Losing Music - John Cotter

Losing Music

A Memoir of Art, Pain, and Transformation

(Autor)

Buch | Softcover
304 Seiten
2024
Milkweed Editions (Verlag)
978-1-63955-076-0 (ISBN)
16,20 inkl. MwSt
“I was in the car the first time music seemed strange: the instruments less distinct, the vocals less crisp.” 



John Cotter was thirty years old when he first began to notice a ringing in his ears. Soon the ringing became a roar inside his head. Next came partial deafness, then dizziness and vertigo that rendered him unable to walk, work, sleep, or even communicate. At a stage of life when he expected to be emerging fully into adulthood, teaching and writing books, he found himself “crippled and dependent,” and in search of care. 


 When he is first told that his debilitating condition is likely Ménière’s Disease, but that there is “no reliable test, no reliable treatment, and no consensus on its cause,” Cotter quits teaching, stops writing, and commences upon a series of visits to doctors and treatment centers. What begins as an expedition across the country navigating and battling the limits of the American healthcare system, quickly becomes something else entirely: a journey through hopelessness and adaptation to disability. Along the way, hearing aids become inseparable from his sense of self, as does a growing understanding that the possibilities in his life are narrowing rather than expanding. And with this understanding of his own travails comes reflection on age-old questions around fate, coincidence, and making meaning of inexplicable misfortune. 

 A devastating memoir that sheds urgent, bracingly honest light on both the taboos surrounding disability and the limits of medical science, Losing Music is refreshingly vulnerable and singularly illuminating—a story that will make readers see their own lives anew.

John Cotter is the author of Losing Music. He has contributed essays, theater pieces, and fiction to New England Review, Raritan, Georgia Review, Guernica, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Joyland, Commonweal, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

I

Prelude 5

A New Life 15

Sound Shadow 35

On the Beach 61

The Polar Vortex 85

No Satori 113

Four Music Lessons 137

 

II

The Trauma Test 151

Lost Things Dreams 177

The Hundred Oceans of Jonathan Swift 201 Other Lives 231

Shocked Quartz 253

Coda 263

 

Notes 275

Acknowledgments 283

Erscheinungsdatum
Zusatzinfo Illustrations
Verlagsort Minneapolis
Sprache englisch
Maße 139 x 215 mm
Themenwelt Literatur Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
Sachbuch/Ratgeber Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie Krankheiten / Heilverfahren
Sachbuch/Ratgeber Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie Lebenshilfe / Lebensführung
ISBN-10 1-63955-076-3 / 1639550763
ISBN-13 978-1-63955-076-0 / 9781639550760
Zustand Neuware
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