“ Perfect Tunes is an intoxicating blend of music, love, and family from one of the essential writers of the internet generation. Gould, in the end, is not suggesting that oft-told myth that motherhood makes artistic life impossible she is showing, through Laura and Marie’s relationship, how unexpressed creativity can become as painful to carry as unpumped breast milk.” “ Perfect Tunes is a cautionary tale about a lesser-discussed form of intergenerational trauma. Through it all, Gould’s insights into what makes up the sometimes barely perceptible beats of our lives are sensitive and spot-on.” Perfect Tunes has many of those big before-and-after moments and many of those rippling after-effects it shows the ways in which we are all, always, having to reimagine the story of our lives. ![]() “What has remained consistent throughout Gould’s career is her ability to understand, amplify, and explore the essence of a moment, in turn offering her readers the opportunity to better understand the exigencies of life, those weird after-effects that ripple out from a major catastrophe. Her writing is observant and unfussy, and she has a knack for addressing serious subjects, such as the hardships of parenting and the darkness of depression, while keeping things light.” The pleasure of this book is in Gould’s astute details about everything from a hangover (which made Laura’s head feel like a “black banana”) to relationships. Anyone familiar with Gould’s work will be unsurprised by her keen eye. “ poignant story about the hard and intangibly enriching work of motherhood. It is a delightful and poignant tale of music and motherhood, ambition and compromise-of life, in all its dissonance and harmony. “A zippy and profound story of love, loss, heredity, and parenthood (Emma Straub), Perfect Tunes explores the fault lines in our most important relationships, and asks whether dreams deferred can ever be reclaimed. But neither her best friend, now a famous musician who relies on Laura’s songwriting skills, nor her depressed and searching daughter will let her give up on her dreams. Laura has built a stable life in Brooklyn that bears little resemblance to the one she envisioned when she left Ohio all those years ago, and she’s taken pains to close the door on what was and what might have been. Their time together is stormy and short-lived-but will reverberate for the rest of Laura’s life.įifteen years later, Laura’s teenage daughter, Marie, is asking questions about her father, questions that Laura does not want to answer. A songwriter with a one-of-a-kind talent, she’s just beginning to book gigs with her beautiful best friend when she falls hard for a troubled but magnetic musician whose star is on the rise. ![]() It’s the early days of the new millennium, and Laura has arrived in New York City’s East Village in the hopes of recording her first album. ![]() Have you ever wondered what your mother was like before she became your mother, and what she gave up in order to have you? “She sometimes couldn’t shake the feeling that they thought of her as kind of a servant.” Laura is still relatively young, but she notices that her once open and inquisitive outlook has curdled into something more skeptical.“An intoxicating blend of music, love, and family from one of the essential writers of the internet generation” (Stephanie Danler). At a school where she teaches music, the students are polite but condescending. Her life now neatly reflects the pragmatism of motherhood, despite Callie’s endless calls for her to come on tour with the Clips (Callie has become a frontwoman Laura still occasionally writes songs). Fifteen years into Laura’s unplanned experiment with parenting, her love for her daughter is no less intense but much more complicated. In a blink of a few pages, Marie emerges as a rebellious and often depressed adolescent who hungers for information about her biological father, about whom she knows very little. Gould often leaps forward in time to move things along - an effect that nicely approximates the usual disorientation of parenthood, whereby clingy toddlers become surly teens seemingly overnight.
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