This book was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography. The first seventy or so pages go back and forth often to her upbringing in West Virginia and Western Virginia, but the rest of the book mainly focuses on her career performing around the country, hired to play her violin in front of a dead mike while the audience listened to a recording! The author has a great sense of humor, calling the act “Milli Violini,” for example. “It’s difficult to write a funny, angry book. It’s even harder to write a merciless, empathetic book. But here comes Jessica 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. “An evocative portrait of America’s literal and figurative landscapes, an incisive look at class and gender, and an examination of what authenticity means.”- Justin St. Germain. The author, Jessica Hindman, has degrees in Middle Eastern Studies and Creative Nonfiction from Columbia and a PhD in English from North Texas State. She teaches at Northern Kentucky University.
New York: W. W. Norton, a 2020 trade paperback edition of a 1919 release. 250 pages with a reading group guide. Trade paperback.