I am no longer in my memoir phase, my friends. I just am not. When I read Educated last year and recommended it to all and sundry, I added the caveat that I am no longer in my memoir phase, except for weird-culty-religion memoirs, as those are my catnip. But then I saw the synopsis for Sounds Like Titanic, a memoir about a violinist who fake-performed in a professional ensemble for a famous composer who played a loud CD of his music on top of the fake performances the ensemble players were doing.
I expected Sounds Like Titanic to feel weird-culty-religion-ish, not just because I wanted to preserve my rule, but because I love to read about bizarre personalities and the people in their orbit that they manage to convince their behavior is normal. Hindman is doing something different, however. Sounds Like Titanic is not about the eccentricity of the Composer, who actually is — weirdly normal? Apart from the ongoing fraud he perpetrates at a wide range of shopping malls, plazas, and concert venues across America?
Instead, Hindman has come to talk about artifice. As a native of Appalachia, she is unprepared for the financial realities of the Ivy League school she attends. Not only does she not have the money to pay her tuition, resulting in her selling dozens of her eggs, but she has never before come into contact with the genre of rich people who attend Columbia.
Let us now speak of the children of the American suburbs, a group with its own culture and subcultures, a species as foreign to you as wild chimpanzees, their hometown neighborhoods so stratified and gated and segregated that the kids who lived in million-dollars houses rarely mingled with the kids who lived in $800,000 houses.
She’s exploring the nature of reality in ways that I find particularly fascinating. What is wealth? What is a girl? What is a talented violinist? The thing that seems true in one context twists away from truth in another. Yes, they are really playing the music at these concerts, albeit in front of microphones that are turned off, and drowned out by the CD that’s playing behind them. Yes, she is very talented at the violin in her Appalachian home. Yes, her family is comfortably off. Yes, she’s a girl.
For the most enraging aspect of life in the body isn’t that you aren’t skinny or sexy enough, it’s that life in the body causes you to be dismissed as silly and shallow and stupid in a way that boys who are equally silly and shallow and stupid are not. Playing classical music on the violin provides a corrective: The violin is serious. Classical music is serious. An understanding of classical music — something adults say they wish they knew more about but don’t — gives a girl weight in a world that wants her to be weightless, gives her substance in a culture that asks her to be insubstantial. And this, it turns out, is the reeyell gift: It is almost as if, by attaching a violin to your body, you can become a dude.
If I was a scootch disappointed not to get more antics from the Composer — this is not really an antics book, it turns out — I was wonderfully surprised by the slippery complexity of Hindman’s prose and thinking. Sounds Like Titanic made me reconsider memoir, in the best ways.
Note: I received an electronic copy of this book for review from the publisher. This has not impacted the contents of my review.