The Hearing Test

When the narrator of The Hearing Test, an artist in her late twenties, awakens one morning to a deep drone in her right ear, she is diagnosed with Sudden Deafness, but is offered no explanation for its cause. As the specter of total deafness looms, she keeps a record of her year: a score of estrangement and enchantment, of luck and loneliness, of the chance occurrences to which she becomes attuned while living alone in a New York City studio apartment with her dog. Through a series of fleeting and often humorous encounters making meaning becomes a form of consolation and curiosity, a form of survival.