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A Memoir
by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman
Book Reviewed by: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?
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.
True Life
New York City, Spring 2004
Your internship ends at the company that is not the New York Times. You are still hoping to find a permanent job or at least a paid internship that has something to do with the Middle East or the two bloody wars your country is in the process of losing. But you cannot find anything. So you sign the contract to go on the God Bless America Tour, thinking that, among other things, the tour will be a way for you to earn enough money to ship yourself off to Baghdad or Beirut or Jerusalem or Cairo to work as a freelance reporter.
A few months before the tour starts, a college friend calls you out of the blue to offer you a well- paid temporary research job at MTV. You don't even need to interview, you just show up. For the first time since you moved to New York, you experience what it's like to be given a job that you aren't even remotely qualified for, because you know the right person, because you went to the right college. You know nothing about ...
Reading this book, I felt I was in the hands of someone wise, honest and very real (Joan R). Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman might not be a great violinist, but she's a very entertaining writer. Her humor engaged me from the start (Nanette C). This book was very well written, with deep insights into growing up a self-avowed "average" person who thought she could work herself into being gifted (Judy K)...continued
Full Review
(676 words)
(Reviewed by First Impressions Reviewers).
Angela Palm, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize for Riverine
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. Caitlin Doughty, bestselling author of From Here to Eternity and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Sounds Like Titanic would be unbelievable as a novel, but as a memoir it is deliciously bizarre and utterly American. It's a Coen Brothers movie come to life--Ruby Tuesday, QVC, and one woman working for years as a fake violinist for classical music's version of Thomas Kinkade. I couldn't put it down. Justin St. Germain, author of Son of a Gun
An evocative portrait of America's literal and figurative landscapes, an incisive look at class and gender, and an examination of what authenticity means. Tom Bissell, author of Apostle and coauthor of The Disaster Artist
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.
In Sounds Like Titanic, author Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman recalls the extreme lengths she went to in order to fund her education, including selling her eggs and touring the country with a crooked classical music composer. The price of tuition for a 4-year private college in the United States was, on average, $34,740 for the 2017-2018 school year. For the same year, public universities charged an average of $9,970/year for state residents and $25,620 for out-of-state students. Room and board can easily add an additional $10,000+ per year. Many college students take out loans to pay for tuition; roughly 70% of college graduates leave school in debt and the average sum of this debt is $28,446, meaning they graduate from college and begin ...
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