Why I write

In 1997, I was on track to become a professional and potentially world-class clarinetist.

In 1998, those plans were crushed by a persistent ringing in my ears. Tinnitus stopped my music career, but it couldn’t stop my creativity.

I turned to reading and writing as a way to make sense of what I’d lost and how I felt about my life. The hours I used to spend in a practice room I now spent with a book or a journal. I was sixteen when my tinnitus became chronic and I started reading and writing seriously. But over the years I realized I’d been a reader and writer from an even younger age. On a family trip at seven, I kept a travel diary. Later, in high school and college, I wrote poetry, then plays—for the stage, the screen, the radio—until, finally, I thought, I settled into fiction. Along the way, I wrote academic essays, book reviews, and a lot of marketing content, but I never imagined myself finding a home in the nonfiction world.

In 2018, I met an editor who asked if I had any true stories about music. We talked for ten minutes, tops. But it sparked something. I did have a true story about music—and it was the story I most needed to tell. When I began writing my first memoir, I found a voice that seemed to touch people in the way I’d once touched them with the sound of my clarinet.

I can’t fully explain why this voice came to me through memoir. But as a reader, I’m so excited by the honesty and vulnerability I feel in the excellent memoirists thinking about and doing the hard work of mapping memory to emotion to identity. They are standing on the live edge of what’s possible in human relationships. I want to stand with them.

Why I write

In 1998, those plans were crushed by a persistent ringing in my ears. Tinnitus stopped my music career, but it couldn’t stop my creativity.

I turned to reading and writing as a way to make sense of what I’d lost and how I felt about my life. The hours I used to spend in a practice room I now spent with a book or a journal. I was sixteen when my tinnitus became chronic and I started reading and writing seriously. But over the years I realized I’d been a reader and writer from an even younger age. On a family trip at seven, I kept a travel diary. Later, in high school and college, I wrote poetry, then plays—for the stage, the screen, the radio—until, finally, I thought, I settled into fiction. Along the way, I wrote academic essays, book reviews, and a lot of marketing content, but I never imagined myself finding a home in the nonfiction world.

In 2018, I met an editor who asked if I had any true stories about music. We talked for ten minutes, tops. But it sparked something. I did have a true story about music—and it was the story I most needed to tell. When I began writing my first memoir, I found a voice that seemed to touch people in the way I’d once touched them with the sound of my clarinet.

I can’t fully explain why this voice came to me through memoir. But as a reader, I’m so excited by the honesty and vulnerability I feel in the excellent memoirists thinking about and doing the hard work of mapping memory to emotion to identity. They are standing on the live edge of what’s possible in human relationships. I want to stand with them.