Coming May 2027
It was the summer of 2014, and I was in despair.
Unable to forgive herself for a betrayal that nearly shattered her marriage, Amy Hassinger enrolls in a jazz combo class at her local community music school. What begins as an impulse to rekindle a college-era love for jazz opens into a long-term creative practice—one that helps her navigate a pervasive sense of failure, guilt, and shame. Combined with a sudden illness that threatens her life, as well as the broader upheavals of our time—ecological precarity, omnipresent anxiety, and the disorientation of living in an age of constant crisis—Hassinger must learn to not only accept herself as she is but rethink her ideas of "self" altogether.
Written in lyric fragments, Apocalypse in Blue braids personal narrative with philosophical and spiritual insight to trace how improvisation transforms into a liberating practice for Hassinger. Interwoven throughout is an inquiry into the cultural history of jazz and the author's awakening to the brutal realities of American anti-Black racism—a history inseparable from the music that sustains her. In passages resonating with the sounds of Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Keith Jarrett, and Cassandra Wilson, Hassinger demonstrates not only the aesthetic brilliance of the artists she loves but also their music's embodied philosophy of originality, playfulness, and resilience.
By modeling an improviser's stance toward uncertainty, Apocalypse in Blue offers a searching, resonant meditation on how one might move through fear and despair toward self-acceptance, presence, and—occasionally—joy.
Wise and innovative. A book expansive in feeling, form, and knowledge—one that meditates, lingers, questions. Amy Hassinger reveals, in her gorgeous prose, the mystery and magic of improvisation and how it can guide not just music, but a life. Working with climate change, pain, and sickness, as well as the dissolution of selves in relationships, Hassinger shows the power—pedagogical, destructive—of both despair and desire, and what it means to live an authentic life.
~Corey Van Landingham, Guggenheim Fellow, author of Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens and Reader, I
A breathtaking tapestry of creative ambition, inquiry, and improvisation. Apocalypse in Blue moves deftly between longing (creative, erotic) and despair (personal, climate) to interrogate questions of utmost urgency. How does a person have faith in apocalypse? What is authentic? What is infinite? With sincerity and rigor, Hassinger reflects on the ordinary/extraordinary experiences of partnership, motherhood, friendship, grief, art, illness, and repair. Along the way, she discovers magic and fortitude in jazz singing, language, and philosophy. This is a book of awesome power and tenderness—a writer in peak form—tiding again and again toward love.
~Jessica Hendry Nelson, author of Joy Rides Through the Tunnel of Grief: A Memoir, winner of the AWP Sue William Silverman Creative Nonfiction Prize
A love letter to Kierkegaard and to jazz, the lyricism and spare-nothing honesty of Hassinger's new memoir will leave readers breathless: difficult choices, a wounded marriage, and always the unexpected. Risky, vivid, and compelling, Apocalypse in Blue is for thinkers and questioners.
~Janice N. Harrington, author of Yard Show, winner of the Anisfeld-Wolf Book Award