Plunges listeners into the Detroit hardcore punk scene with eighteen-year-old Sean and spans a dark decade during which his father succumbs to crack addiction, his younger sister spirals into a fatal depression, and his sense of home crumbles. Sean's prose whips from mordantly funny to searingly honest while offering an unflinching look at a family in crisis, low-rent music subculture, and the hard-earned identity of its author.
"Sean Madigan Hoen is not merely an immensely gifted writer but also a seeker-of redemption, of clarity, of hard family history. There are moments of Songs Only You Know that seem almost too painful to bear-but only almost. What carries the reader through is both the naked beauty of the prose and the deep human certainty that it is always better to face the truth than to flinch away from it. No fl
Elizabeth Gilbert, #1 New York Times bestselling author
"I don't know anyone who has described that terrible yearning for ecstasy and immolation through music as lucidly as Sean Madigan Hoen in Songs Only You Know. Only a thorough initiate of the scene who also had some genius with language could summon the demotic yet electric voice for the job. If there is ruefulness, now, for the way he treated his body, his girlfriends, and his family, he wisely re
Jaimy Gordon, National Book Award–winning author
