“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.”
“Much of my book Afternoon Hours of a Hermit concerns memory and the techniques of fiction which I have tried to pass onto my students. But truth be told, I often feel like a dentist when I’m writing.”
“The Coffin of Honey has an internationalist point of view, and this playlist inevitably reflects that. But despite the eclecticism, there’s an emotional tenor many of these songs have in common: rapture, catharsis, yearning, the desire for transcendence or union.”