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July 19, 2022
Sari Botton's Playlist for Her Memoir "And You May Find Yourself..."
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.
Sari Botton's memoir-in-essays And You May Find Yourself... captures the highs and lows of her life with wit and acuity.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Former Longreads editor Botton debuts with an introspective collection of essays about the joys and pains of feeling like a misfit. Now in her mid-50s, Botton recalls in heartfelt and witty prose the pivotal moments that have shaped her."
In her own words, here is Sari Botton's Book Notes music playlist for her memoir And You May Find Yourself...:
You’re likely to find this to be a weird-ass playlist, because I am weird and always have been, and that’s part of what my memoir-in-essays, And You May Find Yourself…Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo is about.
What’s more, something that contributed to my sense that I was different, growing up and into my young adulthood, was my taste in music. As I write in the book’s introduction, “Having grown up in a house filled with classical and liturgical music, opera, jazz standards, and showtunes (all of which I liked), I wasn’t hip to the pop and rock music my high school and college friends listened to—not until friends and boyfriends started making me mixtapes, to help me keep up.”
These days my taste is very eclectic, and I think you’ll find that reflected here. Of course, there’s eclectic, and there’s eclectic, as in a list that not only contains a selection from dark, hipster '90s alt rock band Morphine, and another from Marlo Thomas’s sunny, hopeful children’s record, Free to Be, You and Me…
I’ve arranged this list so that songs correspond to each chapter of my book. Some chapters get more than one song. I don’t think there’s any rule against that, but hey, I’m also a Gen-Xer and we are notorious rule-breakers. Here goes…
Foreword: “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield
I have a sense that cooler kids might deem this song cheesy or corny or cliche, but I don’t care. It helped me finally overcome my strong resistance to writing my book when I was in the throes of self-doubt and fear. It was part of something like a ritual, an incantation of sorts that I performed on myself: at the beginning of a brisk walk around Kingston, NY, where I live, or work-out session on the crappy Sharper Image cardio machines I purchased at the beginning of the pandemic, I’d play this song and sing along at the top of my lungs, imploring myself to stop “staring at the blank page before me” and write my damn book. Also, this line really resonated with one of my themes, the way I (and many other Gen-X women) have toggled all our lives between “should” and “whatever,” striving to allow ourselves to live differently than we were told we were supposed to: I break tradition / Sometimes my tries are outside the lines / We've been conditioned to not make mistakes / But I can't live that way.
Introduction—Greetings From Weirdville: “Free to Be, You and Me…” by The New Seekers
Marlo Thomas’s children’s record, funded in part by The Ms. Foundation and championing gender equality, had a big impact on many Gen-Xers. It arrived in the fall of 1972, a few months before the Supreme Court handed down its decision on Roe v. Wade. It was also a few years before my parents split up and my mother went back to work, cut off her long hair, and subscribed to “women’s lib,” as I heard Archie Bunker call feminism on All In The Family. I loved the record from the first time I heard it, at 7. The title song, along with another track, “When We Grow Up” featuring Diana Ross, gave me the impression that adulthood was going to be awesome—that I was just going to get to do whatever the hell I wanted, whenever I felt like it. Spoiler alert: adulthood didn’t turn out to be that way. Gender equality has never been achieved. The Equal Rights Amendment has never been ratified. And we’re now in the midst of a judicial coup that has included the overturning of Roe and forecasts the destruction of more basic rights to come. But every time I hear the banjo riff opening this song (which is more often than one might expect for a 56-year-old), I become a hopeful 7-year-old once again.
(Weirdo bragging rights: In 2011 I played “William” in a community theater production of Free to Be… singing the Marlo Thomas part in “William’s Doll.”)
Lost: “Better” by The Hippy Nuts, and “It’s Too Late” by Carole King
In this opening chapter we meet a young adult Sari at a few months shy of 27—more than half my life ago. Here I’m busting out of my first marriage, which I entered cluelessly at almost 24, a function of both cultural programming, and a misguided notion that I could do better where my pre-Boomer parents had failed: marrying young. To me, the Hippy Nuts’ “Better” calls into question an idea I had in my early 20s: that everything in my life would be better if I just had this or that thing I was told I to strive toward—including a diamond solitaire and a wedding and a husband, all before such time as my frontal lobe had finished developing. “It’s Too Late” often rang through my head in the months before I left my first marriage, after I’d found my voice and started speaking up, which made things tense.
Leaving the Land of Make Believe: “Make Believe” by Vanessa Daou
I’m no sociologist, but here’s my theory as to why so many Gen-Xers suffer from impostor syndrome: The attitudinal shift our Boomer and pre-Boomer parents went through during the civil rights movement of the '60s and the sexual revolution of the '70s sent us mixed messages about who and what and how we were supposed to be. It created doubts within us about which versions of ourselves were real, the perfectly behaved, hemmed-in, conformist versions, or the freakier versions we discovered when our parents threw out all the rules that had confined them through the 50s. It made us unsure of our instincts about ourselves, and our true identities. I think this has something to do with why, from a young age, I often pretended to be someone other than who I really was deep down—in one case, at 4, assuming a completely different identity, “Andi Neumann from New Jersey.” (The real Andi Neumann was my uncle’s sister-in-law, and my favorite babysitter.)
Mean Girls: “(You Got to Have) Friends” by Buzzy Linhart and Mark "Moogy" Klingman, performed by Bette Middler
So often when I meet new women friends, they confess something I very much relate to: that when they were in junior high or high school, they were ousted by a clique of girls, and it’s had a lingering effect, leaving them wary of getting close to groups of women again. It’s something I went through in 8th grade—part my fault, part that of the other girls in my clique—and then again and again, at other points in my life. When I think of those experiences, I hear Bette Midler in my head: I had some friends, oh, but they're all gone, gone / Somethin' came and snatched them away. What “snatched them away” is a phenomenon so common that author Rosalind Wiseman wrote a book about it, Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence, and Tina Fey made a movie based on the book, from which this chapter takes its name.
There’s a scene in which I’ve just moved in the middle of 11th grade, to a new town where I have no friends. I go out to a bar at the end of November with some smart/popular girls I’ve just met (the drinking age in NY State was just 18 in 1981, so I was just two years under age). I’m the only one of the group that the bouncer won’t let into the bar, and I’m left to sit alone in a freezing cold car one of the girls borrowed from her mother. Shivering and afraid, I soothe myself in the only way I know how: singing to myself while traffic whizzes by on Sunrise Highway. These lines in Middler’s voice really speak to that experience: And I'm standing at the end of a real long road / And I'm waiting for my new friends to come / I don't care if I'm hungry or freezin' cold / I'm gonna get me some of them
Confessions of a Closet Vocalist: “But the World Goes ’Round” by John Kander and Fred Ebb, performed by Liza Minnelli
Having a dad who’s a singer—who’s always sung everywhere he goes whether or not he is supposed to—gave me the impression that that was normal. I never learned where it was and wasn’t appropriate to just “open your face up and sing” to quote Ani Difranco. In junior high, though, I caught on that it was no longer cool. That’s when I started singing secretly. In high school I’d cut gym to go home and sing by myself when (I thought) no one was home. One afternoon when I was singing this song from Scorcese’s New York, New York—like really letting it rip—my annoying step-brother came bounding down the steps from his bedroom, right in the middle of the crescendo. Oops.
The Weight—A Manifesto: “She’s Falling Apart” by Lisa Loeb
This chapter is about eating disorders—the one I had in my teens and early 20s, and the one our entire culture has, which first infected the adults around me, who passed it down. Lisa Loeb really captures my experience of hiding my starvation from my parents at 15, which wasn’t hard to do, because they weren’t really paying attention. And even though nobody's looking / She's falling apart
The Joy of Not Skiing: “All Downhill From Here” by Amy Kuney
A song about relationships going downhill seems like a pretty good metaphor for the relationships with unavailable men that I tried to sustain in part by going along with them on ski trips. Never mind that I’d fallen off a chairlift at 12, failed gym in 9th grade, am just generally not the type to enjoy hurtling downhill at great speed—and basically hate the entire enterprise. Again and again, when ski resorts beckoned the men I was with, I put on a happy face and spent days on end in beginner school with a bunch of 10-year-olds. (It only now occurs to me that other good titles for this chapter would have been Beginner’s Mind, or Always a Beginner; I never advanced beyond that level.)
Hurricane Tim: “Time (the Revelator)” by Gillian Welch
My penchant for inventing versions of myself I imagined might better appeal to men I was trying to hold onto really peaks in this chapter. Here we meet “Outdoorsy Sari,” who nearly got regular Sari killed on a miserable backpacking trip to the Adirondack Peaks after a hurricane downed many trees, with a miserable man. I think of “Outdoorsy Sari” everytime I hear Gillian Welch sing the lyrics I’m the pretender / and not what I’m supposed to be, and also queen of fakes and imitators.
The Sweet Smell of Excess: “A Case of You,” and “The Gallery,” both by Joni Mitchell. Bonus: “I Want You” by Elvis Costello
I gave altogether too much to the boyfriend at the center of this chapter, including a chance to try again that he never deserved, but which ultimately cured me of the illusion that things could work out, so maybe we’re even. And yet here I am giving him three songs. Then again, there were so many painful and necessary lessons for me in this tortured relationship with an active alcoholic, the songs aren’t for him so much as they are for me. “A Case of You” speaks to my own erstwhile addiction—to addicts like this guy; “The Gallery” speaks to how intoxicating it was to have an artist render a flattering version of me—so intoxicating that I overlooked how awfully he treated me; finally, “I Want You” speaks to how this noncommittal man’s irrational, intense jealousy crept into me, rendering me a green-eyed monster.
The Fling: “Let It Be” by Lennon and McCartney/The Beatles
On my therapist’s orders, while recovering from an awful breakup I embarked on my first (and only) fling, with a younger man who had zero interest in the arts. In many ways we were a mismatch, but he was kind (and cute), and it would have been smart for me to move on after a few months, when our incompatibilities became painfully obvious. Instead, I did what I always had: I hung on for dear life, trying to turn myself into someone he’d want to be with, and trying to turn him into…the kind of person who would go with me to see Richard Foreman plays at St. Mark’s Church. One illustration of how mismatched we were: When I sang along to “Let It Be” on the radio, he asked “Oh, who is that?” When I told him The Beatles, he replied, “Oh, I think my step-mother likes them.”
Fred Talks: “I Melt With You” by Modern English, covered by Nouvelle Vague
After three months on and off, Fred dumped me in an email on the very night HBO first aired “The Post-It Always Sticks Twice,” the episode of Sex & the City in which Berger dumps Carrie Bradshaw via Post-It note. I’ll never know if it was because it became fairly obvious I was faking getting his many musical references so he would think I was cooler than I was. “I Melt With You” might as well have been an anthem of mine in the years when I was dating not just Fred but everyone I went out with, considering the way in which I’d dissolve my true self again and again and try to become who I thought they’d be more interested in. This cover version happens to have been introduced to me by Fred. I like it better than the original.
Inadvertent Matchmaker Seeks a Love of Her Own: “Queen Bee” by Rupert Holmes, performed by Barbara Streisand, and “Real Love” by Ann Klein
I have an innate knack for introducing people who go on to marry, and also creative people who go on to collaborate. In the years when I was single, I tended to put more energy into being that kind of a vector than into examining my own bad relationship patterns. It was an effective diversion that also made people happy with me, an inveterate people pleaser. But my own love life was so incredibly unsatisfying. I would often think of a line from “Queen Bee,” which I’d fallen in love with at 11 after hearing it on the soundtrack to A Star is Born: It’s so frustratin’ when you’re really into matin’ but there ain’t a lovin man around. After a friend showed me some tough love, I went and got help from a therapist. A couple of years later I met my second (and current) husband, and found real love. (We’re together 19 years now, married for 17.)
The Re-Education of the Needless Wonder: “Therapy” by Mary J. Blige
… Why would I spend the rest of my days unhappy / when I can go therapy Indeed, why would I, Mary J. Blige? Meet “Kieran” (not his real name), aka “The Swashbuckling Shrink” (also obviously not his real name). The four years I spent in Kieran’s “laboratory” helped me to untangle so many of my crossed wires around relationships, work, and what I wanted out of life. He helped me determine which of my “gut instincts” came actually from my gut, and which were imposed by the messed up, misogynist, patriarchal cultured I was raised in. Humor was one of the best tools in Kieran’s arsenal. He got me to laugh at myself, above all for my insistence on being so divorced from my needs. I’d been taught, like so many of us were, that it was an imposition for women to have needs. “There she goes, ladies and gentlemen: The Needless Wonder, able to exist on air alone,” he’d say to the empty waiting room as he walked me out at the end of a session.
It’s Not Over Until the Bride’s Father Sings: “Scalerica de Ora,” a Ladino wedding song performed by my dad, Cantor Richard Botton, and “Such Great Heights,” as performed by Iron & Wine
I loved eloping to City Hall in Manhattan with my second (and current) husband, Brian. But it was a sore spot for my father, a cantor who has officiated at more weddings than he can probably count over many decades. We made it up to him a few months later with a wedding ceremony and party at The Rosendale Cafe. Here I give you my dad performing a wedding song in his native Ladino, a Hebrew/Spanish hybrid language that his Sephardic parents handed down to him, and “Such Great Heights,” a song Brian and I were really into, which his brother and grown nephews performed at the ceremony.
New York Cool: Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)
Like so many others, I believe New York City, the East Village in particular, is where I finally became The Real Me™, but not before I tried in too many uncool ways to become “cool.” In the 90s, when I was passing myself off as a music journalist (with very little pop music literacy), attending shows at nightclubs, this song seemed to always be playing in the background, mocking me.
Unloading the Piano That Was Weighing Me Down: “Scheherezade, Movement 2, The Story of the Kalendar Prince” by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, with Lars Hjalmar Joakim conducting the London Symphony Orchestra
My poor upright piano; I lugged that thing from tenement to tenement in Manhattan in the '90s, getting it incredibly dinged up. My poor neighbors; they had to listen to me through paper-thin walls as I played that thing badly and sang along. After I learned my upstairs neighbor worked the graveyard shift and did not appreciate me waking him from his daytime slumber, I stopped playing, and the piano became a hulking waste of space in my tiny East Village apartment. When I wasn’t trying horribly to accompany myself on show tunes or standards or Joni Mitchell songs, I was playing this movement of Scheherezade. I loved the music, but the story really spoke to me, and all the talking and talking I had to do to keep the men in my life from being angry, or jealous, or hurtful.
Adventures in “Journalism” or MFA vs JOB: “Yes,” written by Mark Sandman, performed by Morphine
This chapter is sort of blooper reel, highlights and lowlights (way more lowlights) from my weird, circuitous career path as a writer. For much of my work life, I strived in three different areas at once: arts journalism, creative writing, and trade journalism to pay the bills. It was hard to know at any given time in which direction I should invest the greatest amount of energy, because nothing consistently paid off—maybe in part because I was doing too many things at once, in fields better suited for people with much greater privilege than I ever had. At one point I dated a photographer who helped me make connections in both gossip and music journalism. He brought me along when he went to Boston to interview the band Morphine for Rolling Stone. I got to write a blurb about the band, which then got reduced to a mere photo caption, for which I received no credit. But it led to a few short assignments for them, so it wasn’t the end of the world. When I heard Mark Sandman sing these lyrics, I felt as if he was referring to my career confusion: If you can't decide where to go with your life / You just don't know where to spend your time / If you can't decide where to go with your life / I'm sure you'll do whatever is right / I've always known you were incredibly bright
The Cadillac: “Pink Cadillac” by Bruce Springsteen
I didn’t know how I was going to pay for the MFA program I’d been accepted to. Then I received a phone call telling me I’d won a Cadillac Coupe de Ville, and hatched a plan: When the car arrived, I’d drive it over to the Potemkin dealership on 11th Avenue, sell it to them brand new, and use the spoils—about $30K—to pay for my graduate school gambit. All I had to do was mail a guy in Las Vegas and $850 bank check…
Elegy for the Non-Creepy Realtor: “Piano Man” by Billy Joel
Maggie Estep was a real estate novelist… I idolized Estep, who, after writing seven critically acclaimed novels tried making a living as a realtor in the mid-Hudson Valley. She tragically died at 51 before succeeding in a field she entered out of a desperate need to make a living, and which she felt conflicted about. I learned about Estep’s real estate journey after my email was hacked and everyone in my address book received a false missive proclaiming I’d become a ReMax agent. It happened in the midst of one of many writing career identity crises I went through.
The Girl with the Nerd Tattoos: “Cherry Blossom Girl” by Air
Getting tattooed for the first time later in life—at 47—could very well have been another example of me not being myself, but it wasn’t. This is the story of that tattoo and the two subsequent ones I’ve gotten so far. But it’s also the story of how I learned that the first one, a text tattoo, was not attributable to Anais Nin, as it is, mistakenly, on candles and journals and yoga mats, and all other manner of inspirational doodads: And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than it took to blossom. My second tattoo was a rendering of cherry blossoms. That’s two tattoos that reference blossoming. Thus the song choice.
My Hysterectomy, A Love Story: “Once in a Lifetime” by The Talking Heads
There have been so many moments in my life where I found myself in places I didn’t really belong, then struggled to remove myself. The first time I recognized this in real time, as it was happening, was in April, 2006, when I was 40 and my husband, Brian, was 44, and we sought treatment at a fertility clinic. Deep down, I think I knew that I didn’t want kids. Witnessing my mother’s experience, I got the impression that motherhood was a raw deal for women. And if I’d known the term “art monster” then, I might have decided that’s what I wanted to be. But I didn’t feel permitted to not want kids, and so I didn’t want to even know that about myself. Right there in the sterile waiting room, I began to hear David Byrne in my head—although the lyrics that came to mind were a bit different: And you may find yourself / in a fertility clinic / and you may ask yourself / well, how did I get here.
Losing the Plot: “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” by Bob Dylan
In this chapter, I reckon not only with death and my tremendous, growing fear of it, but also my avoidance when it comes to making end-of-life plans. I keep saying I’d like for Brian and I to awaken from our Gen-X (okay, he’s technically a Boomer by three years) protracted adolescence and do the grown up thing—pay a visit to an estate lawyer. But then more time passes and neither of us makes a move on this. I need to do something soon, because not planning for death is killing me.
Gray Hair Don’t Care: “When Your Hair Has Turned to Silver” by Peter De Rose and Charles Tobias, performed by Perry Como )
When your hair has turned to silver / I will love you just the same / I will always call you sweetheart / that will always be your name. For the longest time, I wanted to let my hair go gray, but I was afraid to, for all the reasons many women are afraid to. Brian was sure I’d never do it. And then one day, I surprised him. I didn’t want to care so much what he or other men thought—whether I looked old, or suddenly became invisible to them. But I did.
Epilogue—Found(-ish): “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac
As I was working on my book, life threw me a few curve balls, and suddenly so many fixtures in my world seemed uncertain. I needed to make changes again, in my work life, in my friendships, in my family life, and it scared me. Initially I was afraid I’d take a series of wrong turns again, as I had so many times when I was younger. But when I took time to think it through, I realized one good thing: that in my mid-50s, I finally really know who I am, and I can let that guide me to the next place, and the place after that, and the place after that… Can the child within my heart rise above? / Can I sail through the changin' ocean tides? / Can I handle the seasons of my life? I do believe I can.
Sari Botton is a writer and editor living in Kingston, NY. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Catapult, and the former Essays Editor for Longreads. She edited the award-winning, bestselling anthologies Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York and Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York. She teaches creative nonfiction at Catapult, Bay Path University and Kingston Writers' Studio. She publishes the newsletters Oldster Magazine, Memoir Monday, and Adventures in Journalism.
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