Every Note Played Q&A

Q: What’s your next book about?

A: Like all of my books, this one starts with a neurological crisis. EVERY NOTE PLAYED is about ALS. While most people are familiar with those three letters in some way—maybe you dumped a bucket of ice water over your head or you saw a movie about Stephen Hawking or Steve Gleason or maybe you know someone—most people have little or no experience actually feeling what it feels like to live and die with this disease. And so in EVERY NOTE PLAYED, we go there.

When learning about the details of ALS, most people are immediately terrified at the thought of two things:

1. Being paralyzed

2. Not being able to speak

Being locked in. And yet, how many of us are stuck, paralyzed in our lives in some way because we’ve built a fortress of fear, blame, and excuses around something? We’re not doing the thing that we most want to do; we’re not taking the steps; we’re not starting something or finishing something. We’re stuck. Paralyzed without ALS.

And I can say anything I want. I don’t have ALS. My voice works just fine. Yours probably does, too. But how many of us are good communicators? How many of us say, “I’m sorry,” “I forgive you,” “I love you” to the people we need to say these things to? We think have forever. We don’t.

So EVERY NOTE PLAYED is about these things. It’s about ALS, and it’s about the ways in which we don’t dare to do what we really want to do, and we don’t say what we need to say. And maybe we don’t have forever. It’s about regret and forgiveness. It’s about living and dying. It’s about letting go and setting yourself free.