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June 13, 2022
Salma El-Wardany's Playlist for Her Novel "These Impossible Things"
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.
Salma El-Wardany's debut novel These Impossible Things is a moving and compelling exploration of friendship and faith.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"The complex characters are well observed and the prose is often moving... Fresh, witty, and insightful, this is an auspicious start."
In her own words, here is Salma El-Wardany's Book Notes music playlist for her novel These Impossible Things:
My novel doesn’t have that many references to music in it, and when it does, it’s never in reference to a particular song. I purposely did that as I wanted to leave it to the imagination of the reader to insert whatever track they felt was appropriate. There’s nothing worse than reading a beautiful passage that references a song you hate.
However, when I was writing the novel, during the first lockdown of the pandemic, I would go out for long walks every day listening to certain tracks while the characters would talk to one another in my head. I have always maintained that I do my best writing, and get my best ideas, when I’m walking.
And so the following playlist is some of the songs I listened to incessantly on repeat while on my daily walks, some of the songs that would be in the background while I was writing, or some of the songs that I heard in my head while I was writing certain scenes.
It is mostly a playlist full of yearning, but then again, the book is full of people yearning for impossible things.
1. Ride It, Regard
For reasons unbeknown to me, this song lived rent free in my head the summer I wrote These Impossible Things. I listened to it every single day and the true number of times I pressed play on this song can never be revealed because it’s quite frankly embarrassing. But there is something about it that makes me think about laughing with my friends at sunset in a hot country. It speaks of all the joy of summer and the hope that sits on the tip of your tongue at the start of a long summer. It’s everything the three protagonists are thinking about at the start of the novel.
2. The Truth About the World, Andrea Marie
This was one of those gentle, beautiful songs that I wrote to a lot. It put me in a trance like state that transported me out of my environment and into the world of my characters. It also feels hopeful and when I was putting my characters through the wars, it was a gentle reminder to bring them back to safety.
3. Surrender, Natalie Taylor
This is Malak and Jacob’s song. It’s full of their angst and separate, but equally desperate, wishes for each other. They have so much desire and love between them, and yet things work against them and if only they learnt how to surrender to one another, things might be different for them. I am immediately with the two of them when this song plays.
4. Paperweight, Joshua Radin, Schuyler Fisk
I listened to this song on repeat while I wrote one of the saddest scenes in the book. It was past midnight and there was a full moon shinning down on me through my skylight. Apart from the moonlight and the flicker of one candle, I sat in darkness with this song and cried while I wrote a scene that broke my heart. There is such longing in this track and such a desire to hold on to a moment. That all went into the novel.
5. Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Jatin-Lalit, Udit Narayan, Alka Yagnik
This song translates as ‘something is happening’ or ‘something has begun.’ It’s all about falling in love, or falling deeper into someone, and it’s very much Kees’s soundtrack when she makes big decisions around her relationship. It’s love and it’s hope and it’s all about that consuming feeling you get when you’re in love. I would listen to this on my long walks and Kees was always in my head during those times.
6. Forgive Me Friend, Smith & Thell
My characters are all looking for forgiveness or redemption from someone at some point in the novel, which is why this track resonated with me so much while I was writing. I kept coming back to it and the nostalgia in the track very much echoes the aching nostalgia the women all feel for one another. They each have such sadness and reluctant acceptance at things ending, they each want times gone by to come back and thins song encapsulates this so well.
7. What Can I Say, Brandi Carlile
Brandi Carlile can tug on my heartstrings like no other, and so this track was on repeat while I was writing. It’s very much Jenna’s soundtrack and the desolation she feels at being alone. There is such an ache to it as well, and for most of the book Jenna is aching for the women she has lost.
8. Chances, Dido
This track is definitely a soundtrack for Malak, particularly towards the end of the novel. She goes through so much, and yet towards the end she has such hope for starting over and for having new chances. I have listened to this song while writing. While thinking about writing. On some occasions it was the only thing that got me writing.
9. Kefak Anta & Hello, Noel Kharman, Fairuz
We go right back to Malak with this track while she’s living in Egypt in a terrible situation dreaming about how life used to be. Malak has a lot of nostalgia about her and once the consequences of her actions hit her, she has a lot of yearning and regrets about the way things played out. This track was one of the ones that gently played on repeat while I wrote her scenes.
10. Kal Ho Naa Ho, Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, Sonu Nigam
This is another of Kees’s soundtracks and it makes me bawl my head off when I listen to it, and I listened to it a lot while thinking about Kees and how her story was going to play out. There is such opportunity for happiness and love with her, and yet she straddles a very fine line of despair and heartbreak, which is ultimately what this song is to me.
11. 9 Crimes, Damien Rice
I’m aware of how many sad and slow songs there are in this playlist, but like I said, the novel is full of yearning and nostalgia and so these songs just ended up on repeat while I was writing. And no one does sad and slow like Damien Rice. Every time I listen to one of his tracks I’m suspended somewhere between euphoria and heartbreak, and perhaps that’s what I was really hoping to make the reader feel while I was writing.
12. Hallelujah, Haim
If the closing scene of the novel had a soundtrack, this would be it. Or at least this is what plays in my head when I read the final pages of the novel and close the book.
Salma El-Wardany is a writer, poet, and BBC broadcaster. As a half-Egyptian, half-Irish woman her work focuses on telling the stories of women, especially women of color, that have for so long been ignored. She has contributed to the anthology It's Not About the Burqa, and her writing has also appeared in Huffington Post, theMetro and she has given two TedxTalks.
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