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 reckoning with 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, self-forgiveness, and—occasionally—joy.
Advance Praise:
“Hassinger brilliantly brings the contrapuntal forces of eroticism, spirituality, jazz, marriage, and the frailties of the body—that inevitable passage of time and more—together into a stunning work of fierce living.”
—Sue William Silverman, author of Selected Misdemeanors: Essays at the Mercy of the Reader
“In the simplest terms, I loved this book. The language brims with a relentless and questioning mind, yet one that is also washed like a watercolor. Apocalypse in Blue so aptly captures one woman’s journey, yet in its specific gaze, it blossoms to envelop all of us. This is a truest of true memoirs of what it means to be alive in an unjust world.”
—Victoria Chang, author of Tree of Knowledge: Poems
“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 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
“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 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, recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships and author of Reader, I: Poems
“Complex, ambitious, and far-ranging. Hassinger's innovative form, inspired by her central metaphor, jazz, keeps the book vibrantly leaping, surprising us with juxtapositions and unexpected harmonies. In the same way that jazz improv allows one instrument to step into the limelight and then recede, the multiple themes of Apocalypse in Blue—a midlife marriage, the climate crisis, musicology, and philosophy—emerge and retreat. Hassinger’s inquiry—‘Who am I, and what am I for?’—furthered my own; I’m so grateful this memoir exists.”
—Beth Ann Fennelly, author of The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs
“Apocalypse in Blue explores what makes an ‘I’ a self in a myriad of ways—community, family, philosophy, forgiveness, remembering, and, of course, jazz. Amy Hassinger shows us we are both call and response, eternity and absence. We are breath.”
—Karen Salyer McElmurray, author of I Could Name God in Twelve Ways: Essays
“A breathtaking tapestry of creative ambition, inquiry, and improvisation. With sincerity and rigor, Hassinger reflects on partnership, motherhood, friendship, grief, art, illness, and repair. 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 Sue William Silverman Creative Nonfiction Prize
“Apocalypse in Blue explores what makes an ‘I’ a self in a myriad of ways—community, family, philosophy, forgiveness, remembering, and, of course, jazz. Amy Hassinger shows us we are both call and response, eternity and absence. We are breath.”
—Karen Salyer McElmurray, author of I Could Name God in Twelve Ways: Essays
“Complex, ambitious, and far-ranging. Hassinger's innovative form, inspired by her central metaphor, jazz, keeps the book vibrantly leaping, surprising us with juxtapositions and unexpected harmonies. In the same way that jazz improv allows one instrument to step into the limelight and then recede, the multiple themes of Apocalypse in Blue—a midlife marriage, the climate crisis, musicology, and philosophy—emerge and retreat. Hassinger’s inquiry—‘Who am I, and what am I for?’—furthered my own; I’m so grateful this memoir exists.”
—Beth Ann Fennelly, author of The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs