The Guest List is a regular book column that surveys the reading habits of our favorite musicians. In this edition, Jimmy Cajoleas talks with the great New Jersey singer, songwriter, and actress Sharon Van Etten. Her new album Sharon Van Etten & the Attachment Theory is out now.
Jimmy Cajoleas: What are you reading right now?
Sharon Van Etten: Right now I’m reading Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. I just got past halfway, which is pretty good for me these days. I didn’t know her work before, but so many of my friends were posting the cover, and that kind of drew me in. My son’s obsessed with chess right now, and one of the main characters is a chess player.
So far it’s interesting. It’s about two brothers who have very different lifestyles. One is younger, one is older, and they just lost a father. The older is a successful attorney, and the younger is in his twenties and soul-searching. Chess doesn’t define him—it’s just something that he does well. He doesn’t focus his whole life on it. Rooney positions the brothers so you see the different ways they’re processing their father’s death. It’s also about how they dissociate themselves into romantic relationships and the different ways they connect with the women in their lives. It’s a page-turner. I’m curious where it goes from here. Sometimes when my partner and I are going to bed, I’m like, “I really want to snuggle with you, but I really just want to keep reading this book. I’m sorry.” I’ll have my hand on his back while I’m turning the pages.
JC: That’s a great feeling—when you have an actual page-turner that’s also a really good book.
SVE: I find myself going back and forth between fiction and nonfiction. I still learn about relationship stuff through the complex narratives some fiction authors use to explain the way people tick. But I also want to learn other things, so I’ll try to take turns, using different parts of my brain.
JC: What’s some nonfiction you’ve been reading?
SVE: The last two that I read were memoirs: the Lucinda Williams autobiography [Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You: A Memoir] and Goth: A History by Lol Tolhurst. Goth tells how Lol came up playing in the Cure as well as the history of goth music through his own lens. He makes the joke, “We didn’t invent goth. Goth literature existed way before us, and that deeply influenced our writing!”
JC: How did you like the Lucinda Williams memoir?
SVE: I’m fascinated by her as a person, how she didn’t really get discovered until late in life. Her father [Miller Williams] was a poet and a professor, and she talks about how he had Alzheimer’s. My father-in-law had dementia and he was an intellectual, and you could just see him slowly disappearing. She talked about that with her father, so I connected with it on a personal level. When Lucinda says her father finally admitted that he couldn’t even write anymore, that’s when she fell apart, because she knew he had turned a corner. The book also tells you a lot about Lucinda’s mother, mental illness, traveling, and all the different ways she was trying to find her voice and communicate as an artist in the studio. For someone who appears so confident, it took her a minute to find her footing. There’s something relatable to her arc for me.
JC: I often think about how for Car Wheels on a Gravel Road she was taking lyrics from Birney Imes’s book of photographs of Mississippi juke joints [Juke Joint], singing the bathroom-wall graffiti. I’ve always admired her ability to put a deeply human stance on anything, to find the character behind the line.
SVE: A phrase like “car wheels on a gravel road” and you already feel like someone’s escaping something. There are writers who look at strangers on the street and build a narrative about them—who they are, where they come from—based on this brief interaction. Her songs are a master class in how to reveal the history of a character.
JC: Are there any books that inspired the writing on your new record?
SVE: Nick Cave came out with Faith, Hope and Carnage. That book talks about art as a kind of defiance. Art as action and activism, with joy being something you can share in art to offset the pain. And hopefully to outlive the pain through radical joy. In so much of his work, both in his albums and in this book specifically, Nick talks about how music and community and collaboration have gotten him through some of the hardest times in his life and it makes him want to engage more than ever. You can see that in his performances, how he’s trying to connect with the crowd, how he’s holding hands, walking through the audience, inviting people onstage. When he was younger, you could see that he hated everything. At least, as a performer, that’s the energy he had from the footage I’ve seen. He was definitely in a place where he didn’t love the world. And I think he’s had these major epiphanies in his life because of the pain he’s been through. He also addresses spirituality—not the idea of finding out what God is and the meaning of life, but more about the path and the questions and the seeking that has made him more of a religious and spiritual being.
I really connect with that at this point in my life, when my seven-year-old is asking me questions about God. My son told us one day that his friend didn’t want to be friends with him anymore. And we were like, “What happened?” He said, “Well, I told him I didn’t believe God.” And we were like, “Oh, well, what did he say to that?” And my son said, “He told me, ‘I believe in God, I don’t understand why you don’t believe in God.’” So we’ve started having these conversations about how it’s a constant journey, and these are questions that you learn to ask yourself throughout your life, and the answers change. Your feelings change, your beliefs change, your questions change, your circumstances change. So you’re allowed to not believe in God, but just know that’s not a permanent feeling, and it might not be something you want to say to people [laughs]! Especially at the age of seven! It’s okay not to know. But the biggest thing is to constantly question and to constantly seek. As a human being and as an artist, I think that’s a really beautiful thing that Nick Cave has been talking about.
JC: I loved that book. It wrecked me. There were parts where I was just sobbing while reading. And who would have thought he would have become this warm and soft and generous person? Without losing that toughness, of course. He’s still very much Nick Cave.
SVE: I was lucky enough to tour with him as support in 2013, for his Push the Sky Away tour, and I will say he was a gentleman then, and very warm. We got to meet his sons, and it broke our hearts to see that happen two years later [his son’s accidental death]. There’s that one visual from the book where he’s trying to write at his desk and he’s looking out the window and he can see the cemetery where his son is buried. I admire Nick Cave greatly.
JC: Are there any books that are all-time favorites for you that you go back to?
SVE: One book is called The Four Agreements [by Don Miguel Ruiz]. When I was having a lot of anxiety, especially in my late teens and early twenties, when I had PTSD and severe social anxiety, an ex-boyfriend who is still a friend of mine gave me this book. It has these mantras to help you deal with everyday stresses that I would write on Post-its and put on my refrigerator. There’s actually a photo of my refrigerator with the Post-its on my record Remind Me Tomorrow. These were all real mantras and things that I still say today. One of them is “Don’t take anything personally.” Another one is “Be impeccable with your word.” Very down-to-earth mantras. Whenever I get ready for a record and have to go on tour, I get a little anxious and I think, I should just read that book the week before I go on tour and have it recenter me.
There’s another book called Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury. He’s one of my favorites. I didn’t even know that I was into sci-fi, but I love The Illustrated Man. Fahrenheit 451 too. These are books that, when I pick them up, I just think, oh wow. The imagery is so interesting. Zen in the Art of Writing is about method, how writing is a practice that you’re constantly honing, and about not being so hard on yourself.
JC: Did you ever read that Ray Bradbury book Something Wicked This Way Comes?
SVE: I feel like I’m confusing that with one of the stories from The Illustrated Man. But was this the one about a kid who keeps going to a carnival and can’t turn away? I think it’s based on one of the short stories from The Illustrated Man. I think even Fahrenheit 451 stems from that as well. Because in The Illustrated Man, the device to set up the short stories is so interesting: the character falls asleep next to someone from the carnival and all the man’s different tattoos take on a life and that becomes the story.
JC: I haven’t read those in years, but even when I was a kid, there was something about how life did contain all these frightening things if I just knew where to look. So you’re both super-attracted to that and kind of horrified by it as well. It’s a manageable terror, and kind of exciting too.
SVE: A manageable terror. I like that.
JC: We’ve already talked a little bit about this, but do you have any other favorite books about music or musicians that you love?
SVE: I read Up and Down with the Rolling Stones [by Tony Sanchez], which is a wild account. It may have been written by their drug dealer or ex-manager. Maybe he was both. The book tells the raw story of where they came from, what life was like on the road, how they were discovered, why they started writing their own songs, all from a very close-quarters perspective. Some things feel unforgivable in this narrative, but it was also such a different time. It was hard to believe that it all actually happened. And for them to still be around, just getting through that time, and how many people they inspired. They still are so close as a band. The Rolling Stones are a fascinating case study.
Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One is amazing. I want to go back to that, because it’s probably been ten or fifteen years since I read it.
JC: That book is so wild. He’ll do things like describe exactly what books were on a coffee table in a room he stayed in once in 1962. Sometimes you feel like he’s just making it up, but it’s perfect and I believe word of it anyway.
SVE: It’s the details! People tell me all the time, “You should write a memoir.” And I’m like, fucking hell, my memory sucks. I wish I was a better writer in that way. I wish I had a story to tell. I’m also only in my forties, and I feel like reflecting now wouldn’t be fair. That’s only like three chapters.
JC: Are there any other books you want to recommend?
SVE: I just finished reading I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sante. My bandmate has been transitioning, and I want to learn more about her perspective. She’s transitioning late in life, same as Lucy. It’s one of those things that will be a constant learning process for me. I’m learning who my friend is becoming—who she’s always been, but it’s new to me. And we can have open conversations, and I’ll admit how much I’m learning in this process with her. The book is a beautiful story about where Lucy came from as an artist and as a person, and about learning to let her voice be heard.
Sharon Van Etten is recognized as one of the most influential and iconic songwriters of our time. She has collaborated with artists ranging from Courtney Barnett and Josh Homme to Norah Jones and Angel Olsen, and been covered by artists including Fiona Apple, Lucinda Williams, Big Red Machine, and IDLES. Her seventh full-length album, Sharon Van Etten & the Attachment Theory, was released in February 2025.
Jimmy Cajoleas was born in Jackson, Mississippi. He lives in New York.
Photo: Devin Oktar Yalkin
