It’s a fitting introduction. The significance of sound runs throughout the memoir, which chronicles Moulton’s time working as a radio DJ and freelance music critic in Bloomington, Indiana, following the death of her father. He was a former record store manager and music lover who died after a struggle with addiction when Moulton was seventeen. Moulton’s parents met in Bloomington as college students, and she moved there at age twenty-five to earn an MFA in fiction writing from Indiana University. The audiobook takes listeners through her coming-of-age in a place integral to her family’s history, and explores her processing of grief through music, particularly the sounds of Tom Petty.

Losing her father became the “central catastrophe” in both her life and her mother’s, Moulton said, and the book is about how they learned to live afterward. But it touches on something bigger. Because everyone has some sort of invisible loss they carry through life, the emotions in Dead Dad Club transcend the specifics of readers’ lived experiences. It’s a concept that brings Moulton back to music. “If you’re standing at a concert, singing along shoulder to shoulder with strangers,” she said in an interview, “everyone’s having their particular emotional experience, but they’re also deeply connected to each other.” 

WHAT I'M READING

Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield

This beautiful novel (by a former academic), set in the nineteenth-century English countryside, is about a little girl who comes back to life after seemingly drowning in the Thames, and the mystery that unfolds around who exactly she is. It’s lyrically written with vivid characters, a compelling plot, and just the right touch of the fantastical.

—Arissa Oh, associate history professor; director of undergraduate studies