My Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love

Singer and rapper Dessa, member of the Minneapolis hip hop collective Doomtree, is no stranger to non-musical composition; she's published chapbooks, worked as a medical tech writer, spoken at the Mayo Clinic and written for the New York Times Magazine. Her first book, My Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love, is part memoir, part science writing and part philosophy. Throughout, she details her musical life and her beginnings in Doomtree, as well as her long-term on-again-off-again relationship with a member of the crew. In "Call Off Your Ghost," she enlists a team of neuroscientists and undergoes brain scans to help her fall out of love with him. In "Breaking Even," when her train between gigs hits a person, she calculates the mathematical value of the life under the wheels. Dessa continuously goes back to the theme of her difficult love without it feeling repetitive, like a friend too self-aware to be annoying.
 
My Own Devices is more universal than most performer bios and more lyrical than many celebrity essay collections, as sharp and witty as the best magazine pieces. "Living as an artist is fundamentally speculative; there's a permanent uncertainty about where you'll be hired next and how long that work might last," she writes. "But really that's true of most parts of our lives.... We don't own much, and what we do own we certainly can't keep indefinitely. Every breath is borrowed by the lungful; you can't save them for later or hold a single one for long." --Katy Hershberger, freelance writer and bookseller
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