Soundtrack of Silence

October 30, 2023
Hay centers his poignant debut on a tantalizing question: “If the rest of your life had to be lived in silence, what sounds would you want to remember?” After learning that his diagnosis with neurofibromatosis would eventually render him completely deaf, Hay leaned into his lifelong love of pop music and resolved to create a playlist of songs he never wants to forget. During his Midwest childhood, Hay “barely noticed when the upper register” of sounds made by power tools, lawn equipment, or rifles “disappeared completely”; it wasn’t until he failed a West Point hearing exam that he realized something was wrong. Alongside the details of how he’s learned to compensate for his condition by reading lips and other methods, Hay sharply articulates the ways in which going deaf plays tricks on the mind: “The thing about gradual hearing loss is that you forget when you used to hear something that you no longer can,” he writes at one point. Elsewhere, Hay praises the devotion of his wife, Nora, who inspired many of his playlist picks, and explores the significance to their relationship of songs by the Eagles, Bing Crosby, and Prince. While Hay doesn’t sugarcoat his circumstances—he unsparingly recounts his lengthy recovery from multiple brain surgeries, for example—his optimism in the face of adversity is stirring. This moving memoir makes magic out of facing the music.

November 15, 2023
A memoir of deafness and music. What's a music lover to do when the music stops? That's the question Hay faced in early adulthood, when his hearing degraded enough that he was denied admission to his dream school, West Point. "Songs are like pages in a scrapbook, each igniting an emotion from the past," he writes, and without music, those pages fade. Try to describe this to a hearing person, he adds, and incomprehension may well ensue, for deafness is unlike the other senses in that it can't be simulated: "You can't remove your auditory receptors for an hour or two just to experience what it's like. Deafness is unique among the senses in that respect." The author replaced sound with memory, recalling the rhythms of Prince or the chords of Top 40 hits. For all that, though, "I can never hear Angus Young's power chords in my mind like I could through my ears." Finally diagnosed with small, constantly forming tumors and a condition known as neurofibromatosis type 2, Hay was fitted with a cochlear implant, a technology that, though several decades old, is still in need of fine-tuning: Rather than the big box of crayons that a lucky kid might have, he writes, "those of us with NF2 who get an implant have the three-pack of crayons you get with the kids' menu at Applebee's." As the author notes, before even that three-pack was accessible, further surgeries were required to combat tumor formation--procedures Hay describes in vivid detail. In time, however, and with gradual improvements to the implants, he was able to reacquire the sounds and words he'd lost years before: "One day, after all that work, I was listening to the Beatles instead of recalling the memory of listening to the Beatles." A medical odyssey told sensitively but unsentimentally.

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