Losing Music: A Memoir
John Cotter’s Losing Music is “a powerful addition to the memoir canon,” said Gretchen Cherington in The Millions. The first-time author has Ménière’s disease, a mysterious ailment that causes severe hearing loss, vertigo, and tinnitus, and Cotter shows well how devastating the condition can be. Music began disappearing for him first, then the sound of the ocean. Beginning when he was 30, a ringing in his ears came and went, sometimes becoming so loud it was painful. Though his condition would worsen significantly, he captures how the loss of normal hearing robbed him quickly of whole worlds of pleasure. “The feeling is one of losing life’s color, its essence.” After detailing how he fell into utter despair, his “hard-hitting, beautiful, profound” book also reveals how he managed to rediscover some semblance of contentment.
“The most memorable sections in Losing Music recount Cotter’s daily struggles,” said Lisa Zeidner in The Washington Post. A poet and essayist who was working as an adjunct writing professor when his hearing troubles began, he’s “lyrical about sounds we take for granted: wind rattling windows, old-fashioned radiators hissing to life, a cat drinking water.” Still, “he reserves his most passionate writing for music,” providing poetically precise descriptions of much of the music he has loved, and connecting the loss of those experiences to the way deafness can be particularly isolating. By 33, his hearing was gone, he was prone to fits of vomiting, used a cane but could barely walk, and considered suicide. Hearing aids and medication helped begin a partial turnaround.
“Cotter ultimately finds the best hope for a life without music: to get right with silence,” said Melissa Holbrook Pierson in The Wall Street Journal. There can be no happy ending in a book about hearing loss, but in writing it, he “turned adversity into quiet triumph.” Losing Music comes closest to capturing what’s transcendent in music “by nearly being music itself.” Even though his hearing has failed him, “evidence that Cotter’s ear is still keen for the melodies of language sings from every page.”