Great Are the Myths has sixty-six chapters. It also has a prologue, a section heading, a commencement, a coda, and an author’s note. But before any of that — before the first sentence, before Birdie’s voice begins — there is a title. And then another. And then sixty-four more.
Read in sequence, the chapter titles of this novel constitute a second text running parallel to the first. They are not decorative. They are not merely evocative. They form a complete architecture of meaning — an intertextual score, scored for Elvis songs, Walt Whitman, Frank Sinatra, Faulkner, David Lynch, The Pogues, and Birdie’s own wild wit — that operates independently of the chapters it names, and that, taken together, tells a version of the novel’s story that the novel’s own prose cannot quite tell.
This essay is about that second text. About what the titles are, where they come from, and what they do to the reading. About why a novel so concerned with myth needed to build its own mythology at the level of the title.
The Architecture
The first thing to understand is that these titles exist outside the novel’s time. They float above the narrative the way songs float above the events that call them to mind — not illustrating, exactly, but resonating. Some of them name things that won’t exist for years after the chapters they head. Others reach back centuries. This is not inconsistency; it is a structural decision. The titles operate in what we might call mythological time: the continuous present tense in which great songs and great poems always exist, untethered from the year of their making, available to any moment that needs them.
The second thing is that there are five distinct families of title in this novel, and each family does different work.
The Elvis songs are the most numerous, and they orbit around the boy the way the novel itself does — not as a sequential biography of his career but as a constant hum of context, a reminder that the shy teenager Birdie is watching in these chapters is already, in some register of reality, the artist whose catalogue will outlast the century. The Whitman titles are the rarest and the most significant — three chapter titles drawn from his poems, plus the epigraph and the closing invocation — and they form the novel’s mythological spine, its deepest layer of meaning. The American Songbook titles, heavy with Sinatra, constitute Birdie’s own emotional register, the idiom of the world she moves through. The literary and cultural titles — Faulkner, Lynch, Keats, The Pogues, The Kinks — are the novel’s most eclectic and sometimes most surprising gestures. And then there are Birdie’s own inventions: chapter titles that belong to no existing song or poem, that arrive in her own voice, that announce: I am also a mythmaker here.
The Boy in His Own Catalogue
He is almost never called by his name. In the prose, he is the boy: a grammatical article and a noun, deliberately withholding the famous noun that would reduce him to a symbol before the novel has had a chance to make him real. But the chapter titles call him by name constantly, in the only language that is authentically and fully his: the language of his songs.
This is the great conceptual boldness of the titling system. The boy exists in the novel’s prose in the continuous present of his private life — eating sandwiches in Birdie’s kitchen, crying in a bathtub, riding home on his bicycle in the Memphis dark. He is interior, unglamorous, young. But the chapter titles place him simultaneously in his own mythology, his own future body of work, the vast cultural landscape of what he is becoming. He is both, always, at once: the boy and the artist. The private person and the public legend. The teenager Birdie loves and the figure America will claim.
The Sun Records titles are where this is felt most acutely. My Happiness (Chapter 21) is the song he recorded at Sun Studio in 1953 as a birthday present for his mother, the first song he ever cut, the beginning of everything — and the chapter it titles is the moment in the novel when he and Birdie are most completely themselves, most happily inside the private world they’ve built together, most ignorant of what is coming. The title knows what they don’t. It carries the future inside it, gently, without cruelty.
That’s All Right (Chapter 26) is the one that broke. The song Sam Phillips recorded in July 1954 that went to Dewey Phillips at WHBQ and caused the phones to ring so furiously that the station played it fourteen times in one evening. In the novel, the chapter marks the moment when things between the boy and Birdie shift into something precarious, when the external world begins to press on their private one. That’s all right, mama — the lyric that launched everything — sits over the chapter as an irony and a tenderness simultaneously. Things are not all right, not entirely. But they will be. They always have been. The song says so.
Mystery Train (Chapter 36) is the one that perhaps carries the most myth. Originally recorded by Little Junior Parker for Sun in 1953, then transformed by the boy into something wilder and more dangerous — the train that “took my baby” and “never will return.” In the novel it heads the chapter in which Birdie fully grasps the enormity of what is happening to him, the speed at which he is being taken. He is becoming the mystery train himself: unstoppable, already past the station, already gone in some sense even when he’s standing in front of her. The title understands his trajectory before she does.
I Forgot to Remember to Forget (Chapter 33) — the last Sun single before RCA — is almost unbearably well placed. The chapter marks a moment of deliberate not-looking, of Birdie and the boy both choosing the present over the implications of the future. The title is a comic grammatical tangle that becomes, in context, something heartbreaking: forgetting to remember is the survival strategy of people who love each other across impossible distances.
And then Heartbreak Hotel (Chapter 35), the first RCA recording, the number that changed everything again. It arrives in the novel like what it is: a rupture, a before-and-after. The chapter it names is the one where Birdie first truly feels the machine of fame operating around him, taking him somewhere she cannot follow. The hotel at the end of Lonely Street — that great American metaphor for the interior loneliness of the public man — arrives as a chapter title just as Birdie begins to understand that she cannot protect him from where he’s going.
What these titles collectively do is something no amount of prose description could achieve: they remind us, at every turn, that we are watching the early chapters of a life that will end in mythology. The boy in the novel is young and funny and scared and vain and real. But his chapter titles are singing his future at us the whole time, and that double exposure — the private boy and the mythological artist, superimposed — is the novel’s most formally original achievement.
Beyond the Sun era, other Elvis titles extend this effect into the film years and the later catalogue. Loving You, Follow That Dream, Wild in the Country, Young and Beautiful — these are the titles of movies he will make, songs he will record, images he will become. The novel’s chapter titles know his future career. They have seen the films. They’ve heard all the records. They report back across time to the chapters that bear their names, and they say: this boy, this ordinary extraordinary boy, will carry all of this. All of this is already in him.
And two titles in particular deserve special mention as the boy’s relationship with Birdie reaches its end. I’ll Never Stand in Your Way (Chapter 23) and I’ll Never Let You Go (Little Darlin’) (Chapter 62) form a bracket around the long middle of their story: the first Birdie’s promise to him as his life explodes outward and she refuses to be the thing that holds him back, the second his corresponding promise to her as the end approaches. Between those two song titles — both of them his songs, both of them named in his voice — the whole arc of what they are to each other is contained.
The Whitman Spine
If the Elvis titles are the novel’s heartbeat — the pulse of popular myth, American and vernacular and urgent — then the Whitman titles are its skeletal structure, the deep grammar beneath the music.
There are three Whitman chapter titles. They do not cluster; they are distributed across the novel’s length like load-bearing pillars, each one placed at a moment of maximum significance. And they are in conversation not only with their chapters but with each other, and with the Whitman epigraph that opens the novel, and with “The Sleepers” that closes it. Whitman is not a reference in this novel. He is a foundation.
Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking (Chapter 17) is drawn from the great Whitman elegy of the same name — the poem in which a boy watches two mockingbirds, loses one of them, and learns from the surviving bird’s grief the first word of death, which is also the first word of poetry. It is the poem in which Whitman traces the origin of his art to a primary experience of loss, of the broken pair, of the one left behind calling endlessly to the one who is gone. In the novel, this chapter is the memory chapter — the one in which Birdie, prompted by Miss Mary and an old photo album, reconstructs her English childhood and confronts, really confronts, the losses that shaped her: the war, Tom, the drafty house, the absent parents, the child alone at the window with her dogs. The Whitman poem is the key to what she is doing: she is, like the boy in the poem, learning the language of longing from grief. She is discovering the origin of her own inner life in the experience of loss. And the mockingbird — the one left behind, calling — is everywhere in this chapter, in every memory of England’s cold corridors, in the understanding that she came to America not toward something, but away from something she could not name.
There is also, quietly, the parallel with the boy’s own origin story: he too had a twin, Jesse, who did not survive. He is also the one left behind. He is also the one calling, in song after song, for the presence that is no longer there. The chapter title links them — Birdie’s grief and his, the twin losses that produced them both — without the prose ever having to say so.
I Sing the Body Electric (Chapter 59) is placed in the novel’s late movement, when Birdie and the boy are adults, when the relationship between them has deepened from the screwball comedy of adolescence into something stranger and more serious. The chapter arrives at a moment of physical and emotional intensity — the body, Whitman’s great democratic subject, his insistence that the soul is not separate from the flesh but expressed through it, becomes the novel’s subject too. Whitman’s poem catalogues the human body with a rapturous specificity that was shocking in 1855 and remains startling now, because it refuses to separate the sacred from the physical, refuses to locate the self anywhere but in the living, moving, feeling body. The chapter it titles in this novel is precisely about that refusal: about two people who have moved past the pretences of polite society into the full recognition of each other as embodied, mortal, electric.
And then the extraordinary Houses and Rooms Are Full of Perfumes, the Shelves Are Crowded with Perfumes (Chapter 64). This is the opening of Section 2 of Song of Myself, one of the most sensuous passages in American poetry — Whitman outside the house, sniffing the “distillation” of the world, resisting the seduction of the interior (“the atmosphere is not a perfume — it has no taste of the distillation”), preferring instead the open air, the grass, the “unstopped and always-ready” self. In the novel, this chapter arrives near the end of Birdie and the boy’s last sustained time together, in the desert, when they are both acutely aware that something is closing. The title does something remarkable: it conjures, in its very length and strangeness, the sensation of a world so saturated with the past that you can barely breathe. Houses and rooms full of perfumes — the Memphis house, Birdie’s bedroom, the recording studio, all the spaces they have inhabited together, all of them now crowded with the accumulated scent of who they were. Whitman’s poem is about stepping outside, into air. The chapter is about knowing that they will have to.
To set these three against each other is to see the spine of the novel clearly. Chapter 17 is the origin: what made them, what loss gave rise to them. Chapter 59 is the fullness: what they became, the body in full expression. Chapter 64 is the saturation point: the world so full of what they’ve been that it can hold no more. Beginning, middle, end — Whitman provides the armature, and everything else hangs on it.
The American Songbook — Birdie’s Register
Blue Moon heads not a chapter but an entire section of the novel — the long central movement covering 1948 to 1956. It is the Rodgers and Hart standard in all its variations: the wish song, the longing song, the song of the person standing alone without a dream in their heart, until suddenly, improbably, the moon turns to gold and love appears. In the novel’s chronology, Blue Moon is also the song the boy will sing on his very first Sun session — that haunted, slowing-down, ghostly version in which he sounds less like a young man performing than like someone moving through a dream. The section heading holds both: Birdie’s longing for what hasn’t arrived yet, and his voice, already finding the frequencies of the uncanny.
The Sinatra titles — and they are numerous — constitute Birdie’s emotional idiom, the sound of the world she moves through. The Lady is a Tramp, Young at Heart, Come Fly with Me, Love and Marriage, Two Sleepy People — these are the songs of a certain mid-century American life, sophisticated, ironic, romantically ambitious, never quite willing to be entirely serious. They are the Great American Songbook at its most knowing, and they track Birdie’s social arc through the novel: from the girl who is slightly too unconventional for her milieu, to the young woman navigating the upper register of East Coast society, to the person who has found her tribe in Sinatra’s New York and Cary Grant’s California.
Two Sleepy People (Chapter 66) deserves particular mention because it is the last chapter before the coda, the final scene before the novel closes. The Hoagy Carmichael song — “here we are, out of cigarettes, holding hands and yawning, look how late it gets” — is one of the most tender songs in the American canon, a love song that doesn’t dramatise love but simply rests in it, too tired and too warm to move. Birdie sings it to the boy in the desert. He holds her close. They have been awake all night, as they have always been awake all night, since they were thirteen and the Memphis dark was full of Dewey Phillips and race records and the smell of grass through the window. The Sinatra songbook, which has accompanied Birdie’s whole adult life, ends here, in this particular song, in this particular quietness. It is the most loving possible title for the last night of something.
The Literary and Cultural Inheritance
The non-song literary titles are the most varied cluster in the novel, and each one deserves its own reckoning.
Rowan Oak (Chapter 37) is the name of William Faulkner’s house in Oxford, Mississippi — the antebellum estate where he lived and worked, and which he purchased in 1930 and named for the rowan tree, which in Scottish mythology is a tree of protection against enchantment. In a novel about the American South, about the mythology of place and the weight of history, a chapter titled Rowan Oak is invoking Faulkner’s whole project: the attempt to contain and understand and transfigure the South’s beauty and violence and grief into something that could be held on the page. It is also invoking a specific relationship between a writer and a house — the way a house can become the ground of an artistic life, the physical manifestation of an interior world. Birdie, who has her own great house in Memphis, who thinks in terms of rooms and gardens and the spaces that shape a life, is in deep conversation with Faulkner here whether she says so or not.
Night-Blooming Jasmine (Chapter 58) is the David Lynch title — a homage to a director whose entire artistic vision is organised around the same dialectic this novel explores: the beautiful surface of American life and the darkness that pulses beneath it. Lynch’s America is Memphis’s America, is Hollywood’s America, is the novel’s America: lush, dreamlike, perfumed, and shadowed. Night-blooming jasmine specifically — a flower that opens only in darkness, that is most fragrant in the small hours, that you cannot quite see but can absolutely smell — is the perfect emblem for Lynch’s aesthetic and for this chapter’s emotional weather. The novel places this title in the California section, and it is a private signal, an act of artistic kinship: I see the same America you see, I smell the same night.
Indian Summer (Chapter 57) belongs to the Keats register — not to any specific Keats poem but to the whole atmosphere of To Autumn, that famous ode to the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, of ripeness at the edge of decay, of warmth that knows it is almost over. An Indian summer is the return of warmth after the cold has set in, beautiful precisely because it cannot last, because it is borrowed time. In the novel this chapter arrives in the late California section, when Birdie and the boy are together again in the desert warmth, knowing something is ending. The title sets the seasonal clock: this is summer after summer, warmth after the chill has already come, and it will not hold.
The Idle & The Wild (Chapter 46) is a brilliant piece of wordplay that earns its double meaning completely. Idlewild — the name of what is now JFK Airport in New York, the gateway through which so much of the novel’s traffic flows, characters arriving and departing from the East Coast with all the freight of their ambitions and histories — becomes, with one small orthographic shift, the Idle and the Wild: the people in this novel who are too rich to work and too alive to be contained, the social register Birdie moves through and is sometimes claimed by, the particular combination of aristocratic ease and barely controlled energy that characterises her world and her. The wordplay is Birdie’s own — it has her wit, her delight in linguistic sleight of hand — and the airport beneath it situates the chapter firmly in the novel’s great preoccupation with movement.
Graceland Revisited (Chapter 56) is where the novel allows itself its most explicit Proustian echo — not just Proust but Brideshead Revisited, Waugh’s elegy for a lost Catholic aristocratic England, narrated by someone who was changed irrevocably by a great house and the family it contained, who returns to find it transformed, who must reckon with the distance between the place as it was and as it is. Birdie returning to the Memphis house, the boy having moved into Graceland — his own great house, his own mythology of place — the chapter title holds all of this: the specific real house, the literary tradition of houses as repositories of lost time, and the particular poignancy of the return that cannot be a repetition.
Fairytale of New York (Chapter 63) closes this section’s most surprising gesture. The Pogues song — Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl, the greatest Christmas song ever written about the distance between the dream of a city and what it actually does to you — arrives in the novel’s New York chapters with a kind of rueful, clear-eyed love that perfectly captures Birdie’s relationship with the city. New York in the novel is the place where the rules of class and art and money are made explicit, where Truman Capote extracts gossip at parties, where Tilly is entirely at home and Birdie is both at home and slightly estranged. The Pogues song is about two Irish immigrants who loved each other and wasted each other’s time and couldn’t leave each other alone — which rhymes, obliquely but truly, with so much in this novel about people who are made for each other and also impossible for each other, who keep finding themselves back in the same city, the same room, the same impossible present tense.
The Frame: Predestination and Riding in Cars with Boys
Two titles stand apart from all the others. They are not chapter titles in the ordinary sense — they are the hinges of the whole.
Predestination is not a song title. It is not a poem. It is a theological concept — the Calvinist doctrine that God has ordained all events and all destinies from before the beginning of time, that free will is, at most, a perception rather than a reality. It is the most serious possible word to put on the first page of a novel, and it is also, in context, the most personal and precise. Because what the prologue describes is not a general theory of fate but a very specific one: the movement of a girl from England to America, and the logic of that movement, and the sense she has of having been placed — by her grandfather, by history, by something she cannot name — exactly where she needed to be.
The novel, it turns out, is not only about Elvis, or about Birdie, or about love, or about America in the 1950s. It is about movement — the great 20th-century movement of people across oceans and continents and cities, in cars and trains and planes, in the restless American energy that doesn’t stay still. The chapter titles pulse with this: airports and railway stations and highways, the social movement of class and education and fame, the interior movement of growth and loss and becoming. Predestination says: all of this movement was not random. It had a destination. The destination was Memphis. And everything that happened in Memphis — the friendship, the music, the love, the mythology — was, in some sense, always going to happen.
This frames the novel as something grander than a coming-of-age story. It frames it as a story about being placed, about the specific gravity of a particular moment in a particular city in a particular decade, and about two people who were sent to each other by forces larger than either of them. Not quite fate in the heavy, tragic sense — Birdie is too funny and too alive for tragedy — but predestination in the lighter, more American sense: the sense that some things are just right, that some meetings are not accidents, that the soul has a geography and sometimes it finds it.
Riding in Cars with Boys closes the novel. Beverly Donofrio’s memoir — published in 1990, made into a film in 2001 — is the story of a young woman in Connecticut in the 1960s who gets pregnant at fifteen, marries the wrong man, and spends the next decade rebuilding a life from the rubble of that early mistake. It is, in part, a book about how the freedom and romance of cars and boys — the particular adolescent American freedom of a car and a boy and a road and nowhere specific to be — can lead somewhere you didn’t intend. It is also, finally, a book about survival and self-authorship and the way a life that seemed derailed can become, in the telling, something else entirely.
To close Great Are the Myths with this title is to perform a small, precise act of literary irony. Birdie has spent the whole novel riding in cars with boys — the Memphis boy, the Harvard boys, the Hollywood boys, the musicians and politicians and film directors, all the boys of mid-century America. She has also, unlike Donofrio’s narrator, navigated this world with extraordinary intentionality, on her own terms, refusing to be only what the boys need her to be. And yet the coda section the title heads is the one in which everything resolves — the wedding, the baby, the farewell — and there is something in the title that knows how close the comedy came to something else, how easily the story of a girl with more vitality than the world knows what to do with can go sideways. The title holds that awareness without endorsing it, tips its hat to a different novel that could have been written about a different version of this life, and then — being Birdie — moves on.
The Titles Birdie Gives Herself
Two chapter titles in Great Are the Myths are not drawn from anywhere. They are not songs or poems or films or airports. They belong to no tradition but the novel’s own. They are Birdie’s.
The Fifth Horsewoman of the Apocalypse (Chapter 3) — the chapter in which Birdie punches a bully in the face and retrieves the boy’s stolen bag — announces itself in Birdie’s fullest register: maximum drama, classical allusion slightly bent, a grandiosity that is also entirely accurate to the situation. She IS the Fifth Horsewoman. She is also a thirteen-year-old girl with shaking hands who told herself “you can do this” and then did it and couldn’t quite believe she had. The title is a myth she makes of herself in real time, a self-mythologising that is both comic and, the novel keeps insisting, true.
Poison Ivy League (Chapter 50) is the later, sharper, more knowing version of the same impulse. Birdie in the East Coast social world, Birdie at Bryn Mawr and Harvard parties and society events, Birdie watching the machinery of class and power up close and naming it with perfect precision: the Ivy League, yes, but poisonous with it, beautiful and dangerous and specifically designed to exclude. It is a title that makes a joke and means the joke completely seriously, which is always the most honest kind of joke.
These two titles, scattered among all the songs and poems, are markers of Birdie’s own mythmaking. She is not only the person the songs are about. She is also a person who makes her own songs, who names her own chapters, who participates in the construction of her own legend. The novel, narrated in her voice, is itself evidence of this. But the titles make it explicit: she is a writer of myths, not only a subject of them.
The Titles as a Complete Text
Read in sequence, without the chapters beneath them, the titles of Great Are the Myths constitute something remarkable: a condensed version of the novel’s emotional arc, its cultural inheritance, and its understanding of what the 20th century sounded like.
They begin in theology (Predestination) and end in literature (Riding in Cars with Boys). Between those poles: a young woman’s entire interior life, expressed in the songs she loved and the songs he would make, in the poets who saw America as she saw it, in the films and houses and airports and seasons that structured her world. The titles do not tell the story. They sing it — or rather, they hold all the frequencies at which the story vibrates, the Elvis and the Whitman and the Sinatra and the Keats and the Lynch, all of them sounding at once, all of them true simultaneously.
This is what great chapter titles do when they are working at the level this novel works: they remind you that every story is also a library, that every life is surrounded by all the art it needed to become itself, and that the books and songs and poems we love are not decorations on the outside of our experience but the substance of it, the very materials from which our interior lives are built.
Birdie knows this. The boy knows this — he who read Kahlil Gibran by lamplight and sang gospel in the dark and believed, sincerely and completely, that music was a spiritual force. Great Are the Myths knows this. And in its sixty-six chapter titles, it makes the knowledge architectural: it builds a house out of songs, and then invites you to live in it for the length of a reading.
“Great are the myths — I too delight in them.”
So did Birdie. So did the boy. So, one suspects, does everyone who has ever needed a song to name what was happening to them when they didn’t have words of their own.
*Poison Ivy League is actually an Elvis song, the writer of this piece did not know this. Also: there is a throughline in the novel of a love of Billie Holiday’s songs including: Blue Moon and I’ll Be Seeing You (the two parts of the novel) that the author of this piece missed.
For the podcast: a note on sources
- The Elvis recordings mentioned: My Happiness (Sun, 1953), That’s All Right (Sun, 1954), Mystery Train (Sun, 1955), I Forgot to Remember to Forget (Sun, 1955), Heartbreak Hotel (RCA, 1956) — all foundational to understanding the mythology the novel is invoking
- Walt Whitman: “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” “I Sing the Body Electric,” Song of Myself (Section 2), “The Sleepers” — all in Leaves of Grass
- Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart: “Blue Moon” (1934) — and the boy’s Sun Studio version (1954) as a specifically haunted reworking
- Hoagy Carmichael and Frank Loesser: “Two Sleepy People” (1938) — one of the great love songs in the American canon
- Beverly Donofrio: Riding in Cars with Boys (1990)
- William Faulkner: Rowan Oak, Oxford, Mississippi — the house as artistic foundation
My World of Interiors 