Okay, my computer keyboard can burn up today, I can succumb to a suffocating writer’s block, and I will still have this: One of my absolute favorite musicians, Lloyd Cole, linked to my No One You Know playlist, on which his great song, “Rattlesnakes,” appears. In addition to the playlist, which is included in the just-released paperback edition of the book, there’s another reference to Lloyd early in the novel, while Ellie is wandering around a Paris graveyard with her sister:

Lila placed a piece of paper on Poincare’s gravestone and rubbed over it with a pencil. Then she helped me locate someone else on the cemetery map: Simone de Beauvoir. De Beauvoir had been buried just a year before in the same grave as Sartre. The ivory-colored gravestone with its simple double inscription was laden with fresh flowers and gifts. I’d read The Second Sex
and Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter , I’d read The Words, but the only line I could conjure at that moment was by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions: She looks like Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront/as she reads Simone de Beauvoir in her American circumstance.