Life Stories #71: Katherine Bouton

Katherine Bouton first began experiencing hearing loss in one ear at age 30, and spent years trying to work around the problem without really addressing it. That, she discovered, only made her life more frustrating. Shouting Won't Help is the story of how she came to face her condition head-on, including the impact of cochlear implants on her hearing and her overall quality of life, but it's also an extensively reported account of how widespread hearing loss is among Americans of all ages--from the factors that contribute to the problem to the costs of dealing with it, and more.

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photo: Joyce Ravid

In this episode of Life Stories, I chat with Katherine Bouton, who draws heavily upon her personal experience of hearing loss in Shouting Won’t Help, a consideration of the hearing loss problems that, at varying levels of severity, affect fifty million Americans. Since the book’s first publication in 2013, Bouton has become a vocal advocate on the subject of hearing loss, a development she explained had much to do with how her life changed while she was working on it:

“I evolved emotionally throughout the whole course of writing this book. I started to write the proposal in 2010… I worked all that year through on the proposal, which became… Initially, it was full of anger and self-pity and fury at everybody who didn’t understand what I was going through, what my hearing loss was like. As I came to the point where I was ready to distribute the proposal, my agent said, ‘This is really great, I think you have a selling proposal here, but you gotta find a happy ending for this.’ So I thought really hard about this. What kind of happy ending is there to hearing loss?

But, actually, there is. I realized I had become much, much closer to my friends. I held everybody at bay for a long time because I couldn’t hear them, and I didn’t want to talk about it. Once I started to talk about it, my friendships just became much more intimate… My relationships with my family—my husband, my two now-grown children—had been very frayed by the fact that I couldn’t hear them and I was angry all the time. So as I put the book together, and over the next year and a half as I was writing it, I was also learning to hear better [with a cochlear implant]… So I was relearning to hear at the same time that I was learning to deal with my hearing loss, and I learned a lot about how many mistakes I had made and how bad it is for your own psyche and your physical and social and emotional well-being to deny hearing loss.”

Listen to Life Stories #71: Katherine Bouton (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)