Songs Only You Know: A Memoir

by Sean Madigan Hoen

Described by Darin Strauss as “Nick Flynn meets Karl Ove Knausgård” and “a book of relentless compassion” Songs Only You Know—Sean Madigan Hoen’s debut—is an intense, sprawling memoir equal parts family tragedy and punk rock road trip.

Songs Only You Know begins in late ‘90s Detroit and spans a decade during which a family fights to hold together in the face of insurmountable odds. Sean’s father cycles from rehab to binge, his heartsick sister spirals into depression, and his mother works to spare what can be spared. Meanwhile, Sean seeks salvation in a community of eccentrics and outsiders, making music Spin magazine once referred to as “an art-core mindfuck.” But the closer Sean comes to realizing his musical dream, the further he drifts from his family and himself.

By turns heartbreaking and mordantly funny, Songs Only You Know is an artful, compassionate rendering of the chaos and misadventure of a young man’s life.

“Few books convey the fever-pitch intensity of youth with such vividness and so little glamorization, or as deeply explore the heartbreaking complexity of family — both those we're born into and the ones we choose.” —Rolling Stone Magazine

Genres: Memoir, Music, Nonfiction, Addiction, Biography, Audiobook

384 pages, Hardcover

First published October 22, 2013

Reviews

[Oriana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am doing some updating for allllll the books I was too lazy / busy to review in 2014. In case that matters to anyone.

Holy god I loved this book like whoa. This one I never reviewed not out of laziness, but out of some weird version of respect: I wanted to write a review as brilliant and beautiful as the book, to make sure that I moved at least a few people to go snatch it up immediately... But then I never could think how to begin, or what to say, and so I just let it lapse.

But really this is everything I could want in a memoir. Sean Hoen has a fucked up life that he renders with awful grace and beauty: his punk bands, his wild hopeless friends, his father's addiction, his sister's demons, his mother's strength. It's a book you can writhe around in, that lets you step into someone else's life and get changed by it. It's gorgeous and horrible and raw and twisted and flawed and perfect. It made me bawl and then call my parents to tell them how much I love them. So goddamn good.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up as a music fanatic with little knowledge of punk or hardcore, thinking I’d learn about music. I didn’t get that, although I do have the author’s albums queued up in Apple Music now. What I got was a thoughtful and perceptive look at a family and a time and place. The author has had a tough path through life, and so have the people around him. He made me care about these people, and although the ending felt a little abrupt (what happened to Lauren?), I’m glad to have read this. Now to see if I can stomach those Ionesco albums!

[Bonnie G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came to this book upon the recommendation of a friend, also a long-ago escapee of a childhood in Metro Detroit and one who, like me, soothed himself in his high school and college years by reminding himself that all he had to do was get out of Detroit and everything would be better. That sentiment, he told me, was the moral of this story. (This was our experience, if Detroit works for you I am happy for you.) I don't fully agree with my friend's synopsis, though that is certainly one of the messages if not a primary one. I do agree with him that this is a very good book.

In addition to the shared escape-from-the-D action, I also share another connection with the author. Like him, I was sunk deep into the Detroit music scene for years. I thought I might have some personal connection to this memoir as a result, but the author is a decade or more younger than I and also lived on the other side of the city. I know it is one metro, but honestly, Dearborn (his hometown) and Southfield/Bloomfield Hills (where my roots lie) might as well be Stockholm and La Paz. It was fun to hear street references I know from East Lansing ("Sparty on!"), I sympathized with him when he conveyed the endless nothingness of living in Detroit where sports, drink, and drugs constitute the only available social life, and I laughed when he told the reader the model of every crap car anyone drove -- only a Detroiter tells you that someone was driving a Ford Contour -- but my life and Hoen's looked very different in most respects. The one thing I understood in my cells was the damage done by the Midwestern mandate that one hide everything, push it down, don't let the neighbors know. There is a lot of that conveyed in this book, and that messaging remains the most corrosive influence on my life. So though there are many differences between my life and Hoen's I think most people would understand enough to empathize and find his life fascinating, heartrending, and instructive. His is a life that was defined by his own and others' addiction, mental illness, and both simple and complex grief. It can be hard to sit as a bystander as Hoen relates how he destroyed his relationships, his body, his mind, and the lives of the people who loved him, The fact of the book reassured me that there was a happyish ending, or at least it reassured me that he lived to tell the tale, but parts of this were agonizing. Also though there is so much love in this book, and as with the grief some of it is simple, but most very complex. Do not expect hearts and flowers, none of this is that sort of love, but it is moving and humbling to see love survive in the most hostile of conditions, and to see it survive when some of the beloved people do not.

As a last note, I want to say that the way this is written is very punk in the best way. When Hoen talks about his music and his band it is clear they had a punk rock aesthetic, but that aesthetic can be overtaken once someone starts learning to write in a formal atmosphere. Here there is a stripped-down immediacy and truthfulness and a DIY heart that is the essence of punk (not as a fashion, but as a philosophy.) It is raw and affecting and it is not afraid to be overwhelming or boring when that is what it needs to be. It felt to me like coming home.

[Andrea Mullarkey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book didn't even get the full run down at the publisher's preview session at Midwinter - just a mention in the list of other books they didn't have time to talk about and a two sentence description in the handout. But it's a punk rock drug memoir by a man I'd never heard of before and the cover looked so bleak in a stylish way. And because I have a soft spot for books that don't get their share of attention I added it to my pile. A quick read later I am glad I did. It's not a life-changing book, particularly not for me as someone who has little investment in music and is well-past my coming-of-age. But it was a well-written reflection on the ways damaged family and cultural influences can fuel an artist's journey. The anger and darkness of punk rock often feels like an expression of social rejection. But to hear Hoen tell his story, punk can also be a rejection of the damage experienced inside a musician's own small world. Hoen's is a suburban variety of rage, something artists like Ben Folds and Green Day specialize in. But in Songs Only You Know, Hoen brought it even closer in to focus on his family's story living in a development outside of Detroit where the story of the city's economic decline is as personal as the decline in the relationships between parents and children. Drug abuse, mental illness, dishonesty and disaffected youth are the agents of change in Hoen's family, and the catalyst for his own musical ambition. It's not an easy story, nor is it meant to be. But it was interesting and accessible and it is always nice to see a troubled young musician grow into a capable writer.

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard to put down, & definitely worth a second read.
I was in tears, Sean speaks honestly about his childhood, his days as an artist trying to escape the tragedy at home. "Anger is artistic currency" I started picking through the book to hear and feel the songs only you know just to get a more authentic feeling of what these moments were like for him. His moments on stage are inspiring, throwing the mic into the audience and just screaming at the top of his lungs as a display of his pain. Sean comes of as a daring rebel, but with a kind heart. As Sean says, "Music saves lives." and that is the message I took from his memoir, to keep going as long as you can breath, smell, and sing music, life has purpose.

[Derek Bright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Books about the Detroit music scene always intrigue me as I have friends and family there. This writer captures the gritty reality of that dying city, while at the same time, in beautifully constructed prose introduces us to a crazy hilarious drummer, a kooky stuttering best friend, a fragile, sorrowful little sister, a bully crack addict father and a mother who is kind and caring and doesn't deserve any of it. The author vents his rage through his savage music and must have released his pain through writing this story. I like his words. I am going to check out his music.He ended up going to Columbia and living in Brooklyn, so I wish him well and hope his life is in a better place now.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written, brave and honest memoir. The two parts of the story (music and family) are expertly woven together. Simultaneously heartbreaking and redemptive. A really exceptional book.

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

a solid memoir with some heavy and powerful themes, of loss, redemption, and finding a path in life through which you can happily walk. i will say i was happy as a reader not to have the typical one-upsmanship of rock memoirs; however, the gastrointestinal garrulousness was unnerving to this reader. My only major complaint (and the reason for 3 stars, although 3.5 is closer to how i feel about this book) is the tone. i struggled to find a unique authorial tone, rather it felt as if written in a universal tone of objectively writing about your subjective experience. there is a line in the book about trying to find a vocal style and how, the singer tried to blend hundreds of others vocal styles to create his own. and his self-perceived vocal weakness is the main issue with the book. that said, it takes a lot of time energy, reading, writing and re-writing just to sound professional. yet the technical proficiency shows a lack of authorial style (i.e. nabokov, borges, dfw, etc). and while it's kinda unfair to compare with the greatest 20th cent. writers, i feel like the emotional perspicacity, and humanity, and willingness to dive in the murky pool of the past and wrestle with embarrassing, needy, and foreign versions of yourself, is the correct foundation upon which can be built, the house of style. and when this author arrives there, we may have a literary mansion: the cement's been poured.

[Sean · Rating 3 out of 5]

approached this as a fan of thoughts of ionesco, and the book is kind of oversold on hoen's time in that band. this isn't really a "punk book". road stories are few and far between and it is far more of a personal story (however one that definitely proves that TOI was music made by truly unhinged people). my main problem is that his relationship issues and poor decision making with the women in his life wear thin at times, but in fairness they do contribute to the larger picture of his chaotic lifestyle and it seems odd to fault an author for documenting his youth. certainly not an upbeat read (some passages made me physically flinch), but an interesting look at one person's tragic upbringing and the kind of extreme personalities subculture appeals to.

[Kevin Kazokas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sean Madigan Hoen tells a story of disintegrating family, wild adventure and tragic excesses in "Songs Only You Know: A Memoir." Told using a fictional-like narrative, Hoen shares inside focus into the travails, degeneracy and impoverished hopes that drove his fledging industrial punk bands, using their home base of suburban Detroit as a haunting backdrop of despair.

Make no mistake, though, this does not read like the endlessly tiring rock band memoir. Hoen flavors and texturizes his odyssey, keeping the reader compelled by centering on the slow insidious destruction of his once cookie-cutter suburban home life. The reader learns of Hoen's father's backslide into a surprising world of addiction, which destroyed his parents' marriage and tore at the fabric of a once-comforting, secure home environment. Hoen also shares the tragic suicide loss of his sister, inserting himself mentally into the torturous slow-burn chasm that exists between self-guilt and coping. Hoen also outlays his mother's strength and the influencing pillar of steadiness she provided to his turbulent life.

This is all brought together in a powerful, authentic narrative, that conveys the harshness and bleak hope that colored the edges of many young lives in the 1990s. Nevertheless, Hoen could have better efforted to tie the disparate struggles of his family with the full impact on his life outside of the home environment. The reader can obviously see his propensity to run away from his problems -- setting out on nationwide, ragtag punk tours and indulging in alcohol and drugs to numb the emotional pain.

Despite this, the fragmentations of Hoen's life, presented as almost two distinct worlds, prevent a seamless real-life analysis. Clearly, Hoen was not the only one in this work to compartmentalize. His father went from the model of stoicism to a silently broken and shamed man, seeking unspoken understanding among his children. His sister, meanwhile, could not fully open her heart to help and disclosure regarding her own personal strife. His mother always seemed to hold back enough love to stay strong and keep some on reserve for when things would hit bottom again. Yet her difficulty in confronting problems over time eroded her strength.

The fragmented construct of Hoen's personal life drove his spiral into drugs, alcohol and escapism. But the hourglass of time offers room for perspective and growth. Had Hoen presented these sealed aspects using a more unified theme, the narrative hook would have been even stronger.

As constructed, this book is a solid three stars, though hanging with it in the beginning through the myriad road-trip punk descriptions and subtle initial indications of family unraveling can be tedious. The narrative builds with each tragedy endured; nevertheless this book could have been a solid five-star rating if Hoen had offered more self-examination.

[Amy Bergethon · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars, but I always feel bad rating a memoir for entertainment value when it is someone’s reality. The rating purely stems from how the book made me feel, I think. My daughter happened to notice it was about a guy who grew up in the Detroit area around the same time I did and he was really into music (as I am) so she picked it up for me — I agreed it seemed totally up my alley. However, it was — by strange coincidence — the third book I read in a row in which suicide features prominently, and this one was the most depressing. Furthermore, the aforementioned music and geographical area were about where the similarities ended and where the drugs, drinking, depression, and various crusty bloody items began. Again, I don’t want to judge someone’s truth — and I’ve read plenty about rock debauchery — but this book, with its eye on the author’s family all trapped in their own versions of crumbling mental devastation, kind of exhausted me. I’m sure part of it is due to one of the primary reasons I read — to clear my mind of daily stress before bed. This one tucked me in with more worries than I started with each night.

While I am thankful the author lived to tell the tale, the ending felt hurried and somewhat unclear. I didn’t really understand why anything suddenly changed in his mind or how it was resolved; that’s the part I wanted to hear more about.

Best wishes to the author, but I am intentionally looking for some humor in my next read. I missed that quality in this book.

[Cranky · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought the book was very well-written, and I admired the author’s power of description and his way of capturing the tumult of family strife, grief, and loss. I gave it high marks for that—it was readable and thought-provoking.

I felt it ended at a weird place—where was all this leading? Where did it get him? I know from his biography that the author went on to have a life much less despairing than the events of this book might lead you to expect, but I got no real sense of how that unfolded. At the end of the book, he leaves for a different city, and I thought, Aha, here we go, here’s where we see he steps into the next phase of his life. But it sounded like he repeated the same cycles of behavior for some time afterward.

The other thing that struck me is that I didn’t get much sense of music from this book. His band stories were either about approaching practice or performance with violent abandon, or about the shifting dynamic between the members. But aspects like writing songs and what they may have meant, connecting to the music or to the audience— there was much less of that than I would’ve expected from an author whose main activity at the time of the book was making & performing music. It seemed like being in the band gave him an outlet to exorcise some of his demons, but I was left without much understanding of or connection to his experience as a musician.

[Sandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

While it was well written and an interesting read, the fact that the author and his friends were a bunch of gross assholes most of the time, and that even years later he seemed to lack self-awareness about it really put me off. Those were the least interesting parts of the book, really cringey bullshit trying to be edgy that is only forgivable behaviour if committed by an actual child not adults. He’s just a really unlikable narrator, good for him that he appears to have changed, but he still comes across as utterly lacking self-awareness, even at this point.

Spoiler alert: The parts with breaking the wine bottles in the store and the gravestones especially pissed me off, and the lack of remorse about that kind of behaviour (we lived for moments like that, he said). As an avid genealogist, fuck you thinking you are somehow going to honour someone else’s ancestors more than they would by stealing their gravestones and putting them in your backyard, leaving their graves unmarked. How fucking disrespectful, I’m sure you wouldn’t like it if someone did the same with your sister and dad’s headstones, even if you were long dead too.

[Maashu · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic memoir of life in the suburban hell town I grew up in, from someone who experienced actual hell. The author was able to successfully sublimate the fear, anger, hurt, betrayal, and frustration he experienced growing up in metro Detroit into music, which has always carried me away as well. His writing style makes you feel like you're not just reading it, but living what's happening - every gig, every dysfunctional family interaction, every regret.

[Norman Weatherly · Rating 5 out of 5]

For anyone who has ever been in a band, or wished they had been or dreamed they were. For those who grew up on a diet of The Sex Pistols, The Clash, and the Dead Kennedy's. For all the metal heads and screamo fans. Oh forget the flowery words, it's just a damn good book.

[Christina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I give it a generous 5 star in part because I know the time and place and these sort of characters so well. But it's genuinely well written, totally evocative, humble but brave. I love that despite all the misery and betrayal, it's ultimately about love and forgiveness of others and self.

[meredith Mangerson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could not put this down!!!

[Aidan Hunt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully haunting and hauntingly beautiful. Sean doesn’t pull any punches, and each jab alternates between landing on himself and the reader’s heart.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 great book

[Kurt Ames-Sallant · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really nice. Kind of like a protracted Jesus’ Son meets Pat Conroy family trauma yet there’s a punk rock thread through it as well that’s treated with a rare literacy. A really sad book that somehow feels comforting but also hilarious at times.

[Craven · Rating 5 out of 5]

REVIEW ORIGINALLY RUN IN RAZORCAKE #81:

Songs Only You Know opens with a young man walking down the dark streets of his suburban neighborhood with a baseball bat. He takes a few wild swings, takes out a mailbox, and keeps moving. He doesn’t have a plan other than some vague hopes that his father will drive back and catch him in his headlights. The whole time songs play in his head, as yet, unwritten and unriffed. He’s eighteen and his father, once his hero, has fallen deep into crack addiction. He has also stolen his daughter’s car, disappearing for days. More than any young, nihilistic urge for release, he wants his father to see him—shirtless, maniacal, and on a rampage—to see his hurt, to express the anger at the pain his father’s habit has caused his family. His dad doesn’t return at all that night and his anger remains, deep and repressed.

The mark of a good writer or artist is what they can do with damage. How they reflect on it. How they calibrate the damage done to them by others, the damage they’ve done to others and the damage they’ve done to themselves. The subtle way they express how it lives in the body, remains in the back of the mind to be smoothed over with time or, perhaps, re-triggered. Many writers are unable to express this damage in a way that hits, in way that moves the reader. Their ego is too deeply entrenched. Chips remain on shoulders. Reparations are whined for and grudges kept. Sean rises above this when he tells his story.

At home, his family is disintegrating. His father’s crack habit leaves everything in ruin: his parent’s marriage, the family’s stability, his body and mind. His sister falls into a catatonic depression and tries to take her life, a secret Sean promises to keep. His release is playing in a band notorious in Detroit for trashing venues, cutting themselves with knives, and leaving in their wake a mess of blood, plaster, and broken glass. More importantly, it’s an unbound, raw, and cathartic expression of alienation and pain for Sean.

Offstage, he and his batshit crazy friends desperately seek oblivion through drugs, liquor, and violence. He’s shitty to women who love him, unavailable when his sister desperately needs him, and taxes his mother who’s suffered far more than enough. This is where his gift of nuance comes in. During the most intense scenes of bloody knuckles and drug binges, self-destruction, and crime, through walls of guitar feedback and amplified screaming, these passages become serene and almost quiet in the telling. In that moment, a scream into a mic, a hanging snip of dialogue, a movement of the body expresses perfectly the repression and the release, the fear and the aggression, the masculinity and vulnerability and the constant confusion of a desperate young man who’s been dealt a shitty hand. It doesn’t hit hard. It hits deep.

[Konrad · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a beautiful misery to have wallowed and luxuriated in.
One that makes me wish I was screwed up, so it could save me.

I know the people in this story, been friends with them, hated them, loved them. It's a Thanksgiving visit with the ghosts of your past that you both dread and need.

It informs my vision of Detroit, a place I've never been to and probably never will, but has been built upon a mish-mash media mythology:Justice League Detroit, RoboCop, the Crow, Beverly Hills Cop, and the White Stripes bio Fell In Love With A Band. I feel I can almost smell the place.

It's a storm that lasts through the whole book, a storm that's so hard and long that it becomes normal, and the few moments the sun breaks through become weird and scary in turn. A pitch black storm in sheets and torrents within which an occasional strike of a transformer brings a millisecond of oohs and ahs and focused clarity before plunging back to black with the afterimage burned into your brain, leaving you to examine it while still careening forward.

It's a tornado on an otherwise clear day, full of terror and noise and pain, that suddenly hits a paint store, creating a furiously beautiful bouquet of destruction that you have no way to take a picture of and you know no-one will believe the pristine chaos you have just witnessed.

Yeah. This book is kind of like that.

[S · Rating 3 out of 5]

What Hoen uncovers here is a raw, emotional beat. A soundtrack to the meat of his life that one would think flavours how he comes at his music. A force of sadness, brutal honesty, and life as it happens.

There's a sense of desolation in the many drives and mentions of Dearborn, Michigan. A lonely world and a lonely thrust. Writing with a terse and unapologetic tone, it's at times meandering and a little into the wallowing stillness that exists when you're circling a drain. Then again, for all the darkness that it consumes, it at least knows how to shed light on the journey.

And it's that journey, from one point of despair to another, that really shows up in his voice. A layered, objective take and understanding of what's going on, while at the time not understanding how, if any of it, would make sense in the end.

The opening lines show off a rage and anger that simmer as the chapters unfold. There, just under the surface, knowingly waiting to colour the situation, but one that gets to unleash its fury in the sets Hoen and his various bands throttle.

There's no celebration, no playing victim, just a frank awareness of the fragile world that exists when you cross music, drugs and a family that falls one by one.

(The publisher provided a review copy.)
_

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had no idea who Sean Madigan Hoen is, and even when I would Google his bands after every tour he mentioned on paper, I found that it wasn't his brief graze with fame that made him uninteresting (one of his bands opened for TV on the Radio). He's a good writer, no doubt, and I'm swayed by some of the words that he uses to talk about his late teenage years/early adulthood years being in the suburbs of Chicago. However, there's no pulling thread that ties in this grand image of Hoen and the struggles of a father hung on cocaine and a sister who has had enough of life. Songs Only You Know ended up being the diary that Hoen had meant to start when he was 13 years old with no intention of publication.

[Melis · Rating 4 out of 5]

"At your worst moments you are forgiven by those who see all the way into you, clean through your fears, to the thing you truly are, what you could or couldn't be"

An honest, at times heart breaking, account of what it's like to become lost to yourself and to those you love and bearing the loss of those loved ones before you find your way back to them. The way music, and drugs, and relationships can be used to either aid you through these times or further lead to your destruction.

"A song could tear a while through the middle of the day, could widen the road as it ascended toward the sunlight"

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sean Madigan Hoen's memoir, Songs Only You Know, is a sad story. As a young man he discovered that his father was hiding an addiction to crack cocaine, and it caused profound damage to his family. This book is about the period of his life that was most seriously affected by his father's addiction, his sister's depression, and his own struggles with substance abuse while he was trying to become a successful punk rocker. His mother is the hero of the book.

Selected as one of twenty Michigan Notable Books in 2015, I had the privilege to meet Sean when he came to speak at our library. A humble, intelligent, and sensitive writer, I look forward to reading his fiction in the future.

[John Paul Floyd]

I picked this one based on a recomendation after reading Marky Ramones autobiography. In midst of recovery myself, it has been helpful to hear others stories of past pains and tribulations. Hoens memoir is more about his struggles with lifes surprises and temptations than about a specific band. for that reason, I found i got a lot more out of it than someone wanting to learn about the bands he was in. Ive never heard his music nor do i care much too. His story is told in a personal and what seems to be an honest way and keep me reading page after page. I really found it both entertaining and insightful.

[Chanda2426 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I debated whether to give Songs Only You Know by Sean Madigan Hoen 3 or 4 stars. I really enjoyed the prose, the depth the narrator delves to discover who he is. Hoen's memoir is a hard pill to swallow with many dark alleys and heart-wrenching stories. But he crafts this book in such a way to make it stand on it's own as a personal story of triumph in the face of unfortunate hurdles. The writing, in and of itself, carried this memoir and bumped my rating from a 3.5 to a 4. Hoen is a refreshing, new voice and separates himself in this candid, honest work.

[Joey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a tour de force of writing, like James Frey with better punctuation. I had never heard of Sean Hoen or the bands he was in before reading this book. Sometimes it was a thrill ride to live vicariously through him, but if you are triggered by drug use or suicide this may not be the book for you. For me it was comforting to find a family whose trail of drugs, death and dysfunction so closely mirrored that of my own family. This is a book for those of us who grew up not in the Brady family but the Manson family, Marilyn or Charles, you choose.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite the easy sell of a story rooted in Michigan hardcore, family challenges, and destruction via rebellion from conventional life trajectories (audience = me), there is definitely some universal pain, loss, and honesty here. And most importantly, there are periods where Hoen truly sounds like a piece of shit—thus making it a coarse, (mostly) unglorified account of the mess of youth. I'm also fully content that my 18 year old self's poor decisions and lack of grace only went a fraction of the distance that Hoen's did.

And finally, Thoughts of Ionesco was bad ass.