LOSING MUSIC

The author’s account of facing a life-changing health issue.

In an affecting debut memoir, novelist and essayist Cotter recounts the health crisis that transformed his sense of self and connection to his world. Beginning in early September 2008, he experienced a ringing and roaring in his ears along with intermittent attacks of vertigo. He tried fad diets, meditation, and even a change in environment, moving from the East Coast to Colorado. Seeking medical help, he came away repeatedly frustrated: Doctors in Los Angeles, Boston, Denver—where he lived with his ever patient wife—and even at the Mayo Clinic were baffled and too often dismissive. “Why do we assume doctors can fix nearly anything?” he asks. “Why do we assume that even when cures aren’t around now, they’re around the corner, or a few years ahead?” Eventually, he received the diagnosis of Ménière’s disease—the same affliction that beset Jonathan Swift—for which there is “no reliable treatment, and no consensus on its cause.” As his symptoms worsened, Cotter became newly aware of the physical and social consequences of being disabled. “I’m white, male, cisgender—for someone in a position of such social privilege to find himself falling into any amount of marginalization is a shock,” he writes. He felt ashamed of his deafness, depressed by an increasing sense of isolation, and even suicidal. Hearing aids offered some amplification but hardly clarity. Although much improved over ear trumpets of the past, “hearing aids, no matter how advanced or how expensive—can’t entirely separate foreground from background.” Nevertheless, as the vertigo began to abate, they allowed him to return to teaching. Besides assorted adjunct classes, for a month, he lived and taught in a homeless shelter, where he found he had “plenty to learn from people so intimate with loss.” He and his students, he discovered, shared the language of pain.

A gracefully rendered, candid chronicle of trauma.