From Square One:
The Spoken-Word Download

This is not an audiobook. At least not in the traditional sense. It’s not a verbatim reading of a text over the course of six CDs.

Rather, this is a spoken-word performance, 70 minutes long, with sound design and original music (yep, that’s me playing piano, bass clarinet and accordion) released June 23 as a download only by Random House Audio.

Kind of like the thing you’d hear on The Next Big Thing.

As the subtitle promises, there are digressions, and they take up much more of this incarnation of From Square One than the crosswords do. It’s a combination of reporting and memoir, somewhere on the continuum near Laurie Anderson, Spalding Gray and Anna Deveare Smith.

Ultimately, it’s a story about the war between thinking and feeling, and how they play into the struggle to become fully human.