REVIEW: I Sing to Use the Waiting by Zachary Pace

Review by Emily Webber

I’ve always taken refuge in the written word and the surrounding silence. My husband is a frequent attendee of live music shows, and at home, he fills any quiet with music or the television, with me pleading for him to turn it down or off.

Beyond Glenn Gould’s magical Goldberg Variations with its frenetic energy, Gould’s muffled voice coming through as he hums and sings to the music, and an intimate performance of the band James at the Stone Pony in New Jersey, music doesn’t factor into who I am. I don’t turn to it when I need to escape or understand the world. Yet I found an immediate connection with Zachary Pace’s, I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays About the Women Singers Who’ve Made Me Who I Am (Two Dollar Radio; Jan. 2024). Even though we have vastly different experiences, we both have experienced being an outcast and floundering, yet ultimately fruitful, attempts to better understand ourselves and the world.

Are you a boy or a girl? At age twelve, I was taunted by bullies every day in school—my hair dyed blond and growing past my ears, my mincing gait, my lilting voice. Are you a boy or a girl? Every day I dreaded their mockery.

To this day, talking among strangers—who often look up, with an inquisitive smirk, when I start to speak—I blush, instinctively ashamed of this queer timbre. (5)

Pace’s experience so mirrors the constant dread of my childhood at this exact age that it caught me off guard. Throughout the last two years of middle school, I was relentlessly taunted by the other kids because of my voice, because I was an awkward, different kid. Such mocking served to silence and make both Pace and me invisible. My saving grace was spotting the quirky cover of Kurt Vonnegut’s Hocus Pocus at the bookstore. Knowing nothing of Vonnegut, I took the book home and found safety and a new understanding of the world in his strange, funny, and sad stories and learned I could live in words and use my voice on the page. Pace finds the same in art, particularly in the experiences and music of women singers, and in their own writing:

One day, I realized the loneliness of love and needed to tell someone—but had no one to tell. I wrote it down. Ever since, I’ve been fishing for words—reeling in phrases and tossing them back into the sea of love’s lonely missive, traumatized, gasping for breath. (99)

Pace has an encyclopedic knowledge of female singers such as Cher, Rihanna, Madonna, Whitney Houston, Cat Power, and others. Their essays explore the influence of pop culture and how it helped them cope with a father who doesn’t accept their sexuality, peers who mock their physical attributes, and pressure from society to be a certain way. The title of the collection comes from an Emily Dickinson poem on loneliness and the desire to be seen, which are common themes in Pace’s and the artists lives. Many of the essays focus on how identity is formed and how beliefs evolve over time.

In “My Tattoos: On Madonna,” Pace describes their foray into Kabbalah, which led to them getting tattooed with a sequence of Hebrew letters, which, when asked about the tattoos now, prompts embarrassment. But pop culture, artists, and the television we consume profoundly impact our beliefs, especially as we form our identities. The Hebrew letters Pace got tattooed with as a teenage were intended to keep bad luck away. They got the tattoos at time when they were dealing with a depressed father who didn’t accept their sexuality, an overworked mother, and when they would soon be diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder and on the verge of coming out as queer.

I imagine Kabbalah gave Pace something to channel their energy into and a belief system to hang on to at a time of chaos. While Pace no longer practices Kabballah and is sometimes embarrassed by their tattoos, this still served a purpose at a critical point in their life and remains a way of connecting with others who were searching in similar ways.

While Pace learns more about their true self over the course of the essays their writing taught me too. Reading Pace’s essay on Rihanna, “Too Good to Work” helped me expand my narrow definition of queerness: it isn’t just about sexuality, but also about being different and the backlash that can come when you don’t follow people’s expectations.

Rihanna should be celebrated for her queer powers of survival, adaptation, and dynamic negotiation in her articulation of selfhood; by recording the mainstream perception of the margin, she flourished at the forefront of a history of racist and sexist material conditions and has achieved international, astronomical popularity. (68)

In “Hop Along” Pace talks about the use of they/them pronouns, how they perceive the musician, Frances Quinlan’s voice outside the typical masculine or feminine descriptors, and how Pace hopes people would perceive their own voice. As someone who has never questioned my given pronouns it helped me better understand why people choose different ones.

Another powerful essay is Pace’s breakdown of Whitney Houston’s alleged relationship with Robyn Crawford, showing the major damage we do when we try to tell people how they should live their lives and what they should do with their bodies. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Pace shows through Cher what happens when we put in the work towards acceptance of the different choices people make. In an interview, she said:

“I don’t know why people are preoccupied with my cosmetic surgery…It mystifies me    that people would care what I do to my body.” (108)

When Cher is initially distraught over her firstborn’s transition from female to male, she returns to these thoughts of bodily autonomy and works towards a place of acceptance. Every single day, we make decisions about our bodies—what we eat, medicine we take or choose not to, Botox, cosmetic surgery, how we choose to wear our hair—that we consider ours alone. It is a straightforward, logical argument to leave other people to make their own choices.

Pace’s essays are as much music criticism as they are a personal exploration. At times, the amount of detail on the individual artists can overshadow Pace’s own journey or their insights are reduced to a few sentences. I understand in some instances Pace wants the artists’ life experiences to be the focus and not insert themselves into the story. Their writing is always engaging, but the real power is in seeing an ordinary person, one with no fame or riches, come to a better understanding of themselves.

I love many things about living in Florida where I’ve spent my whole life: the Everglades and diversity of wildlife, the strange stories. But I’m ashamed that PEN America has stated that over 40 percent of all book bans occurred in Florida.  Some people fear others, especially young people, having the ability to read widely because through stories, we find unexpected commonalities and expand the ways we think and view the world. The journey Pace took led them to finally find affection for their own queer voice just as others’ stories gave me strength. What is in these essays is a vital message for our times: that art can save us, and shape us, and that individual human creativity should be cultivated and valued.