Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir

Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir (2019) by American author Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman tracks her life from her origins in West Virginia and her rural, complicated adolescence through her college life in New York. She comments candidly on her struggles with poverty and mental illness, making harmful decisions and stumbling into career pitfalls in desperation to make ends meet. She frames much of her struggle in terms of society’s blind and relentless pursuit of economic success, or “The Money,” showing that the ideal rings hollow. Nevertheless, Hindman shows that she learned to express her humanity and creativity along this journey common to many Americans.

Hindman begins her memoir back in Appalachia, where she spent her first 18 years of life. Using the second person, she distances herself from her own narrative, as if she is observing it herself in real time. Her father was a family physician, her mother a social worker. Growing up in rural West Virginia was a culturally remote, but vibrant experience: Hindman learned to play and love the violin, traveling two hours away across the mountains each week to her teacher’s studio. She also performed well academically. In high school, she dated a Jewish classmate who was biracial and had family roots in New York. Her boyfriend’s liberal and cosmopolitan outlook on the world inspired her to move to New York herself after graduating.

Accepted into Columbia, Hindman moved to New York City. She found the pace of life to be overwhelming at first and could barely scrounge up enough money to afford food and rent. Yet, having moved to New York knowing that her parents could not pay for her to live there, she was somewhat prepared for the financial struggle. Her resourcefulness brought her into contact with some interesting figures. At Columbia, she was acutely aware of the huge wealth disparity in her classmates’ backgrounds, though it was a taboo topic. She notes that classmates and professors acted as if they had never thought about The Money’s scarcity before; indeed, many really had not. Hindman ended up paying her way through college by donating her eggs after finding an ad in a newspaper. The job required her to regularly inject herself with hormones, leaving bruises all over her body. Her first-year roommate, Ariel, looked down on her with disgust and fear, failing to appreciate her desperation.



Toward the end of her first year at Columbia, Hindman answered another ad for a high-paying job. The post led her to a man she only refers to in the text as “Composer.” She “played" violin in the Composer’s orchestra, selling out concerts numbering in the thousands. Behind the scenes, the Composer was merely pressing “play” on a cheap, portable CD player that the Composer bought from a Wal-Mart. This fraudulent scheme continued for years.

Hindman left for an interim to study abroad in Cairo. She was in Egypt during the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center; the attack inspired her to study Arabic and declare a major in Middle Eastern studies. However, after graduating, she was unable to find a job in the field. She worked several odd jobs, then was re-hired by the Composer to go on a national tour. The national limelight, combined with the fraudulent line of work and her feelings of fragility and desperation, caused Hindman to spiral into mental illness. Eventually, she found help with a psychotherapist—an event in her life that she credits as one of the most transformative. At the end of the memoir, Hindman speaks to herself in retrospect. She tells the younger Hindman that her reckless drive to succeed and garner the praise of superiors, no matter how immoral or otherwise unworthy they were, caused most of her problems. Even having gained this insight, she contends that her mistakes were extremely valuable and helped define her idiosyncratic sense of humor and positive attitude.