About The Book:
Title: WHO PUT THIS SONG ON?
Author: Morgan Parker
Pub.
Date: September 24, 2018
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Formats: Hardcover, eBook, Audiobook
Pages: 336
In
the vein of powerful reads like The Hate U Give and Girl in Pieces, comes poet
Morgan Parker's pitch-perfect novel about a black teenage girl searching for
her identity when the world around her views her depression as a lack of faith
and blackness as something to be politely ignored.
Trapped in sunny,
stifling, small-town suburbia, seventeen-year-old Morgan knows why she's in
therapy. She can't count the number of times she's been the only non-white
person at the sleepover, been teased for her "weird" outfits, and
been told she's not "really" black. Also, she's spent most of her
summer crying in bed. So there's that, too.
Lately, it feels like the
whole world is listening to the same terrible track on repeat--and it's telling
them how to feel, who to vote for, what to believe. Morgan wonders, when can
she turn this song off and begin living for herself?
Life may be a never-ending
hamster wheel of agony, but Morgan finds her crew of fellow outcasts, blasts
music like there's no tomorrow, discovers what being black means to her, and
finally puts her mental health first. She decides that, no matter what, she
will always be intense, ridiculous, passionate, and sometimes hilarious. After
all, darkness doesn't have to be a bad thing. Darkness is just real.
Loosely based on her own
teenage life and diaries, this incredible debut by award-winning poet Morgan
Parker will make readers stand up and cheer for a girl brave enough to live
life on her own terms--and for themselves.
Now on to the excerpt!
Susan
This is a story about Susan. Draped permanently on the back of Susan’s
chair is a sweater embroidered with birds—that type of
lady. She has this thing I hate, where she’s just always
medium, room temperature. Susan looks like a preschool teacher with no
emotions. She smiles, she nods, but she almost never laughs or speaks. That
might be the number one thing I hate about coming here. She won’t even laugh at
my jokes! I know that life with me is a ridiculous hamster wheel of agony, but
I’m kind of hilarious, and I’m just trying to make this whole situation less
awkward.
I’m the one who begged for my first session, but I was desperate, and
it was almost my only choice. Now that I’m actually doing this, I hate it. I
just want Susan to buy my usual pitch: I am okay. I am smart and good. I am
regular, and I believe in God, and that means I am happy.
By the way, of course my therapist’s name is Susan. It seems like
everyone I meet, everyone telling me how to be, is a Susan.
I don’t trust a Susan, and I don’t think they trust me either.
I don’t like Susan, but I want to impress her—I’m usually so good at it.
But this is what I mean about the bird sweater. I know the bird sweater
is awful, and just uncool and unappealing in every way—it doesn’t even
look comfortable. But other Susans like it, and generally all Susans do. It is
a sensible piece of clothing; it is normal, and it makes sense. Wouldn’t it be
so much easier if I liked the sweater, if I just wore the fucking sweater and
didn’t make such a big deal out of everything?
This Is a Story About Me
This is a story about me, and I am the hero of it. It opens with a
super-emo shot of a five-foot-nothing seventeen-year-old black girl—me—in the waiting
room at my therapist’s office, a place that I hate. It’s
so bright outside it’s neon, and of course the soundtrack is Yankee
Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco, because I have more feelings than anyone knows
what to do with.
The smell in here is unlike any other smell in the world, some rare concoction
of pumpkin pie–scented candles and every single perfume sample from
the first floor of Macy’s. I bet Susan Brady LCSW decorates
her house with Thomas Kinkade paintings and those little figurines, cherubs
dressed up for various occupations, I don’t know. The other
thing I hate about coming here is the random framed photo of, I believe, Bon
Jovi on the coffee table, which also features a wide assortment of the corniest
magazines of all time.
(White people love Bon Jovi. When Marissa and I went to Lake Havasu
with Kelly Kline, because that’s what white people do here in the summer, Bon
Jovi was the only thing her family listened to—that freaking
scratched-up CD was actually stuck inside the thing on their boat. I had a
moderate time at “the Lake,” except for when I had to explain my summer braids to Kelly and
Marissa, for probably the eight hundredth time, to justify why I didn’t have a
hairbrush to sing into. They made me sing into a chicken leg because of course.
I was also shamed for not knowing any Bon Jovi lyrics. That was around this
time last summer, but it feels like a past life.)
(Another thing I hate about coming here is how I have to think about
everything I’ve lost, everything I’ve done wrong, and everything I hate about
being alive.)
The thing I like about it here is that there’s Werther’s.
Susan opens the door and spreads her arms to me in a weird Jesus way,
the sleeves of her flowy paisley peasant top billowing at her sides. She has
kind of a White Auntie thing going on, or a lady-who-sells-birdhouses-at-the-church-craft-fair
thing: a sad squinty smile, a dull brown bob, a gentle cadence to her voice. I
can tell she’s used to talking to children—probably rich
white children—and as I stiffly arrange myself on the couch in her
office, I’m suddenly self-conscious about my largeness, my badness. I just
feel so obvious all the time.
It’s like that song “Too Alive” by the Breeders. I feel every little
thing, way more than regular people do.
“So, how are you doing today?” Susan asks too cheerily, like a hostess
at Olive Garden or something. “Where are you on the scale we’ve been using?”
(I feel so deeply it agonizes me.)
“I’m okay. I guess on the scale I’m probably ‘pretty dang bad,’ but
better than yesterday and still not ‘scary bad.’ ”
(Now, probably to the soundtrack of Belle and Sebastian’s “Get Me Away
from Here, I’m Dying,” there’s a longish montage of me zoning out, imagining
the lives of everyone I know. Even in my dreams, it’s so easy and fun for them to
exist.)
“Are you still taking the art class?”
“Yeah. Every Tuesday.”
“That’s wonderful. And how are you liking it?”
“It’s fine. Sort of boring, but . . . I guess it takes
my mind off things.”
“Do you want to talk about what’s on your mind the other times?”
“Um, not really,” I chuckle, in my best joking-with-adults voice. The
AC churns menacingly, like it always does, taunting me. Susan, with her
wrinkled white cleavage, unmoving and unrelenting. Susan doesn’t play.
I think about grabbing a Werther’s from the crystal bowl but don’t,
even though I want one. (Will Susan write Loudly sucks on Werther’s in
my file as soon as I leave, right next to Is probably fine; just being
dramatic?)
“I guess just people at school. Why I’m so different.”
“Can you say a little more about that? What are the things that make
you feel so different?”
“I don’t know.” My chest is welling up with everything I’ve been trying
to stuff into my mind’s closet. “I can’t get happy.”
It happened only three weeks ago, but since my “episode,” no one in my
family has uttered the word suicidal. It’s easier not to.
I glance down at my Chucks, trying to divert my eyes from Susan. Stare
at a lamp, the books stacked on her shelves. I spot a spine that reads Healing,
Recovery, and Growth, and immediately feel ridiculous. Sweat pools in
my bra. This isn’t gonna work.
“Morgan, why are you so angry with yourself?”
I clench my jaw. “I’m not!” This is a lie, but it hasn’t always been.
“I’m annoyed,” I admit, sighing, “and embarrassed.”
“Why are you embarrassed?”
“Just—I don’t know . . . ,” I whine. Words begin to spill and spew
from my lungs like a power ballad. “Like, why am I the
only one I know who has to go to a shrink? How did I become the crazy one? I
have to be the first one in the history of our family and our school to go to
therapy?” I bristle. “I’m pissed I can’t just get over stuff the way everyone
else seems to.”
I purse my lips resolutely and fold my arms tight against my boobs.
Your ball, Susan. She just nods and squints like she has no clue what to do
with me.
I’ve asked God and Jesus and all their other relatives to “wash away my
sins,” but it doesn’t feel like Jesus is living inside me—I can’t even imagine what that would feel like. I’m so full up with me, me, stupid me.
“Mmm . . . ,” she finally grunts. “I see.”
Fighting the near-constant urge to roll my eyes all the way to the
back of my skull, I snatch up and devour a Werther’s.
Copyright © 2019 by Morgan Parker
PublisherDelacorte Press
Morgan Parker is the author of the
poetry collections Magical Negro (Tin House 2019), There Are More Beautiful
Things Than Beyoncé (Tin House 2017), and Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At
Night (Switchback Books 2015). Her debut young adult novel Who Put This Song
On? will be released by Delacorte Press on September 24, 2019. A debut book of
nonfiction is forthcoming from One World/ Random House. Parker received her
Bachelors in Anthropology and Creative Writing from Columbia University and her
MFA in Poetry from NYU. She is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for
the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and a Cave
Canem graduate fellow. Parker is the creator and host of Reparations, Live! at
the Ace Hotel. With Tommy Pico, she co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA)
reading series, and with Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective.
Morgan is a Sagittarius, and she lives in Los Angeles.
Giveaway Details:
3 winners will receive finished copies
of WHO PUT THIS SONG ON?, US Only.
Tour Schedule:
Week One:
Week Two:
9/9/2019- Kait Plus Books- Excerpt
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Week Four:
9/23/2019- BookHounds YA- Review
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Week Five:
