SOUNDS LIKE TITANIC
A Memoir
Sounds Like Titanic tells the unforgettable story of how Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman became a fake violinist. Struggling to pay her college tuition, Hindman accepts a dream position in an award-winning ensemble that brings ready money. But the ensemble is a sham. When the group performs, the microphones are off while the music—which sounds suspiciously like the soundtrack to the movie Titanic—blares from a hidden CD player. Hindman, who toured with the ensemble and its peculiar Composer for four years, writes with unflinching candor and humor about her surreal and quietly devastating odyssey. Sounds Like Titanic is at once a singular coming-of-age memoir about the lengths to which one woman goes to make ends meet and an incisive articulation of modern anxieties about gender,
Sounds Like Titanic tells the unforgettable story of how Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman became a fake violinist. Struggling to pay her college tuition, Hindman accepts a dream position in an award-winning ensemble that brings ready money. But the ensemble is a sham. When the group performs, the microphones are off while the music—which sounds suspiciously like the soundtrack to the movie Titanic—blares from a hidden CD player. Hindman, who toured with the ensemble and its peculiar Composer for four years, writes with unflinching candor and humor about her surreal and quietly devastating odyssey. Sounds Like Titanic is at once a singular coming-of-age memoir about the lengths to which one woman goes to make ends meet and an incisive articulation of modern anxieties about gender, class, and ambition.
- W.W. Norton
- Paperback
- February 2020
- 272 Pages
- 9780393357738
Buy the Book
$15.95
About Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman
Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman has “performed” on PBS, QVC, and at concert halls worldwide. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, McSweeney’s, Brevity, and Hippocampus. She holds a BA in Middle Eastern studies and an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and a PhD in English from the University of North Texas. She teaches creative writing at Northern Kentucky University and lives in Newport, Kentucky.
Praise
A Finalist for the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography
“Deliciously bizarre and utterly American.…[A] Coen brothers movie come to life.…I couldn’t put it down.” —Caitlin Doughty, best-selling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?
“Although her violin days are over, Hindman can be assured that she’s accomplished something incredible: she has written a memoir about identity and finding a sense of self that is funny, personal, empathetic, and amazingly true.” – Lily McLemore, BookPage
“Hindman is an emissary for a generation, repurposing its sarcasm and irony in a nuanced, humorous, and intelligent look at what it means to construct and consume fake realities in post-9/11 America.” – Angela Palm, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize for Riverine
“It’s difficult to write a funny, angry book. It’s even harder to write a merciless, empathetic book. But here comes Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, doing the impossible with a funny, angry, merciless, empathetic book that’s not only a hugely entertaining memoir, but an insightful meditation on a?time in our nation’s recent?history whose strange and ominous influence grows more apparent by the day.” – Tom Bissell, author of Apostle and coauthor of The Disaster Artist
“[A] most original memoir, one in which the narrator’s intelligence deepens by the page…. I salute Jessica Hindman for having shaped so well a remarkable piece of experience.” – Vivian Gornick, author of The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir
“[An] outrageously funny, shrewdly meta memoir.” – O, The Oprah Magazine