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.
The linked stories in Elizabeth Stix’s debut collection Things I Want Back From You vividly bring the fictional California town of San Encanto to life.
The Masters Review wrote of the book:
“Compulsively readable… deeply observational… precise, surprising, and off-handedly hilarious.”
In her own words, here is Elizabeth Stix’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut story collection Things I Want Back From You :
When I write, I write in silence. If I’m feeling stuck or prone to distraction, I put on cushiony headphones that block out noise so all I can hear is the beating of my heart and sound of my breath. I like to think it keeps my thoughts from escaping out of my ears before they get to my fingers.
That said, music plays a big role in my writing. It helps me enter into the world of the book and get excited about it. It’s a way of connecting to the characters on a different plane.
This playlist captures the mood and vibe of my linked story collection, Things I Want Back From You . The stories take place over a series of decades; characters recur in each other’s stories and move through time. They all live on the same cul de sac in a fictional town called San Encanto, not far from San Francisco. The songs on this playlist either resonate with the plot of a particular story or capture the feeling of a broader theme. I also just love listening to all of these songs. They’re great.
Stacy’s Mom , Fountains of Wayne
Several of the stories in Things I Want Back From You trace characters as they move through childhood and adolescence as neighbors at the end of a street called Lemon Patch Lane. Stacy’s Mom conjures all that. The song conveys teenage angst, desire, a bit of perversion, and this warped view of community. It’s also hilarious. (“I know it might be wrong, but I’m in love with Stacy’s Mom.”) Plus, the band is named after a cement fountain store in New Jersey that appeared fleetingly in one episode of The Sopranos , and that alone makes it a keeper. The singer and songwriter, Adam Schlesinger, was so talented, and he died in the very early days of Covid-19. It was a heartbreaking loss. And that also makes me want to include this song on the playlist, because the book tries to hold both the crushingness and hopefulness of the world at the same time. This song contains all of that for me.
Teenage Dirtbag , Wheatus
This is another song that’s all about teenage angst. It’s so quirky and funny, but also has that head-banging guitar that makes it satisfying. The lyrics capture all the absurdity of being young and trapped in the universe that is junior high school: the narrator is afraid of his crush’s boyfriend, who lives on his block and drives an IROC, and she doesn’t even know who he is. He dreams about going to an Iron Maiden concert with her, and – spoiler alert – sometimes dreams do come true.
I’ve Got You Under My Skin , Frank Sinatra
One of the anchor stories in the book is called “Alice,” about a little girl who has a Guinea worm growing out of her stomach, and the relationship she has with her brother, who is tasked with winding the worm out over one long California summer. I wrote the story when I was thinking about the idea of benign parental neglect – the kind of trauma that parents can inflict when they don’t commit any grave sin but just sort of overlook their children and don’t intervene. At the same time I was thinking about this idea, I read a newspaper article about a little girl who had a stomachache, and when doctors cut her open, they found about a billion tiny worms in her stomach. There was another case where a man had a long, thin Guinea worm. The way a Guinea worm works, when the egg hatches, the worm pokes its way out of your skin and you just have to let it emerge over a period of weeks, twirling it around a long stick. If you try to pull it out all at once, it will break. The situation seemed so ripe for metaphor. So I combined these two worm scenarios, gave the girl a Guinea worm, and then asked myself: If a little girl in suburbia had a worm growing out of her stomach, what might be her complaint? What might she be trying to say?
Cannonball , The Breeders
I could listen to this song 100 times in a row. It’s got this latent, angry power behind soft female vocals, punctuated by a driving guitar. To me the energy of it captures the danger lurking in several of the stories in the collection. In “Safekeeping,” a teenage girl works at a storage facility and escorts people down long, echoing corridors to the locked units where they store the junk they hold dear. “When I walk the hallways, I hear my shoes squeak on the flooring and imagine that behind each door is an inmate locked in solitary confinement,” she says. The rooms are rented by “hoarders who need to touch their piles of litter every few days or else they become anxious, and small business owners who use the units to store their paperwork in case their houses blow up or fall down.” One rule applies to everyone, though: “You can’t keep anything dangerous inside.” She meets a renter who may or may not be a threat to her, and this simmering peril is what I wanted to explore. The song’s propulsive energy demands to be heard and listened to, and it reminds me of the subtext of this story.
Steady as She Goes , The Raconteurs
A lot of the characters in Things I Want Back From You fall into a life, don’t really know how they got there, and feel out of place in it. This is true in “Toreador” and “Party at the End of the World,” which trace a couple from their first date in the ‘70s (the night that Skylab fell from the sky) through an eventual marital betrayal, and then later on as they become older divorced people moving through the world. At one point in the marriage, the wife, Betty, sees her husband’s reflection in a window as he approaches her. “Still handsome, lanky and sexy, he had the same soft, glossy hair he’d had the day she met him 21 years before,” she thinks. “She’d read that baby animals have giant eyes, eyes too big for their faces, so that adults want to protect them. Eyes so adorable it disarms predators. Robert’s grin and hair and big brown eyes were like that. Evolutionary tricks that had disarmed Betty. Now? It was just the way he looked.” Jack White reminds me of this marriage when he sings, “You found yourself a friend that knows you well, but no matter what you do, you’ll always feel as though you tripped and fell.”
A Long December , Counting Crows
This is a wistful song that’s full of grief and hopefulness, anchored in the California landscape. “Maybe this year will be better than the last,” Adam Duritz sings, and you can hear the grind the year has put him through and the optimism that has not been squelched. There’s a lot of tenderness and empathy here. Most of the characters in my collection sort of drag themselves through the years holding onto hope that better things are in store. They’re flawed characters, so close to attaining the love and connection they seek, but usually sabotaging themselves again and again. But that glimpse of connection is enough to keep them going, with the promise just around the corner of a second chance.
Comeback Kid (That’s My Dog) , Brett Dennen
This is a catchy earworm all about second chances. It’s filled with optimism and defiance. “Well, maybe it’s the common curse. Maybe things get bad before they get worse,” Dennen begins. “I don’t wanna be someone who can’t live up to what I already done.” This reminds me of the patriarch in the book, a former investigative journalist turned budget travel writer named Robert Zinger. He used to be a firebrand, but now he finds himself facing obsolescence – invisible to women and a frequent target of frustration and anger from his children. As his daughter storms away from him after he has said the wrong thing yet again, he calls after her with an apology, but in his heart, he knows he’s right. “Maybe once he had been destined for greatness, had lived his life as if shot from a cannon. Not anymore.” Like the Comeback Kid in this song, Robert keeps screwing up, and keeps hoping to be redeemed.
Naïve Melody , Talking Heads
Home plays a complicated role in Things I Want Back From You . It’s the source of a lot of dysfunction and trauma, but it’s also the foundation of identity. It’s the place that makes us who we are, and the people who live there are the ones who made us. Characters in the collection leave home and come back to it, resent it and grapple with it, and try to make it right. David Byrne sings, “Home is where I want to be, but I guess I’m already there. I’m just an animal looking for a home, share the same space for a minute or two.” Naïve Melody is a beautiful song about home, about creating it wherever you are, and finding it within you.
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Bay Area native Elizabeth Stix writes and edits in Northern California. Her stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Tin House, Boulevard, The Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine, and elsewhere. Her work has been performed live at Selected Shorts in New York and the New Short Fiction Series in LA, and her story “Alice” was optioned by Sneaky Little Sister Films. In the early 2000s, she founded the vanguard lit zine The Big Ugly Review . Her stories have won the Bay Guardian Fiction Prize and the Katherine Manoogian Scholarship Prize, and have been finalists or semi-finalists for the Disquiet Prize, Glimmer Train Fiction Open, Boulevard Emerging Writers Contest, Sherwood Anderson Prize, and others. When she’s not writing, she can be found staying up way too late doing the NYT Spelling Bee.
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