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June 10, 2022
Rebecca Van Laer's Playlist for Her Novella "How to Adjust to the Dark"
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 Van Laer's inventive and engaging novella How to Adjust to the Dark is one of my favorite books of the year.
Lindsay Lerman wrote of the book:
"I'm in awe of this book. In a fictionalized inner travelogue, Rebecca van Laer writes fearlessly about life, writing, love, and loneliness, with exquisite attention to detail. This is a book about the various forms of armour we wrap ourselves in-most especially the armor of identity-and about what we think we're protecting. This is a book about how big our desires are and how big we believe they can be. Like Maggie Nelson's Bluets and Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be, van Laer takes so-called 'women's writing' and opens it up, showing us what exists beyond cliché and easy answers."
In her own words, here is Rebecca Van Laer's Book Notes music playlist for her novella How to Adjust to the Dark:
How to Adjust to the Dark is about a writer’s life—in it, narrator Charlotte revisits the doomed love affairs of her teens and early 20s and the poems that sprang from them. These stories are told from a vantage point a decade or so later in which she is happier, aside for the fact she can no longer write a note in a birthday card, much less a poem. In looking back, close-reading, and bringing both theory and distance to bear on the selves revealed in these poems and relationships, she seeks to figure out what is possible for her as a person and as a writer.
Beyond that, it’s a story of bad decisions in the early aughts: drunken one-night stands, k-holes, and the irresistible impulse to pursue, fuck, and idolize people who are beyond emotionally unavailable. Naturally, Charlotte writes about music, from the punk rock that served as a reflection of her anger and frustration to the 60s girl pop that reinforces her embrace of typical femininity to the pop songs that are her oft-sung salves through breakups and rejections.
The songs on this playlist appear in the novella, speak to its themes and the narrator’s tastes, or come from its era.
X-Ray Spex – Identity
At the risk of being a little on the nose, this song is perfect for a book about the identities we feel compelled to step into—both those imposed upon us and those we adopt as masks. At the beginning of this book, Charlotte sets out to confront her own crisis of identity, no longer seeing herself as a writer, and Poly Styrene’s vocal style, vibrating with defiance, encapsulates both the anger of the moment and the possibility of making something new out of it.
The Modern Lovers – Girlfriend
Just about every song on the Modern Lovers’ self-titled album is filled with longing and frustration yet manages to be whimsical. In this one, Jonathan Richman sings about a girlfriend as something that he “understands”—as opposed to the paintings in the Boston MFA. While Charlotte can’t always make sense of herself as an artist, the significance of a partnership is something that she, like Richman, understands.
Animal Collective – The Purple Bottle
Animal Collective’s giddy, almost childlike sound became part of my life soundtrack in college, making everything feel sped-up and urgent and joyful, yet sometimes near-nauseating.
The excitement of a brand new object of obsession can make you feel absolutely sick. Animal Collective unravels a near-frantic love that elicits big feelings, nausea, and of course, a lot of “WOO!”
Noreen Cocaron – Love Kitten
There are a few versions of this song, but I first heard Noreen Cocaron’s on a compilation called The Girl Group Sound. In the book, Charlotte writes about the allure of 1960s pop songs and the version of housewife femininity they perform and coerce. In “Love Kitten,” the singer longs to be treated like a pet—held tight and stroked until she purrs. Like many pop songs, it’s hypersexualized but cloaked in a faux-innocence.
Radio Stars – Nervous Wreck
“Nervous Wreck” is a song that sounds absolutely gleeful, tricked out with the whistles and trills of the sounds of wind-up toys, but is actually about a toxic relationship. Charlotte’s poems perform a similar trick, transforming destructive love into neat aesthetic objects. I imagine her listening to this, both recognizing her situation in the lyrics and continuing to hold them at a distance, keeping up her 60s housewife drag all the while.
Joanie Summers – Johnny Get Angry
This 60s banger appears in the book, introduced to Charlotte by one of her crushes. It’s problematic, to say the least—Joanie Summers asks her lover to be a “brave man, a cave man” by berating and lecturing her. This, the song insists, is fun!
Shakira – She Wolf
In my one year in an MFA program, I watched this music video on endless repeat. Shakira gyrates in (amongst other settings) a vaginal cave, fully claiming her sexuality and insisting she won’t be “domesticated.” Yet she gets back into bed with her boyfriend at the end of the video. Charlotte struggles with what sex means to her in relationships—and if Shakira can’t get what she wants, how can anyone?!
Richard Hell – Love Comes in Spurts
In high school, I searched Napster for musical rarities—live recordings and alternate cuts. Spotify makes it all a little too easy to find dozens of versions of this song, written by Richard Hell and recorded by The Heartbreakers, The Neon Boys, and Hell himself. I think the Electric Lady Studio recording best captures Charlotte’s predominate feeling about love in this book. Hell screams again and again, “Oh no!”
Broken Social Scene – Lover’s Spit
In the aughts, I thought this was the ideal song to have sex to.
Belle and Sebastian – Get Me Away From Here I’m Dying
This is a song about songwriting, just like HTATTD is a book about books. But really, the title says it all.
Christina Aguilera – Fighter
Punk rock is about defiance; indie music is about melancholy. You have to turn somewhere else for the unbridled belief that better is fully possible and attainable. There’s nowhere better to turn than this Xtina-era jam, which appears in the book as a breakup anthem.
Mirah – Recommendation
On the other end of the breakup spectrum, there’s Mirah’s address to her ex-lover, delivered in a letter: “I’m doing fine, just fine.” I listened to this on endless repeat in college, and I still sing it in the shower. I imagine Charlotte, too, singing it a decade after leaving her exes and her poetry behind. There’s that reclamation of self, but alongside it, the inability to fully let go of the past. But that, too, is fine—who can?
Rebecca van Laer 's writing appears in TriQuarterly, Joyland, Columbia Journal, The Florida Review, Salamander, Hobart, Monkeybicycle, the Ploughshares blog, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in English from Brown University, where she studied queer and feminist autobiography. She lives in the Hudson Valley.
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