“I remember lying back on my bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to Simon and Garfunkel, ‘Hello darkness my old friend,’ and thinking, if I could express myself even a fraction as well as these musicians express themselves, I could survive.”
“If you play these LPs while serving people huge amounts of good food and wine, guests cannot but let their hair down and disport themselves.”
“Receiving a mixtape was the highest honor; making one, the greatest responsibility.”
“In true ’90s fashion, at one point, I sent him a mix tape.”
“I listened to so much music as I wrote. I love music. And I included a lot of it, knitted into the writing. I can’t imagine writing novels without music, honestly.”
“This is a set list of brokenhearted love songs, so listen to it when you want exactly that”
“…when you’re looking for a certain entry point to your writing, a tone or mood or feeling (grim in this case), then it’s nice to have a song that can ease you into that mood as into a warm bath.”
“In the days after I came out, I would sit in my small house, cut off from everything, with my kids, a toddler and an infant, with long nights ahead. Music brought me a lot of deep healing as I learned how to be okay.”
“…the protagonist is a music lover, a concert goer, and music of a certain kind, in a certain register, can be imagined as floating around the edges of the story.”
“At the keyboard in the morning, I feel the pressure to perform. To sing. I love a musical sentence.”