Songs Only You Know ― A Memoir

Songs Only You Know: A Memoir plunges the reader 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 salvation is music, and the many eccentrics and outsiders he befriends as frontman of a band once referred to by Spin Magazine as "an art-core mindfuck." 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. A story of young mahood that deserves a place alongside Tobias Wolff’s In Pharaoh’s Army and Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Songs Only You Know is a beautiful, devastating exploration of family, friends, and one young man's musical dream. It marks the arrival of a fiercely original literary voice.

Sean Madigan Hoen was raised in Dearborn, Michigan and spent his young adulthood touring and recording in several Detroit-based music groups. His fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including BOMB Magazine, where he was awarded the 2011 Fiction Award. He has taught creative writing at Columbia University and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. Songs Only You Know: A Memoir is his first book.