Sound: A Memoir of Hearing Lost and Found
By Bella Bathurst
Profile Books, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-77164-382-5
Before I get into this review, let me note that I read this book on the Libby app. Page numbers on the app do not reflect page numbers in print editions so I did not include the digital page numbers for quotes.
Sound is a memoir written by a woman living in the UK who lost her hearing for 12 years. When someone loses their hearing, they pretty much think it’s a permanent loss. However, in Bella’s case, this did not happen. She did get her hearing back, after twelve years of severe hearing loss. I chose to read this book out of curiosity. I wanted to know her story, her experience being deaf, and just how she got her hearing back. In reading the whole book, I was not disappointed. However, there are some parts of the book which I felt the need to comment on, both as a person who is deaf and as a reader.
The book begins with an adventure story: She accompanied friends to go sailing. This particular incident takes place after she has lost her hearing and she is wearing hearing aids. As someone who has once A: Been on a boat and B: Used to wear hearing aids, I approached the reading of this particular chapter with a bit of concern. If you’re going to go sailing, chances are pretty good you may get hit by a random wave of water or water may splash over the side of the boat and right onto any person in its path. Hearing aids and water DO NOT go together, at all. If you get your hearing aid wet, it can cause damage. Still, I read this particular chapter with interest to see what happened. Naturally, disaster struck, but oh what a story it was!
Sadly, though, this experience was a grim reminder to the author of just how her hearing loss affected the status quo of her life. She was independent, carefree and ready to take on any challenge. She looked fear in the eye and winked back. But losing her hearing proved to derail all of her gust for life and adventure.
The book shares how she adapts to this unexpected turn of events in her life. One minute, she is a 28-year-old enjoying a ski trip with friends. The next, she experiences difficulty hearing. She then gets the sad news that she is going deaf.
Before total deafness sets in, she shares how she tried to enjoy as much of life as possible, though as her hearing loss set in, so, too, did her depression. She finds relief in studying the lives of other people who have gone deaf (notably Beethoven) as well as studying gradual hearing loss in general. Her research on Beethoven is intriguing. Now I want to read about him.
Apparently, the term for her condition is "pseudohypacusis.” I never knew there was a term for nonorganic hearing loss! It was good to learn this term and, at first, I thought this applied to my own situation. However, since I lost my hearing due to meningitis, mine is called “sensorineural deafness.” This kind of deafness is, I feel, important to include when talking about different ways a person can become deaf. Her research prompts her to discuss how people lost their hearing in an unnatural way – such as with work-related deafness (military, aviation, construction, rock music), but there is no mention of losing hearing from an illness, as in my case. This was very disappointing.
She seems to perceive a majority of Deaf individuals as leading lives of seclusion because of their deafness. In the past, this was true, because deaf people were NOT the majority, deafness was seen as a sign of mental deterioration or impairment, and we did not have many accommodations for the deaf then as we do now (interpreters, for example). Plus, not many people were sensitive to the communication needs of the deaf. Today, it is always a joy to come across people who know some sign language or who can, at the very minimum, use fingerspelling to spell out words. In the past, however, coming across such a person while out and about was rare.
Of the Deaf individuals she communicates with in this book, one of them shares with her his own experience in going to bars with his friends, who are also deaf. He shared how their use of sign language was seen as an act of aggression and many pub owners called police on them, thinking these guys were going to cause problems. I recall one story I read some time ago in which a Deaf man was communicating with another person in sign language and he was confronted by police because the police thought this guy was flashing gang signs.
There are many passages in this book which really made me think. There were also many passages which I could relate to. Here is one of them: "If you're deaf, you're focused outwards, registering visually all the information which might otherwise come to you aurally – announcements, warnings, communication from those you're with. Those who can hear are accustomed to using their ears as eyes in the back of their heads, so if they're walking through an airport and a luggage cart comes beeping up behind them then they move out of the way without needing to turn around to verify the cart's existence. Hearing has given them a three-dimensional comprehending. But those who are deaf can only be aware of that cart because they've seen it. One sense must do the work of two." The Deaf hear with their eyes since we cannot hear with our ears. For those individuals who are not deaf and blind, myself among them, we rely on our eyes to help us be aware of our surroundings. I once spilled a bottle of pills on my way through a hallway. Despite the wooden floor I walked on, I did not know I spilled these pills until I looked down at an empty pill bottle and turned around to see a nice little trail of pills along the hallway. We can’t be aware of a car coming up behind us because we can’t hear or feel it, but if we see it, we know that a car is coming up behind us and we need to get out of the way.
In addition to using our eyes to help us “hear” things around us, we also rely on vibrations. If a heavy object drops on a wooden floor, we feel that something fell on the floor. Whenever I get home from an outing and I’m unlocking the front door, I know that the dog is barking at the door because I can feel the sound vibrations. I can feel that the washing machine is running just by placing my hand on it and that music is playing just from feeling the sound vibrations.
Her reflections on sounds and conversations she could easily hear pre-deafness made me think about my own experiences. I still remember things that were said by various people in my past before I lost my hearing at age 13. As a kid, I would listen to music as I fell asleep, and I still remember the song “I Can’t Stop Loving You” that Michael Jackson sang as I drifted off to sleep.
This book captures Bathurst’s experience of living with deafness for 12 years. She has a surgery called a stapedectomy that eventually helps her brain to just "right itself." As she writes, "Science had given me back my hearing." And the best part is that it's not "artificial hearing" like one gets via a hearing aid, but REAL hearing. The kind that is natural. It's amazing and wonderful that she got that sense of natural hearing back.
I really enjoyed reading this book. I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in reading about what it’s like to cope with being late-deafened and different takes on the experience of living with deafness.
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