I'm Sticking with You

“I'm Sticking with You” is a recurring musical cue through which the narrator recognizes the force of an old, unrequited love and the intensity of her younger self. First identified as a Velvet Underground song heard while she cuts vegetables, it carries her back to a summer in Berlin and illuminates the book’s larger concern with how memory survives in music, objects, and places after they have changed or disappeared.

The song and a remembered summer

While preparing vegetables in her kitchen, the narrator hears “I'm Sticking with You” and finds herself transported to an earlier summer, riding her bicycle through Steglitz with the song in her headphones. She remembers being so consumed by thoughts of a man that she was in danger at turns, then arriving at a café exhausted, exhilarated by Berlin and burning with passion. The song is not merely background to the recollection: it is the immediate route back into its bodily urgency and its particular place in her life.

An unrequited love as a measure of intensity

The song’s persistence raises a question for the narrator: why does it summon this man alone, when she has loved others since and those relationships made her happier? Her answer distinguishes happiness from emotional devastation. The man never returned her love, and she associates abandonment and passion with that one-sidedness; the love that hurt most became the standard against which later feelings seemed less overwhelming. She calls the year when she was twenty a golden age she has pursued ever since, longing to feel again as alive and full of the world.

Memory, work, and the self in retrospect

The memory also belongs to a larger self-portrait. The narrator imagines that, without meeting this man, she might have become a diplomat, doctor, psychologist, or academic rather than a melancholy writer who worked in a brothel and entered unfamiliar worlds. She presents the encounter as a turning point whose significance remains opaque to the man, while her own life appears, by contrast, to have acquired the force of an uncontrolled catastrophe. The song thus joins private recollection to her account of the person she became, without suggesting that the lost love was reciprocated or resolved.

Recurrence and the work of remembrance

Elsewhere, the book makes the preservation of the past a conscious task. The narrator wants to describe the closed Maison accurately enough to call images of it into being, but finds that its distinctive spirit eludes her despite having written extensively. A bedspread bought when the Maison closed becomes a keepsake whose significance lies in its connection to the vanished workplace; she fears that washing it will erase that association. Like the song, the object gives memory a concrete point of return, while also making clear that preservation cannot restore the place itself.

The narrator’s reflections on Svetlana’s departure sharpen this contrast between attachment and forgetting. At the brothel, work continues and absences are quickly filled, even when someone had once been central to the evening shift. The narrator describes forgetting as built into that routine. Against this practical succession, the song’s return preserves an attachment that time has not diminished into mere background: it repeatedly restores the narrator to a defining, painful intensity.