Losing Music

Reviews / Votes

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 through literary grace, for a book. [. . . ] Losing Music comes 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 science's many unsolved mysteries."-Maddie Crum, The Vulture

"Losing Music explodes an individual experience of illness into a cultural and medical reckoning; with a sociologist's rigor and a poet's 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 Meniere's, Losing Music is a powerful addition to the memoir canon-hard-hitting, beautiful, profound-a 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 Meniere's cruelest elements is its imprecision [. . .] It's unclear to Cotter-and any of us-how 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 you've loved your whole life becomes something that causes you pain? That's a question at the center of John Cotter's new memoir, which chronicles his diagnosis with a condition that's likely Meniere's Disease-and the physical and psychological effects that it had on him. It's a harrowing and insightful look at a challenging time in its author's 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 Cotter's 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 Cotter's 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 he's plagued by vertigo. A memoir about dramatically changing one's 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 sense-hearing. It's 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 age-a 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. It's a matter of perseverance, bravery and accepting change."-Linda Bond, Auntie's Book Shop, Spokane, WA
"I read Losing Music in part to examine my own ailments, which are similar to John Cotter's: tinnitus, hearing loss, vertigo, and the anxiety that can accompany them. I was relieved that my symptoms pale in comparison, but Cotter's 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 Meniere's 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. I'm 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 Meniere's disease encroach upon up-and-coming college professor and writer John Cotter's 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, Meniere's 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 Meniere's 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 more-a lot more about Jonathan Swift-and how to help more people and be more compassionate. How many books can you say that about?"-Mollie Mitchell, HearthFire Books, Evergreen, CO
"Losing Music is 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 songs-points of connection that can be taken for granted. And even beyond this reality, Losing Music is 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 Music is 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 Music is 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 Meniere's 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 friend-'articulate, accessible, free with his time,' and, I might add, darkly funny, dramatic, and brilliant, not unlike Cotter himself."-M. Leona Godin, author of There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness
"I'm not sure what I'd do if my body became a seemingly unsolvable mystery, and I can't know how I'd handle the fear, frustration, and despair, but I doubt I'd have either the fortitude or the imagination to do what John Cotter has achieved in this book. Losing Music is a remarkable memoir: unsettling, insightful, and gorgeously written. I'll be pressing this book into many people's hands."-Maggie Smith, author of Goldenrod: Poems
"I think the hardest thing for a personal writer to do is think well and feel well at the same time. John Cotter's writing is bursting with as much intellect as heart. It's as clear-eyed and incisive as it is moving. It's what nonfiction should be."-Lucas Mann, author of Captive Audience and Lord Fear
"Losing Music is a fascinating, heartbreaking, deeply personal story from one of the most talented essayists around. It's a book about art and illness, the betrayals of the body, and what is kept and what is lost as time goes by."-Justin Taylor, author of Flights and Riding with the Ghost





Praise for Under the Small Lights

"John Cotter's prose is lyric, his images unforgettable, his characters richly complicated. From the first sentence to the last, I was captivated by this story and the characters that call out to the reader with mystery and beauty and terror, like voices in the night. Under the Small Lights is a book to be savored, and John Cotter is an exciting new voice in contemporary fiction."-Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel


"John Cotter has a way with words. He has a way with dialogue, with setting a scene, with crystallizing description and insight into just a handful of words. He has a way of wrapping his observations about lost generations, about the charade of the Bohemian lifestyle, about the fragility of ideals when they crash into immovable objects, into the characters themselves. . . . Cotter treats these themes with a rare intelligence and subtlety and a certain warmth for these characters who are charming and contemptible by turns. Cotter is going to be a writer to remember, and this is a great book. You should read it."-Tampa Bay (FL) Creative Loafing

"Under the Small Lights is the kind of book I always look for and rarely find: a mellow meditation on friendship and romance and the romance of friendship told in prose straightforward and lovely. [Cotter's] characters are urbane and articulate, foolishly impulsive, and heartbreakingly earnest. It's been a long time since I've encountered a bildungsroman this successful, let alone a novella this bighearted."-Josh Russell, author of Yellow Jack

"[Cotter] writes with insight, nuance, and respect for the complexity of these young people's lives. The prose is lyrical and lucid; the scenes are powerful and vivid."-The Rumpus

"One of the strongest aspects of [Under the Small Lights] is Cotter's ease with natural-sounding dialogue, which sparks, shambles, and darts along-the rhythm of you and your friends goofing on each other. . . . The book also has the substantial advantage of having a great atmospheric beginning, excellent action-packed climax, and a poignant ending. Under the Small Lights is a very good read."-New Pages

"[Under the Small Lights] moves through a series of scenes that surface like memories, wandering the way our attention spans and affections will, from friend to friend until our rash decisions blast everything away, or until we have to make new friends or risk the inevitable outcome that accompanies emulating / lusting after / emphatically loving your friends ...What might otherwise be construed as a group of selfish kids is instead a group of self-aware kids, who are easier to relate to and easier to love."-Lit Pub