Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir

"This book was a pleasant surprise for me. If you serve on a literary judging committee, you have a lot of books thrust at you. You have books literally sent to you, a lot of people in your inbox. And you also have the general noise and chatter about, what are the ‘big books’ or the ‘good books’ of the moment. But this was a book I discovered when I was scanning the new release stacks in my public library, which I was doing as part of my due diligence. I saw it, saw that it was published in 2019, took a flyer on it, and I absolutely fell for it. “She does something risky, which is write much of the book in the second person, implicating the reader in her experience and her struggle” First of all, she is a tremendous storyteller. And she does something risky, which is write much of the book in the second person, implicating the reader in her experience and her struggle. It’s risky because that can come off as whiny, or as manipulating the reader. But I think that she has not just a remarkable story to tell—about being roped in to work with this PBS composer to pretend to play violin for hours at a stretch and spend time in this RV going across the country playing music that she utterly detests—but an ability to unpack her experience and understand it as indicative of a wider cultural fakery that Americans, in particular, have allowed themselves to be susceptible to. So on the structural level, her way of weaving in her experiences in the Middle East , on this tour, growing up in Appalachia—her stylistic gambits—are, I think, interesting without being showy. This is a book with a broader thesis, extending beyond her particular experience. I think there’s a lot to think about in this book. I’m a great fan of it. There’s so much embarrassment surrounding that sort of experience. Being Ivy League-educated, but forced to sell your eggs in order to just survive; or to take a job like this and be grateful for the money that it earns, but also just be so cognizant of cheapening every ambition that you had as a child to be thought of as a serious person . . . I think these are especially true challenges for a whole generation of college-educated kids who have taken on massive amounts of debt and were told that this is the investment that you have to make in order to be a good and successful person, who then realize that you have to make not-so-good choices to be even semi-successful."