Featured Essay: My Mother-in-Law’s Records

by Laura Lippman

My current vinyl collection comprises 52 albums that belonged to my late mother-in-law and most of it sucks.

“Sucks” is too harsh. It includes a smattering of classical and opera, a few out-and-out duds (Andy Williams), and quite a bit of Broadway, a genre I love, although not as indiscriminately as my mother-in-law. (L’il Abner? WTF, Dorothy?) I don’t own a turntable, but in late 2020 my ex-husband decided these records should reside with me and so they reside with me. I loved my mother-in-law very much. I loved her so much I let her die without knowing that her son had left me. 

Music and men are intertwined in my life. My tastes and my equipment in the former have almost always fallen short of the latter’s exacting standards. My love of Stephen Sondheim was met with disdain, negating any cred I might have gained as a protopunk in my college days. What does it matter if one owns the Tuff Darts eponymous debut album when it is surrounded by So Much Sondheim?

I probably owned fewer than 52 albums when I left Northwestern University for my first job in Waco, Texas. Every Sondheim musical and revue that had been staged to that date, for sure. But also: Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Dave Edmunds, Rockpile, the Clash, the Talking Heads, the Beatles, the Ramones, Steely Dan, Tom Petty, the Pretenders, the Police, and the Fabulous Thunderbirds, a Texas band I had discovered in Baltimore’s Marble Bar. Not cutting edge but not embarrassing.

As a young reporter in Waco, I fell in love with a man who took music seriously. This had many upsides – I saw Wynton Marsalis when he was no more than 21, B.B. King at my first Jazz Fest in 1982 – and some downsides, although the only one I remember is his insistence that I refer to the harmonica, the instrument he played – quite well! – as a “harp,” and the pronunciation was very precise, more like “hahp.” I never got it right.

I think he approved of only one album I owned – “Ain’t Nobody’s Business if I Do,” a four-record Billie Holiday set. Yet even that was sort of uncool because it had been produced by a division of the Book-of-the-Month Club. It had that striver stink. As did I.

Somehow, I became the custodian of my Texas boyfriend’s record collection when he moved to Guatemala and somehow he became convinced I would do horrible things to his records after we broke up, although I initiated our definitive split. (By the way, when your boyfriend moves to Guatemala, he is, in fact, breaking up with you.) His albums were returned in pristine condition.

Two or three boyfriends later, I headed to my dream newspaper job in Baltimore with a record collection that had quadrupled, quintupled over my Texas years, thanks to those various men. I married a Texan I met in Baltimore. He persuaded me to sell our vinyl so we could go all-in on compact discs. An audiophile friend warned against the new format, but I have never been an audiophile.

Yet I mourned some of those albums I surrendered for cash: The Clash’s London Calling, the Live Stiffs Live bootleg that sometimes feels like a fever dream. (Elvis Costello’s straight-up sincere version of “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself,” years before he teamed up with Burt Bacharach for Painted from Memory.) And that beautiful four-album set by Holiday, a Baltimore girl and a hopeless romantic – just like me.

That first marriage lasted seven years. Splitting our CD collection was quite easy because he abhorred musicals, cared little for jazz, and wanted nothing to do with country music, especially Marty Stuart, for whom I had and still have an unironic affection.

And then came my second marriage. Excuse me for a minute while I consider my syntax – the passive voice, the suggestion that this 18-year union was something that happened to me. It’s akin to saying: I drank 12 beers, got behind the wheel, and that utility pole just came at me. 

My second husband knew a lot about music, even more than the previous men. He would quiz me. “Do you know who’s playing the guitar” – or the saxophone or the piano – “on this song?” (I never did, unless the instrument was “dobro” and the answer was “Marty Stuart.”) He introduced me to dozens of bands and artists I still love. I even met some of my faves through him – Chrissie Hynde, Costello, all the Pogues, John Hiatt. 

My second husband’s musical taste and knowledge were undeniably superior to mine. But I would be surprised, sometimes, by his indifference to artists I thought unassailable – Oscar Petersen, Chet Baker, Blossom Dearie. He out-and-out loathed Nancy Lamott, the late cabaret singer beloved by me and my friend Terry Teachout, who knew a thing or two about music. (A cultural critic, he wrote a biography and play about Louis Armstrong, covered music for several prominent publications.) Sometimes it felt as if my ex had an uncanny knack for changing the station whenever one of my favorite songs came on. “You like that?” he would ask in bafflement. 

But – he had good taste. In music. Our early trips to New Orleans, pre-parenthood, were Bataan death marches with great soundtracks, all-night affairs in which I was exhorted to keep moving forward. I once fell asleep while dancing.

And then one day I was a late-in-life mom living half of the year in New Orleans, with the built-in excuse of a baby to stay home in the evenings, avoid the shade-less torture of Jazz Fest. (To be fair, I have had many incandescent experiences at Jazz Fest, but that sun is brutal.) I began drawing some boundaries: I do not, in fact, like Lowell George or Little Feat. Ben Ellman in the Klezmer All-Stars? Absolutely. Ben Ellman in Galactic? No thank you. (Please don’t yell at me: I understand that Galactic is great, but, in the immortal words of Ralph Tabakin in Diner, it’s not for me.)

I began seeing more of the musicals I loved, hatching a plan in January 2020 with one of my best friends to become Sondheim completists. 

Less than a month later – correlation is not causation – my marriage was over. It fell apart the way that Hemingway once described bankruptcy: Gradually and suddenly. I don’t think the dissolution had anything to do with our musical tastes, although I wouldn’t have minded being allowed to control the car radio every now and then. I think my ex left because we were miserable and he had the wisdom to extricate himself from the situation. Me, I would have stood over the corpse of that relationship for years, applying the paddles and shouting: CLEAR. I hope it’s obvious that I am the less admirable person in this situation. Delusional and romantic, someone who listens to Nancy Lamott, especially after a break-up, although Sondheim’s “Not a Day Goes By” is my go-to. 

“Isn’t it funny,” mused my friend and fellow Lamott acolyte Terry, “that Sondheim, a gay man, was obsessed with the near impossibility of successful heterosexual love?” And yet Terry, widowered about the same time my marriage ended in February 2020, found true love again in 2021, only to die a year later.

Nine months after my husband and I separated, everyone in the family knew my mother-in-law was dying, but only my daughter and stepson had been told that their father and I were no longer together. It was the first year of Covid and everything sucked. One dreary night, we drove the 35 miles to my mother-in-law’s apartment so my daughter and I could say our goodbyes.

I had seen my mother-in-law very little that year because of the pandemic, but also because it was hard, keeping such a big secret from her. I remember bringing her a Passover feast when the breakup was pretty fresh, a summertime visit where I turned the tables on her and played the Jewish mother, urging her to eat the Burger King cheeseburger she had requested. 

I sat by my mother-in-law’s bedside and held her hand, cool and papery as the hand in that Ezra Pound poem.

“I am so happy you were in my life,” she said. 

“I’m happy, too.” I did not add: And I’m happy you won’t live to see it fall apart, that you won’t have to take sides, not that there are sides to take. 

She died within the week. I went to the funeral, still playing the part of the wife that I wasn’t. A few months later, the albums came to live with me. They remain in the den closet to this day. My daughter wants a turntable, has already started collecting vinyl, but I am decluttering with great savagery as of late, eager to own less.

Yet my mother-in-law’s records survived my recent assault on the den closet. I did inventory them, however, and discovered an album I didn’t know she owned: That same Billie Holiday set that was practically my personality when I was 22. So many songs of heartache and longing, even masochism. I love Holiday, but I have no desire to listen to such songs right now.

Then again – Holiday died at age 44. I’ve made it to 66, lived long enough that I no longer romanticize romance. I recognize that the punks and the rockers and the country balladeers were the starry-eyed dreamers among my records, extolling the highs and lows of love, yet never doubting it was an essential human quest that must never be abandoned. 

It was the clear-eyed Sondheim, working from within a genre so many deride as corny, who was willing to suggest that marriage might not be the be-all and end-all for everyone.

It’s not so hard to be married

It’s much the simplest of crimes

It’s not so hard to be married

I’ve done it three or four times. 

Me?  I’m stopping at two.

Laura Lippman is a New York Times bestselling writer who has published 30 books to date: 25 novels, a novella, two short story anthologies, an essay collection and a children’s book. Her latest book, Murder Takes a Vacation, was published last month. She lives in Baltimore and New Orleans with her daughter.