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Nobody needs a playlist that doesn’t cast a weather in the air. So the one I offer here is meant to do that: to make it rain, or snow, or shimmer, wherever it is you’re sitting. It’s inspired by my new book Do You Remember Being Born?, which follows the story of a famous 75-year-old poet, named Marian Ffarmer. She is sitting at home in her Manhattan apartment when she gets a letter from a Big Tech company. Come here to California, they say, and write a poem with our machine...

I always listen to music when I write. It helps me focus, it shuts out the noise of the world, and it often puts me in an emotive space so that I can feel deeply for, and with, characters who are going through a lot. While working, I make compilations of songs that best serve the fictive moment I’m wrestling with; some songs migrate from playlist to playlist, persistently essential to my process, and others I only want to hear for a few weeks. What follows is a list of songs I listened to when writing...

Maybe it’s the poet in me, but when it comes to music, I’m a lyrics queen. I have trouble writing when a song I know is playing, because I find myself tuning into the words of the song instead of my own. Sure, the instrumentals are important, but the lyrics are what determine whether a song hits like a banger for me.

When I was working on my debut novel, All-Night Pharmacy, I had a mental moodboard of songs that captured the vibe of the book. “Hot, sad, sapphic weirdos” was a recurring theme. Lots of St. Vincent, Lucy Dacus, and Jenny Lewis...

Set at the famed Venetian orphanage and music conservatory the Ospedale della Pietà, Maddalena and the Dark is obviously a book full of music. Initially inspired by the challenge of writing a novel whose characters traded perspectives like orchestral soloists passing each other melodies, I ultimately found myself influenced not only by Antonio Vivaldi — who wrote many of his famous works for the Pietà’s all-female orchestra — but also a range of contemporary musicians tapping into the ecstasy...

Sorrow and joy, guilt and responsibility, remembrance and denial — music helps us encode and later restore so many of our feelings and experiences. While writing my memoir Wild Dances, I used this playlist to excavate memories, some of which I’d forgotten, others that I’d deliberately buried. Those memories helped me understand how my various traumas and failures, which I now see as re-directions, led me to embrace Eurovision — the glitter-slicked song contest known for its outlandish staging...