Owning Our Voices: On Zachary Pace’s I Sing to Use the Waiting
My toughest college class sounded easy—it was only a single credit and promised a trip to New York City. I was desperate to travel and liked singing, so joining choir seemed like a win-win. But the instructor relentlessly criticized my voice, holding me after each class and requiring extra sessions if I wanted to pass. I needed to learn how to sound feminine. Once he pounded his fist, Why can you not sound more like a girl? I dropped the class before the coveted trip. I couldn’t make my voice do what someone expected it to, which is why I often gravitate to music sung by males—I can sing along.
Regardless of the singer’s pitch, the songs I love most rattle something deep in my chest, reverberating through my body. My favorite books do something similar, reflecting their truth, showing me something I’d ignored. Imagine a mash-up of the two—that’s what it’s like to read Zachary Pace’s debut essay collection, I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays About the Women Singers Who’ve Made Me Who I Am. The title comes from an Emily Dickinson poem, and while there’s also an essay with this title, it’s the previous one, “Could We,” which shares its name with the song by Cat Power that asks the question that holds the collection’s heartbeat. In it, Pace writes, “We live by waiting; we’re creatures who’ve sung to survive. Will our song outlast us?”
Reading the opening essay, “Daddy Was a Musician,” about the evolution of Pace’s relationship with their queer voice and their father’s homophobic and musical tendencies, unearthed memories of the degrading sessions with my choir teacher, reminding me how my voice defied others’ expectations of what it should sound like. It helped put words to my experience. Driven in part by inquiry (“What makes a voice sound masculine or feminine, anyway?”), Pace details a childhood spent sitting by the television watching Disney musicals and performances by women, a voice marked and targeted by the cruelty of other children—“Are you a boy or a girl?” they frequently ask—for its “effeminate inflection, nasal vowels, [and] slight lisp,” and a “personality ignited from the incandescence of a woman singing.” It’s one of few in the collection that firmly centers their own narrative, as if establishing their individual voice before letting it, at times, hide behind cultural criticism.
The subtitle is a bit deceptive; these essays span much more than women singers. They dive into sound, gender, queerness, the shaping of identity through voice and pop culture, and, yes, survival. The result is a collection with the vibe of a perfect mixtape. This compilation blends research, reportage, personal narrative, and cultural criticism, and each track offers something different and building off what came before. A couple essays are sheer reportage: One outlines Cher’s film career and another breaks down the Rihanna and Drake song, “Work.” Others blend researched discussions of songs or musicians with Pace’s personal connection to and interpretation of the music, like the ones about Cat Power and Nina Simone, or the title essay that deals with stuck song syndrome.
Ending the collection is a compilation of B-sides and rarities, almost like a flash round of other musicians they’d be remiss to omit. But rather than feeling tacked on, an afterthought, this closing offers completion. The last sentence is a hum of what’s reverberated throughout the collection: music as life raft. “If I’d known this B-side at eighteen,” Pace says, “I would’ve played it through the open window of my station wagon on the way out of my hometown.” Actually, this final essay is like a hidden bonus track (remember those?), a jewel buried at the end; because it is an afterword, therefore the previous one, “Colors of the Wind,” is technically the last.
Reading this essay on Pocahontas as the last in the collection reveals a bookend quality between the first essay and this one, the two in the collection that juxtapose Pace’s personal history with how our culture’s homophobia has marginalized queerness. But in “Colors of the Wind,” they consider how that connects to colonization: “There, I began to understand that the same Eurocentric, patriarchal, racist, religious, and capitalist apparatuses that had colonized the land and imperialized the tribes of Tsenacommacah, Lenapehoking, Mannahatta—where we sat—and all across this so-called country were the same apparatuses that had instilled the homophobic hatred of my own voice in me.” I recognized this homophobic hatred of my own voice in the memory of dropping choir. At the time it felt like an act of defeat, but maybe it was actually survival.
The collection resists easy classification—is it a memoir in essays or a collection of essays on pop culture? It’s neither, it’s both. The assemblage of this range of reportage, personal narrative, and cultural criticism, this hodgepodge of different forms, is itself queer. How beautiful for a book’s form to echo what’s at the heart of this collection: The intersection of pop culture, social issues, and personal experience make up Pace’s claiming of their voice. And in doing so, they’ve helped me claim mine. Because Pace’s collection shows there’s no better way to push back, than to survive by owning our voices, to thrive. Isn’t that what music gives us—not only a soundtrack for our lives, but a way to make sense of our pain, and when we understand it, we can transform it, make it something new? I say “we” because this collection offers that sense of connection, of community. Because while my experiences don’t resemble Pace’s, some of our musical tastes don’t even align, I still found my story in these pages. I found something like healing.
Pace develops this kind of stark intimacy with the reader through this melding of the personal with something larger. Which is why whether or not you’re a fan of the bands or singers in these essays, and whether or not you also have a fraught relationship with your queer voice, there’s something here for you. Something to learn, something to see anew, something to reflect upon, and like the best songs, something to feel. It's as if this debut is Pace singing for us, and the beauty of a book is its ability to endure—this song will outlast them, and we’re so lucky to have it.
Zachary Pace (@zacharypace) is a writer and editor who lives in New York City, whose first book is I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays About the Women Singers Who’ve Made Me Who I Am, and whose writing has been published in the Baffler, BOMB Magazine, Bookforum, Boston Review, Frieze Magazine, Interview Magazine, Literary Hub, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the PEN Poetry Series, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. More work can be found at zacharypace.com.
Rachel León (she/they) (@rachellayown) is a writer, editor, and social worker. She serves as Daily Editor for The Chicago Review of Books. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, BOMB Magazine, Catapult, LA Review of Books, The Millions, Electric Literature, and elsewhere.