And then I found this amazing performance by Ladisi, and I played it over and over. I could only search the internet for answers. When Ducu died in 2019, I could not feel. Jacques Brel’s “Ne me quitte pas,” Performed by Ladisi: Royal Albert Hall, 2019 In other words, Horne demands you wise up and keep going.Ĥ. “If You Believe” follows it and kicks your ass out of any form of sadness and self-negation. This reinterpretation of “Stormy Weather” cuts to the core of loss, forces you down the well that is grief. I still remember Horne’s sweat rolling down her chest, the elegant fabric of her dress sticking to her, how she embodied her life story. He saw her perform three times, taking me along once where we sat in the front-row. I remember my father coming home one night with tears in his eyes, saying he’d seen the best performance ever: Lena Horne. “Stormy Weather/If You Believe, by Lena Horne: Live On Broadway I wish he’d used the audio of the performance in the production because really, it’s epic.ģ. Floored by this performance, Ducu captured some of its vitality by staging the play’s crowds like a mosh pit. This video, with a young Eddie Vedder, is a gorgeous time-capsule of some of the energy of the early 1990s- the hair, the mosh pit, the yawp to the world that we are actually alive-all of it, brought me back to when I was younger and in love, and very angry.
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In 2018, I sent this video to Ducu who was directing a sixty-person, modern version (set in modern Iraq) of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. “Alive,” by Pearl Jam: Live, Pinktop 1992 Writing my book, I played this live performance and remembered living with Ducu in an apartment facing the back of the Chelsea Hotel.
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I wish I could recall what Smith was like back in 1979, when I saw her hanging out at cafés and performing. I grew up in the avant-garde theater of Greenwich Village, and Patti was around because she was with Sam Shepard. Smith’s not Jewish, but to say these words aloud gave me a sense of strength and place I don’t think I’ve recovered from. The first time I heard the lyrics “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine,” I thought it was the coolest, most Jewish thing ever. “Gloria,” by Patti Smith: 1979, Live from Germany I think that being caught in an elaborate scam to hide any truth resulted in me longing to watch live performances these performances embody the rage I felt, the longing, and, most importantly, the rebellion of truth-telling.ġ. Following his death, I traveled to Bucharest twice to try to find out what killed him. Ducu and I were lovers in the early 1990s and stayed very close after breaking up. Writing the book, I turned to music to, and even though I had been caught in a web, I went to the web, to social media, where I engaged artists I loved, drawing from their strength and honesty in order to write a narrative non-fiction book echoing our contemporary tempo.Īmong other things, The True is about renowned Romanian theater director Alexandru Ducu Darie and about a deranged woman who convinced me there had been a conspiracy behind Ducu’s death. I wrote The True in a mad fever dream after discovering that I had been caught in a scam of the heart, a complex con that ate two years of my life. In her own words, here is Sarah Kornfeld's Book Notes music playlist for her book The True: The True lures the reader in with its dark poetry, and then refuses to let us go." "The True is a compelling, troubling, and painfully honest story about the world we live in now-a world of fake news and alternative facts in which we believe what we want to believe and ignore or deny those nagging voices that tell us otherwise. Sarah Kornfeld's book The True is a fascinating trail of where grief can lead us.
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Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C.
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In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.