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Songs Only You Know

A Memoir

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Songs Only You Know: A Memoir plunges listeners into the Detroit hardcore punk scene with eighteen-year-old Sean and spans a dark decade during which his father succumbs to crack addiction, his younger sister spirals into a fatal depression, and his sense of home crumbles. Sean's salvation is music, as well as the many eccentrics and outsiders he befriends as front man of a band once referred to by Spin magazine as "an art-core mindfuck." Sean's prose whips from mordantly funny to searingly honest while offering an unflinching look at a family in crisis, low-rent music subculture, and the hard-earned identity of its author. A story of young manhood that deserves a place alongside Tobias Wolff's In Pharaoh's Army and Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Songs Only You Know is a beautiful, devastating exploration of family, friends, and one young man's musical dream. It marks the arrival of a fiercely original literary voice.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      February 10, 2014
      In this overlong memoir, Hoen tells of growing up in and outside of Detroit with a crack-smoking father, a helpless but stoic mother, and a painfully shy and desperately-seeking-meaning-in-life sister. Hoen channels his own frustration into playing in a punk music band. Weaving stories of the band’s life with his family life, he paints a now all-too-typical tale of a family going down in flames. Music sort of saves him, though: “With every traveled mile I sensed a mythology in the making, a history I imagined musicologists discussing years later.” Eventually, Hoen comes to himself, though not before losing himself again: “To achieve self-invention, you first evacuate the truest parts of yourself—they were slipping from me, connected only by a fear of losing touch completely.” In the end, what starts as a promising read, loses its rhythm.

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  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

Languages

  • English

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