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"A devastating account of the author's experience with the debilitating condition known as Mâeniáere's disease that sheds urgent, bracingly honest light on both the taboos surrounding disability and the limits of medical science"--
Table des matières
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
A propos de l'auteur
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.
Résumé
“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.
Préface
- Advertising with NEIBA to reach East Coast booksellers and readers
- Paperback release event on the East Coast
- Major bookseller send to accounts that missed the hardcover
- Publicity outreach focused on regional and paperback-release outlets, positioning the book as a critical addition to the body and illness memoir canon
- Major academic campaign to 100K educators, positioning the title as a strong candidate for course adoption
- Ongoing ebook promotions
- Email marketing promotion via the publisher to readers, sales and academic lists of more than 65K subscribers
