Synopses & Reviews
I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays about the Women Singers Who've Made Me Who I Am is a vital and affecting reflection on how popular culture can shape personal identity.
With remarkable grace, candor, and a poet's ear for prose, Zachary Pace recounts the women singers — from Cat Power to Madonna, Kim Gordon to Rihanna — who shaped them as a young person coming-of-age in rural New York, first discovering their own queer voice.
Structured like a mixtape, Pace juxtaposes their coming out with the music that informed them along the way. They recount how listening to themselves sing along as a child to a Disney theme song they recorded on a boom box in 1995, was when they first realized there was an effeminate inflection to their voice. As childhood friendships splinter, Pace discusses the relationship between Whitney Houston and Robyn Crawford. Cat Power's song "My Daddy Was a Musician" spurs a discussion of Pace's own musician father, and their gradual estrangement.
Resonant and compelling, I Sing to Use the Waiting is a deeply personal rumination on how queer stories are abundant yet often suppressed, and how music may act as a comforting balm carrying us through difficult periods and decisions.
Read an excerpt:
Debutiful presents: "Colors of the Wind," an excerpt from Zachary Pace's I Sing to Use the Waiting.
Further reading:
LitHub presents: "Zachary Pace on the Push and Pull of Working in Publishing as a Writer" (Jan. 23, 2024)
Review
"No higher praise have I for Zachary Pace and their yes once more delish collection of prose poems really about those songbirds that help give the queer soul their own voice. Covering national treasures including Cat Power, Whitney, Nina Simone, etc., it's a compendium born of a true consciousness, one that is serious about and committed to articulating writing's best and true subject: how we speak, and why." Hilton Als, author of White Girls and 2017 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Criticism
Review
"What draws us to the sound of another person's voice? What magnetizes others to our own? I Sing to Use the Waiting is not only a thrilling homage to a group of majestic women, but an exploration into the nature of voice itself — that queer and primal animal signature. Zachary Pace writes with electric intensity. A total joy." Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World
Review
"Pace's beautiful prose and palpable passion make this soar..." Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Zachary Pace 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, 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.