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June 9, 2022
Ru Freeman's Playlist for Her Story Collection "Sleeping Alone"
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.
Ru Freeman's collection Sleeping Alone is a collection of nuanced, disturbing, and unforgettable stories.
Booklist wrote of the book:
"Too often, graphic violence in fiction is garish and showy. It takes a deft hand to portray the more subtle kinds of cruelties that shape these spectacular stories. Freeman possesses just that sort of talent, the kind that can massage touches of the unwelcome into everyday incidents to unsettling effect."
In her own words, here is Ru Freeman's Book Notes music playlist for her story collection Sleeping Alone:
The stories in this collection were written over the course of fifteen years, a time during which the contours of my own life changed from absolute certainty to complete doubt. Music accompanied the great dismantling as much as it did the composition of the original psychological and physical landscape of the stories I was telling myself and also writing down.
Egyptian Drum Solos and Chicago, the musical
The title story was formerly given the much less compelling title “And I Bellydance,” and it evolved from a tiny interaction at a Dunkin Donuts, a fragment of which appears in the story. Embedded in the long conversation that was edited out was the line, “And I bellydance,” which was an unspoken thought.
I was struggling with being in a small town in Central Maine, away from my job in international social justice advocacy, and my salvation was dance. I was the member of a troupe of dancers who performed raqs sharqi (what is commonly known in America as “bellydance”) and I also re-hearsed, taught, and performed Latin/Ballroom dance. The rhythms of each form of dance and each style within each form, delighted me. Among those, the Malfouf solo on the album “Pulse of the Sphinx” by The Henkesh Brothers and the Darbuka solo on the album “Further Journeys” by Brothers of the Baladi were two drum solos that I listened to often while driving, practicing my “zil fingers” and muscle isolations. I also performed a tango routine on several occasions with my dance partner that was choreographed to the song “He had it coming” from the musical Chicago. There is an element of that form of vindication/revenge that clearly crept into the story.
Das Leben ein Tanz oder Der Tanz ein Leben, Walzer, Op. 49
This piece of music dating back to 1831 is sometimes considered one of the finest of the waltzes written by Johann Strauss Sr. I am not a classical pianist, though I studied the piano, but I did have a feel for the way music moves us to do things we might not ordinarily feel capacitated to carry out. I wanted to find an elegant and romantic score that would rouse a household the way that this piece of music does in the story. I could imagine the inhabitants who loved Madaileine going about their habits uplifted by her playing, and I could picture someone who did not or could not love a person like her becoming infuriated by the passion and longing it conjures. The English translation of the title was a gift.
“Whispering Hope” written by Septimus Winner, sung by my mother
This was a song that my mother sang to my older brothers and me as kids, and that we grew up to learn to play on the piano and sing, and that all of us in turn sang to our own children. How it arrived in Sri Lanka I don’t know, but I assume it was either the American country singer Jim Reeves or the Irish Catholic nuns who set up convents the likes of which my I, my mother, and her mother before her attended. I thought of this piece of music and its message of resilience and the turning of tides/nights, of looking for the gift that can be given when it seems there might be none to be found, when writing “Beauty Treatments.” I recall vividly that I had not heard this song after I left Sri Lanka until I found myself left in a room post-massage in a Philadelphia spa and quite unexpectedly the soothing yoga music track ended and this piece came on. My mother had recently passed away and I lay there thinking backward from that moment to all that had come before. It informed the evolution of the story.
Three Easy Pieces: Johann Sebastian Bach’s Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor or “Minuet in G,” as it is usually known, Johann Strauss II’s “The Blue Danube,” and Ludwin van Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”
When I was imagining the character of Rene in “The Wake,” I wanted to give her some sort of work. Turning her into a piano teacher seemed like a lovely way to insert the grand piano and describe her various peculiarities —her own musical career, her fastidious practices, etc. When I wrote about those lessons and the kids who came and were eventually turned away, I always heard these three relatively less complicated pieces of music for the piano because they have all been written out in versions that appeal to beginners as well as to intermediate musicians.
“Sri Lanka Maatha” The Sri Lankan national anthem on the flute
In the story “First Son,” the uncle plays — or attempts to play — the flute. It is not an easy piece to play on the flute, but in my memory the uncle upon whose life this story is based attempted it because it is one of those works that is obviously recognizable. You can pick it out and hear it and revise the position of your fingers in order to try and hit the right notes. The anthem is dear to me, its celebration of the abundance of the country, and it fit the yearning that this uncle had for just such largesse toward him and also flowing from him.
“Jesse” by Roberta Flack & Joan Baez
I heard this song first as it was sung by Joan Baez, and learned it from that version though I went on to appreciate the more tender version sung by Roberta Flack. It captured so much about the way things once were between “Jess” and the singer. The way it tells us that what had been was once good, that absence does not end the memory of that time, and that we ask and ask for the ones we love to come back to sit at the dining table, to climb the stairs, to lie beside us, without real hope that the wish will be granted. There’s a sense that it doesn’t matter, in some ways, if those wishes are fulfilled because that which we love lives, and we hold it until we have to let it go. The tangible grief that is in the lyrics and the voices of both these performers is, I hope, evoked in “Matthew’s Story,” that is dedicated to a Jesse I’ve known—haven’t we all?
Ru Freeman is the author of A Disobedient Girl and On Sal Mal Lane, and the editor of Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine and Indivisible: Global Leaders on Shared Security. She directs the Artist Network at Narrative 4.
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