List #3 – From Daniel Torday’s The Duct Tape Brother

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LISTS: LITERARY & LAUNDRY

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At the beginning of Daniel Torday’s short novel, The Duct Tape Brother, the narrator, whose name happens to be Dan Torday, decides to make a brother for himself.

“When I’d finally saved up enough duct tape,” he says, “I made myself a duct tape brother.”

But Duck, the recently-made brother, quickly succumbs to chronic illness, which alienates him socially. As a result, he begins reverting to adolescent behavior and tastes.

The following list comes near the middle of the novel. Dan brings his brother to dinner with his friends. On the ride to the restaurant, Duck—wearing a ratty Guns ’n Roses t-shirt—blasts Candlebox on the stereo.

Bands My Duct Tape Brother Inexplicably Still Liked From When We Were Teenagers With Singers Whose Lyrics All Sounded Like They Were Saying “Hrew,” Like Their Jaws Were All Clamped Shut From the Same Case of Tetanus That Must’ve Been Going Around in the Early ‘90’s:

Live

Stone Temple Pilots

Pearl Jam

Soundgarden

Temple of the Dog (not an actual band but a one-off between Pearl Jam and Soundgarden)

Soundtrack to the movie Singles

Screaming Trees

Alice in Chains

Tool

Eddie Vedder Solo Records

Chris Cornell Solo Records

That Awful Scott Weiland Solo Record

Candlebox

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The Duct Tape Brother is not yet published, but you can read an excerpt in The Kenyon Review. 

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Daniel Torday’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Esquire Magazine, Glimmer Train, Harper Perennial’s Fifty-Two Stories, Harvard Review and The Kenyon Review. A collection of his short stories was recently named a finalist for the Bakeless Fiction Prize. He is Director of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College. His favorite list-makers are Salinger, Fitzgerald, and whoever wrote that useful collection of rules in the Torah.

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