A memoir with bite ... profiles the challenges of the 99 percent with humor, sarcasm, and wit ... shows us what it takes to become a fully realized adult — or at least this fully realized adult ... Hindman doesn't shrink from the big, systemic picture, but her fascinating personal story, with its unexpected twists, puts the memorable into this memoir.
But Sounds Like Titanic at times casts Hindman too much as a millennial Everywoman. The weakest parts of the book are when she tries to wring meaning from absurdity, painting her generation or her country with wide strokes. The details she brings out from her gigs across America often fall back on unkind clichés ... The writer dresses up the events in her life with shifts in point of view, lyrical fragments, nonlinear storytelling, parodies, rhapsodies and a brocade of description. Hindman’s stylistic experimentation gives her book an alluring energy but hobbles her narrative. I longed to see how one event led to another in her life, and how the troubles of earlier scenes resonated in later ones. Instead we travel from topic to topic in discrete, sardonic vignettes that culminate in pithy but unsatisfying kickers...
Sounds Like Titanic, a debut memoir by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, is the definition of an overdeliver ... With an idea that compelling, the rest of the book really didn’t have to be better than passable. But then Hindman ups her game ... And on top of her ability to mine unexpected resonances from a story, she writes marvelously lucid prose. That her voice is strong enough to pull off the impossible horror that is lengthy chapters written in the second person is just icing on the cake ... Sounds Like Titanic... is never bland. It’s a rich, powerful book that is never content to rely on the wackiness of its premise but instead keeps digging. It does the hard analytical work that shows not just that a weird fake music tour happened for a period of years but why it might have happened, and what its audience got from it.
Hindman, who now teaches writing, plants her addictive, confessional, and often-funny memoir in a fertile discussion of authenticity and Americanness in the aftermath of 9/11. The performances ultimately took a serious toll, but readers will note Hindman’s refusal to cast anyone as plain monster or hapless victim, and be struck by her grasp of the many ironies of her situation—chiefly, that it was easier to find work as a fake musician than as a real war reporter, which is what she most wanted to be after graduating from Columbia. Far-reaching, insightful, and unputdownable.
[Hindman's] memoir is original, funny, and deeply moving. It’s also perplexing. What caused Hindman, a young woman with obvious drive and intelligence, to settle for this farce of a career? ... Hindman offers a harrowing account of a young woman whose ambition slowly gives way to desperation ... Hindman is never fully forthcoming about what attracted her to the work, or what allowed her, finally, to choose a new path. Throughout the book, she makes penetrating observations about the people around her — angst-ridden high school girls, smug college students, even her colleagues in the ensemble. And she frequently writes of her young self with raw, searing honesty — even when, as shown from the quotations above, she persistently couches her self-analysis in the second person. Yet her small, but critical, omissions weaken what is otherwise a brave and captivating memoir.
As the author connects the dots among American gullibility over fake weapons of mass destruction, chain restaurants offering faux authenticity, and her own psychological breakdown, the emotional honesty of her narrative permits no doubt ... Like the most discerning members of the audiences for whom Hindman played, readers may be left wondering what’s really real—and how it matters. A tricky, unnerving, consistently fascinating memoir.
