November 28, 2022
In this bracing memoir, essayist Cotter (Under the Small Lights) recounts his experience with an incurable inner ear disorder. In his early 30s, Cotter began having problems with his hearing, and what started as a ringing in his ears became “a jet-engine roar” accompanied by debilitating bouts of vertigo. Seeking a diagnosis and treatment, he traveled across the country to meet with specialists and underwent a battery of tests; the uncertainty and fear surrounding his mysterious condition led Cotter to contemplate suicide, which, he reasoned, “may be a cruelty to those around me, but I saw it as a kindness.” Eventually, he was diagnosed with Ménière’s disease and struggled to accept that his hearing loss could be permanent. But with his caring spouse and a passion for the arts, Cotter learned how to adapt to his new life. Cotter is frank about the “shock” of being “someone in a position of such social privilege to find himself falling into any amount of marginalization,” and he captures the frustration of trying to communicate with doctors: “Medical personnel are very good at explaining things in either the simplest or the most complex possible terms, but little in between.” The result is a poignant reflection on disability.
May 1, 2023
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 M�ni�re'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.
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