« older | Main Largehearted Boy Page | newer »
October 17, 2022
Debra Monroe's Playlist for Her Essay Collection "It Takes a Worried Woman"
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.
Debra Monroe's collection It Takes a Worried Woman is smart and important, a book where the essays inform each other and form a greater whole.
David Jauss wrote of the book:
"Debra Monroe sings a worried song with fierce, introspective honesty about sex and love, marriage, parenting, violence, acquaintance rape, hate crimes, the COVID pandemic, and worry itself, its value and its cost. These essays have the qualities that have made me a longtime fan of her fiction―scalpel-sharp prose that is poetic without calling undue attention to itself; vividly drawn scenes and characters; and the kind of intelligence that never loses contact with the heart and deserves to be called wisdom."
In her own words, here is Debra Monroe's Book Notes music playlist for her essay collection It Takes a Worried Woman:
I wrote this book while learning not to answer the reflexive social question how are you? Or any of its variants. For example, if a doctor writing a prescription for one of my widespread petty ailments flaring asked me if I’d been under unusual stress lately, in time I learned to succinctly say: “My child was the victim of a violent crime.” A true answer that omits context. The context was national headlines, hate crimes. If people knew, their eyes widened. They couldn’t help but hope to learn where, when, and—as if this question could ever be answered—why. The answer I finally settled on was code for yes, and no details will be forthcoming because I’ve sealed off that part of my life like a tree seals after a big branch breaks, and the sealed part, the cicatrix, is part of the tree forever.
But before I sealed, people asked me how I was, and I overflowed with bad facts and precursors to them, foreshadowing I’d noticed only after the bad facts, too late, warning signs I’d missed. We all hope to understand our bad facts as a one-way cause-and-effect sequence: a story. Cause-and-effect implies that future bad luck can be prevented. So I’d retell my bad facts, in search of context, backstory. I felt shock and grief all over again.
Some problems are situated in history. You can’t change that. Or they’re problems you couldn’t have foreseen. Hindsight is not exactly insight. And other reasons to worry had occurred so near to each other in time that all my fears amassed as one fear, outsized. I wrote as I wished for clues, reasons, a mystical sequence, a story that sometimes materialized then vanished, a mirage. I wanted a single root cause, the mother of all trouble, an old miscalculation I could magically, retroactively fix. Did I mention the west coast burned that year, climate change? Violence erupted. The world was on fire. The world is too much with us. I wrote as I became a silence fetishist. Failing to find silence, I listened to classical music as I walked in the woods. I gave up on music with lyrics, information that no longer pertained. I listened to it as research, remembering who I once was.
Mother Maybelle Carter, “It Takes a Worried Man”
She recorded this before women were allowed to have their own song about worrying.
Odetta, “I Feel Like a Motherless Child”
Sometimes I did. But I found workarounds: Plan B, then C, then D, and so on.
The Hidden Cameras, “Ban Marriage”
Or at least its heteronormative gender roles, situated in history.
Pamputtae, “Single Mother”
It’s a more worrying gig than you might realize.
Loudon Wainwright III, “Tip that Waitress”
Your waitress wants to be invited to the table of life.
Florence + The Machine, “Kiss with a Fist”
To grow up violence-adjacent is to not quite realize when you’ve landed in the thick of it.
Fake strength will suffice until you get the real kind.
Nina Simone, “Trouble in Mind”
Sexual violence, situated in history, is an ambient threat if you’re a woman at large in the world. I wasn’t blue always.
Arrested Development, “Tennessee”
Ethno-violence is also situated in history. But you knew that.
Death Cab for Cutie, “I Will Follow You into the Dark”
Death occurs. Grief follows. I found ur-reasons for grief in the ancient past.
Niccolò Paganini, “Cantabile in D Major for Violin and Piano”
I heard this song via bone-conduction headphones that let me also hear birds, the bird racket, the bird chorus, as I walked away from civilization, many miles out and miles still to get home again, over steep rocks, into valleys, dissonant chords rising, falling, and crying out for solution. My parasympathetic nervous system cut a mysterious path.
Frédéric Chopin, “Nocturne Op.72 No.1 in E Minor”
This song wooed a latent part of me.
Gustav Holst, “Venus, the Bringer of Peace”
Peace means wrestling with memories. Repeat as needed. Catharsis is temporary.
Debra Monroe is the author of The Source of Trouble, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. She is also the author of the short story collection A Wild, Cold State; two novels, Newfangled and Shambles; two memoirs, On the Outskirts of Normal and My Unsentimental Education (both Georgia); and the essay collection It Takes a Worried Woman (Georgia). She is the editor of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. She lives in Austin, Texas, and teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University.
If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider making a donation.
