In dim light, I pass daily by the new fiction shelves. The books on display, each cracked open to forty-five degrees, stand on their own. I used to stop here to browse on my way into work, my accounting job at the library system. All lights out except the nighttime emergency light, opening time still an hour away. The April illumination with added daylight is brighter than December, but not much. The windows face west with sheer curtains. Bright in the afternoon, twilit in the morning. I enjoy the unlit library. It relaxes me, reminds me of the era where wall sconces were candles, not electric lights. I rarely look at the books anymore. I stopped reading a four years ago.
Two weeks ago, walking into the library, a title caught my eye. It stopped me in my tracks. I didn’t read the title so much as it imprinted itself on my optic nerve, Some Strange Music Draws Me In. I was singing the song before I realized how I even knew the phrase. It’s a Patti Smith lyric from her song Dancing Barefoot, I’ve known it for decades. I grabbed the book and skimmed the dust jacket flap. Paraphrased as I absorbed it: A gender-confused teenage girl in the nineteen-eighties meets a transgender woman in a drug store and begins a journey of self-discovery. I flipped the book over, written by a man. What’s a middle-aged, bald guy know about queer teenage girls?
I put the book back on the shelf and climbed the staircase to my office. I can’t add any books to my pile. I’ve got that half-finished Christmas present and an unopened novel I need to read for work by mid-May. Plus, it’s not my normal sci-fi genre. Woke! I studiously avoid political literature. I get too much just reading the news.
I found myself singing Dancing Barefoot in my head all that day at work. Driving home, I took my playlist off shuffle and streamed through a few Patti Smith songs on my short commute. I went for a run with a mantra of Because the night belongs to lovers… (a song Smith collaborated on with Bruce Springsteen) on repeat in my brain. Later that evening, I confessed to Susan: “I saw a book today with a Patti Smith lyric as its title. I want to read it, but I know I never will. That really bums me out”
“Why don’t you give it a try? Maybe it will click with you. Maybe this book will get you back on track with reading.” I grabbed Some Strange Music the next morning. And yes, it clicked. It really clicked. A week later, nose in the book, again, Susan said “Wow, you’re really liking that book, huh?”
From Amazon: It’s the summer of 1984 in Swaffham, Massachusetts, when Mel (short for Melanie) meets Sylvia, a tough-as-nails trans woman whose shameless swagger inspires Mel’s dawning self-awareness. But Sylvia’s presence sparks fury among her neighbors and throws Mel into conflict with her mother and best friend. Decades later, in 2019, Max (formerly Mel) is on probation from his teaching job for, ironically, defying speech codes around trans identity. Back in Swaffham, he must navigate life as part of a fractured family and face his own role in the disasters of the past.
One might wonder why a straight, married, middle-aged (OK, oldish) guy like me identified with a novel about a teenage girl and a trans woman. Susan and I discussed this. The author, Griffin Hansbury, did a phenomenal job of capturing the otherness both characters feel. Do you know this term? Merriam-Webster defines otherness as ‘the quality or state of being different.’ I think I would alter that to ‘the quality or state of feeling different.’ It doesn’t matter if you are different, just how you perceive yourself.
I’m sure if I look hard enough, I can find some stats stating the percentage of the population that suffers from feelings of otherness. I can’t guess at that. People like me who feel ‘other’ tend to feel like they are the only one. First as a child and now as an adult, my otherness has stemmed from embarrassment over Tourette Syndrome, loneliness from social anxiety, and the agitation of OCD.
I’ve just spent three days reading messages from Patti Smith fans on a former rock singer’s Facebook page. The singer posted a thank you to Patti Smith for changing the direction of her life and included the drawing above created by artist Sheila Ann Journey. Woman after woman attested to how Smith’s music altered their approach to… everything. As a man and feeling left out, all I could offer was a description of my book and a recommendation to read it.
I fully understand the sentiment, though. Patti Smith is a voice for those of us who feel different from everyone else. A voice for the outsiders. Smith and other punk bands from the seventies helped an oddball like me craft an identity that gave me confidence. Griffin Hansbury gets it. Earlier in this essay, I called him a middle-aged man and wondered what he knows about teenage girls. A closer look at the back cover reveals that he used to be one. I suspect Some Strange Music is somewhat autobiographical.
It’s not surprising to me that Hansbury used Patti Smith as a catalyst for change in his book, that he used her lyric as its title. She’s an empowering force. She dares us to be ourselves. Like Mel and Sylvia in the book, like those women on Facebook, listening to Patti Smith sing helps me locate my place in the world. Helps me assess how I fit in. Reading Some Strange Music Draws Me In has done the same thing.
I never give books a five-star review—that should be reserved for those once-in-a-generation novels like the Grapes of Wrath and One Hundred Years of Solitude. But who knows, maybe Some Strange Music Draws Me will hold a spot like that in the hearts of readers in the future. It certainly does for me.
internal art art created by (and used with permission from) Sheila Ann Journey.
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Previously Published on jefftcann.com and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Wikimedia
