That one Prom Song always does it for you.

Just a few notes and you’re reminded of sweaty hands and wilted corsages, awkward poses for parents with cameras, arms around your date, and tiny steps while swaying in a circle. A song sure can be a memory-tickler. In the new memoir, “Soundtrack of Silence” by Matt Hay (with Steve Eubanks), it can also be a lifeline.

It was an easy assumption: didn’t every kid grow up learning to read lips?

Matt Hay did, and he figured it was a part of being human. You heard certain syllables, saw words form on faces, and you communicated from there. You turned up the radio on road trips. You said, “Pardon me?” or “Huh?” a lot. Wasn’t that normal? Obviously, a guy could get around fine this way, right?

Hay thought so, until he graduated high school and set his sights on going to West Point. At his pre-admission physical, he was turned down and he was devastated. As was stated in black and white, his hearing was well below optimal.

Back at college near his Indiana hometown, Hayes was finally given a diagnosis: he had neurofibromatosis type 2, or NF2, which affected the nerves in his brain that deal with hearing. But that wasn’t all: the disease caused tumors that could go rogue — but Hay didn’t want to worry about that.

College was great, and he was falling in love with the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Nora was attending medical school, and Hay’s diagnosis didn’t scare her away. She barely even blinked when Hay temporarily lost his ability to walk due to surgery on an NF2 tumor, and life went on. Nora and Hay married, found jobs, bought a condo, and Hay worked to imprint his favorite songs on his brain before NF2 took his hearing.

He likened NF2 to a “steamroller” that moved so slowly he couldn’t see it coming, though he knew it would arrive someday. Could he keep it from crushing his dreams?

The soundtrack of your life runs from folk music to hip hop to country music to pop, and a single line of any of those old songs acts like a time machine. Now imagine the hard loss of never hearing them again and read “Soundtrack of Silence.”

Using music as both touchstone and launching point, author Matt Hay (with Steve Eubanks) takes readers on a journey that’s sweet and funny but also terrifying, all wrapped up in a Classic Hits playlist that hints at, if not a totally happy ending, at least one that’s not going to sound like a funeral dirge. It helps that Hay’s knowledge and love of music loops through his story and leaves snips of song behind, like breadcrumbs, to ground readers in time and place.

Despite a few setbacks for the author, this is an uplifting, easy book to enjoy, and it could be quite surprisingly comforting for someone with a new diagnosis. Try “Soundtrack of Silence” and see if it does it for you.

“Soundtrack of Silence: Love, Loss, and a Playlist for Life” by Matt Hay
c.2024, St. Martin’s Press
$29.00
272 pages