Losing Music

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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 Mnires 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 illuminatinga story that will make readers see their own lives anew.

Reviews

Praise for Losing Music

"An acute and very beautiful book."Teju Cole, author of Known and Strange Things: Essays

Understatedly elegant [. . .] In articulating what is now gone, Mr. Cotter vibrantly evokes the sensations of life before the beginning of the end of his hearing [. . .] Notwithstanding the personal catastrophe that deafness represents, it did give Mr. Cotter the ideal subject, transformed throughliterary grace, for a book. [. . . ]Losing Musiccomes closer to expressing the transcendent sensation by nearly being music itself. Its author turned adversity into quiet triumph. Evidence that Mr. Cotter's ear is still keen for the melodies of language sings from every page.Wall Street Journal

In his moving memoir, John Cotter anticipates a world without sound. Losing Music offers a compelling portrait of how deafness isolates people from even those closest to them. [. . .] More broadly, he also challenges us to better understand how any disability radically alters a person's sense of self."Washington Post

In this bracing memoir, essayist Cotter recounts his experience with an incurable inner ear disorder.The result is a poignant reflection on disability.Publishers Weekly

Cotter writes about the embodied experience of hearing loss vividly and within a network of contexts: that of caregiving and that of medical sciences many unsolved mysteries.Maddie Crum, The Vulture

"Losing Music explodes an individual experience of illness into a cultural and medical reckoning; with a sociologists rigor and a poets lyricism, Cotter takes readers on an odyssey through the social history of disability, the brutal bureaucracy of the American healthcare system, and the intimate violence of living in a volatile body. But this memoir is just as much a love letter to sound itself as it is a chronicle of loss; your world will sound different after reading it."Charley Burlock, Oprah Daily

"More than about Mnire's, Losing Music is a powerful addition to the memoir canonhard-hitting, beautiful, profounda story of finding safe ground in a world regularly buffeted by very rough seas."The Millions

Cotter makes clear in his remarkable memoir, Losing Music, one of Mnires cruelest elements is its imprecision [. . .] Its unclear to Cotterand any of ushow much time we have left to consume, love, and share art. Through describing that uncertainty, Cotter reveals its value.On the Seawall

What happens when something youve loved your whole life becomes something that causes you pain Thats a question at the center of John Cotters new memoir, which chronicles his diagnosis with a condition thats likely Mnires Diseaseand the physical and psychological effects that it had on him. Its a harrowing and insightful look at a challenging time in its authors life.Inside Hook

In an affecting debut memoir, novelist and essayist Cotter recounts the health crisis that transformed his sense of self and connection to his world [. . .] A gracefully rendered, candid chronicle of trauma.Kirkus Reviews

Devastating and beautiful. Losing Music is pieced together in a particularly uncanny way, like scraps of conversation that gradually coalesce into an immensely powerful and meaningful whole.Sam Sacks, editor, Wall Street Journal

John Cotters memoir examines hearing loss, challenges with the American healthcare system, adaptation to disability, and questions of fate, coincidence, and making meaning from misfortune. This is a moving and vulnerable story. Kathy Baum, 5280 Magazine

"[Losing Music] deepens our understanding of sound, human connection, and what it means to be (and remain) alive."Shelby Smoak, Washington Independent Review of Books

Lighthouse writing instructor John Cotters memoir examines loss, challenges with the American health care system, adaptation to disability, and questions of fate, coincidence, and making meaning from misfortune. This is a moving and vulnerable story.Kathy Baum, Tattered Cover, Denver, CO

Cotter first notices that music sounds off, and then hes plagued by vertigo. A memoir about dramatically changing ones life and dealing with a mysterious illness. I highly recommend!Caitlin Luce Baker, Island Books, Mercer Island, WA

This is a memoir about the loss of an important sensehearing. Its also about what was gained as Cotter was compelled to contemplate his short personal history, his goals and the meaning of life. The diagnosis came quickly and at a young agea rare disease, origins not understood and for which there is no known treatment. Quitting his work, he travels cross-country in search of help. Meanwhile, he has to come to grips with the loss of so many strengths he had become accustomed to, and to learn about the language and other taboos related to disability. And to think about the many, many people who have suffered their own similar losses, through war, accidents or just plain happenstance. This short memoir is moving, in some ways frightening, but also hopeful. There is life after loss. Its a matter of perseverance, bravery and accepting change.Linda Bond, Aunties Book Shop, Spokane, WA

I read Losing Music in part to examine my own ailments, which are similar to John Cotters: tinnitus, hearing loss, vertigo, and the anxiety that can accompany them. I was relieved that my symptoms pale in comparison, but Cotters story tracking the severity of his condition is both enlightening and a bit terrifying. Throughout his memoir, Cotter describes the impacts to his personality, the challenges of communication with others, and the marital stress he and his wife have dealt with. The search for medical treatment led him through the long history of Menieres disease. He found that many attempted cures were horrific failures, and that in fact, little or no progress has been made over the last one hundred years. His journey laced all the way back to Jonathan Swift and Beethoven, who is also hearing impaired. This story is deeply reflective and moving, full of sorrow, hope and how to cope after being humbled by a crippling disease. Im grateful that Cotter was able to overcome his obstacles to tell his story.Todd Miller, Arcadia Books, Spring Green, WI

Heart-wrenching . . . When the mysterious symptoms that turn out to be Menieres disease encroach upon up-and-coming college professor and writer John Cotters soul-satisfying work and domestic life, its degrading effects on his hearing and sense of balance slam down an unwanted wall between his aspirations and the world beyond . . . An ill-understood condition, Menieres drives the dispirited Cotter to pursue any number of clinics across the country for help in dealing with this isolating new normal of greatly diminished hearing and unpredictable bouts of vertigo. Cotter is a grounded and reflective narrator of these struggles, and he envelopes the reader in grieving for the losses, little and big, as well as rejoicing in his numerous hard-won but successful adaptations, and concurrent optimism for what is to come. An added bonus: his historical anecdotes about changing attitudes and outlooks toward Menieres can be as entertaining as they are, at other times, flummoxing. Losing Music is the outstanding work of a straightforward memoirist with a wry sense of humor who feels very much like a good friend.Susan Braunstein, New Rochelle Public Library, New Rochelle, NY

This memoir by John Cotter has made me think more about disabled people, homeless people, suicidal people, and lonely people, and I want to learn morea lot more about Jonathan Swiftand how to help more people and be more compassionate. How many books can you say that aboutMollie Mitchell, HearthFire Books, Evergreen, CO

Losing Musicis a stunning, expansively beautiful book. Not just because of John Cotter's precise and vivid language on a sentence level, but also because of how it moves so tenderly through the vanishing of sound, and not just sound, but songspoints of connection that can be taken for granted. And even beyond this reality,Losing Musicis not solely a sad book. It is also a book of comforts, of joys, of closeness. I am thankful for all of its movements.Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America

John Cotter brings sound to the page as something tactile: abrasive, elusive, fluid, textured, a current between body and mind. He fashions language into a velvety pocket in a harsh world.Losing Musicis a phenomenal book about what it's like to be sick and suffering, and in it, I recognize not only the isolating nature of illness, but also a powerful intimacy with one's own changing self.Elissa Washuta, author of White Magic

Losing Musicis a vertiginous journey of loss and discovery triggered by the onset of an unpredictable and mysterious disability. With poetic energy, John Cotter describes the roaring and swirling particulars of Mnires disease, while he grapples with universal questions of meaning and suffering. The memoir effortlessly blends personal stories with delightful deep dives into sound dynamics, inner-ear anatomy, and eighteenth-century author Jonathan Swift, who becomes a much needed friendarticulate, accessible, free with his time, and, I might add, darkly funny, dramatic, and brilliant, not unlike Cotter himself.M.LeonaGodin, author ofThere Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness

Im not sure what Id do if my body became a see

Author Bio

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 Literatures Recommended Reading, Joyland, Commonweal, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island.