The harpsichord

I was quite a fan of Juliana Hatfield's music when I was in college and a few years afterwards.  I'm not sure where it had originated, but it took off when I had become friends with someone at Bowdoin College who was a big fan of hers.  It's slacked quite a bit in the last decade, but I haven't forgotten it.

On the short list of books to read is her book When I Grow Up, which she was reading at Northeastern University a few years ago.  I found it yesterday, and it contains one of the most gutwrenching account I've read in a very long while of a marriage on life support that eventually died.*

The description of her life at home provides a powerful explanation for the songs she wrote, and perhaps why they resonated with me so much, although my home life growing up was anything but turbulent.  It was borderline idyllic.  I'm not sure where my nagging discontent comes from.

Dad walked in through the kitchen door and past my mother, holding the ax.  He went through the dining room and into the music room and he brought the ax down hard on the harpsichord - the beautiful harpsichord that he had built for my mother.  He destroyed it, methodically, as my mother watched, numb, and when he was finished, he looked at her, with sweat streaming down his face, and said, "Stay with me." She did, for eight more years.

I, naturally, concluded that love, and men, and marriage must always lead inevitably to smashed harpsichords.  But music, my loyal and constant companion, would never break my heart or love me too little or destroy anything.  Music would be an alternative to secular, romantic love and to marriage and misery.  The audience and I would love each other from a safe, platonic reserve and no one would get hurt.

Here's the clip of Hatfield reading it at Northeastern, starting at "The Harpsichord." It has been on my mind, a lot, lately.


* The other one that comes to mind is Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which I read my senior year in high school while I was dealing with the fallout from a really shitterific breakup with my high school girlfriend, who had gone on to college.