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January 25, 2023
Angela Woodward's Playlist for Her Novel "Ink"
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.
Angela Woodward's novel Ink conflates atrocity and everyday life to powerful results.
Hannah Lillith Assadi wrote of the book:
"Angela Woodward's Ink mines the relationship between the word as witness and the nightmares buried beneath our words. This is a novel that marries politics and poetry in the profoundest sense."
In her own words, here is Angela Woodward's Book Notes music playlist for her novel Ink:
One morning, I started my car, and it filled with unknown music. As I backed out of the driveway into the busy street and threaded rush hour traffic, the song seemed to narrate the feeling that the situation suppressed—the mild horror of being encased in metal, alone amid a crowd of other machines, finding my way effortlessly towards a workday that promised routine and false cheer.
My daughter had just gotten her driver’s license, and had left a home-made CD compilation in the player, on at top volume. Rather than being annoyed at the infliction of her teen tastes on me, I was overcome by my first exposure to Arcade Fire. She told me later that she usually listened to music on headphones as she walked to her large public high school alone in the dark. In leaving the disc in the car, she’d accidentally let me in on her private world. My sudden craving for more Arcade Fire—I immediately bought all the albums—created a commonality between us that we hadn’t known was there. I had let slip the dread I so carefully hid from my kids, the conflict I felt about my conscientious conformity. My kids were the ones who needed a house and a car and middle-class stability. I wouldn’t have lived in such a rigid way, I thought, if I weren’t trying to protect them. It was an exposing moment, that the beautiful, clashing sadness of The Suburbs spoke to all of us in the household.
My novel Ink revolves around two typists, Sylvia and Marina, who are employed to transcribe taped interviews with men detained at Abu Ghraib, detailing their abuse at the hands of American forces at the Iraqi prison during the first phase of the Gulf War. One of starkest features of this grisly chapter of American history was how public it was. The shocking images from Abu Ghraib found their way to the media almost immediately. While Julian Assange quipped “Lights on, rats out” as a justification for exposing secrets through Wikileaks, it seemed to me that with Abu Ghraib the lights were on the whole time. We the public squinted our eyes shut and created our own darkness in order to live with those images of naked, cowering men and their laughing captors.
Ink negotiates different levels of hiding and exposure, where the atrocity is out in the open, and our reaction to it is buried. My daughter hadn’t deliberately hidden her music from me, but I hadn’t heard it until that morning. And she hadn’t had access to the part of me that reacted to these sad tunes. We had each shielded the other from something that was in retrospect obvious. My playlist interweaves two threads. One is songs without words. These convey emotion and mood without being explicit. The other thread is teen angst from the early 2000s, chosen by my son and daughter from songs they listened to then. Music is at the heart of Ink, as Sylvia only begins to feel the impact of her transcription when she hears her son sing. I had a particular song in mind for this scene, “How to Save a Life,” the 2005 hit by The Fray, which ends the playlist.
“Nu_ Chanic,” Kara-lis Coverdale
“Deep Blue,” Arcade Fire
“Jesus of Suburbia,” Green Day
“3 Rags for Piano, No. 2: Circus Dreaming,” Gene Pritzker, Kai Schumacher
“My Heart Is the Worst Kind of Weapon,” Fall Out Boy
“Girl Anachronism,” Dresden Dolls
“I Will Follow You Into the Dark,” Death Cab for Cutie
“Sprawl II (Mountains beyond Mountains), Arcade Fire
“Single Petal of the Rose” from the Queen’s Suite, Duke Ellington
“I’m Not Okay (I Promise),” My Chemical Romance
“Nocturne,” Julian Lage
“How to Save a Life,” The Fray
Angela Woodward is the author of the novels End of the Fire Cult and Natural Wonders. Natural Wonders won the Fiction Collective Two Doctorow Innovative Fiction prize in 2015. Rain Taxi called it "a wide-ranging meditative book that is by turns delightful, clever, and heartbreaking." Woodward's short fiction has won the Pushcart Prize and been anthologized in Dzanc Books' Best of the Web. She has published stories and essays in many journals, including the Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, Los Angeles Review of Books, and American Chordata.
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