lou does a lot of wandering around Forest Park, and there’s something about the sense of place in this song that feels true to the millions of shades of green that exist there.
Time Is Now - Nicholas Krgovich & Friends’ cover of Dear Nora
I really struggled writing the end of the novel (I struggle writing endings period, which is probably why I write novels -- then I only have to do it once every eight years). This song strikes the kind of note I wanted Body Grammar’s ending to land on. I love an ending that leads the character somewhere new, and doesn’t leave them in a ditch somewhere (though sometimes I love those too). Nicholas Krgovich’s cover of this lovely Dear Nora song is gentle but hopeful. There’s some pop to it. It’s the present moment, and the time for everything is now.
Jules Ohman received an MFA from the University of Montana and co-founded the nonprofit Free Verse. She coordinates Literary Arts' Writers in the Schools program and lives in Portland, Oregon, with her wife.
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