Soundtrack: A Lyric Memoir

Is a song enough
to hold all the truths we cannot bear
without it? 

From award-winning writer Michael V. Smith comes a poetic memoir about growing up gay in the shadow of AIDS. Embodying an elusive part of queer history, these song and album-inspired poems capture the last three decades of the millennium and reveal how music has an uncanny ability to remind us not just where we were at a given moment in time but who we were.

With his signature humour and tenderness, and guided by the music of the era, Smith catalogues social prejudices, court rulings, and medical breakthroughs, alongside personal devastations, triumphs, and the search for community. From a first crush toting a Michael Jackson Thriller cassette, to falling in love to the music of Jane Siberry, to dancing at a gay bar to “Groove Is in the Heart,” Soundtrack is a moving personal record of a man who survived the lost generation and a vital document of queer joy.

Press Coverage

2025 Fall Preview: Nonfiction —Quill & Quire

Most Anticipated: Our 2025 Fall Nonfiction Preview —49th Shelf

45 Canadian nonfiction books to read this fall —CBC Books

The Music in Soundtrack Chronicles the True Joys and Looming Dangers of an Important Cultural Era —Open Book

Le Vancouver Writers Fest : L’engagement des auteurs et le pouvoir de leurs mots —Lauren Theodet, La Source

“In Soundtrack, there’s music, music everywhere at the point where these two unequal forces interact.  With poems named after music by Cyndi Lauper, Culture Club, Jane Siberry, The Cure, and Sinead O’Connor, Smith summons experiential highs and lows.” —Brett Josef Grubisic, The BC Review

“Smith has written a smart and sexy book, full of joy and humour and history and resistance and music. Sometimes it may be true that music articulates what cannot be borne, but here, Smith succeeds in articulating what he needs to say and what many need to hear.” —Amanda Thru the Looking Glass

About the Author

Michael V. Smith is a writer, performer, and filmmaker. His poetry has been shortlisted for the ReLit Award, his fiction has been shortlisted for the Journey Prize and Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and his queer memoir My Body Is Yours was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award. Smith is the winner of a Western Magazine Award, numerous film awards, and the inaugural Dayne Ogilvie Prize from the Writers’ Trust of Canada. He is currently a professor in Kelowna, BC, where he lives with his husband on the unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan people.

Publisher
Book*Hug

Genre
Memoir / Poetry

Publication Date
2025

Size
6 x 8 inches
212 pages

Binding
Softcover, perfect-bound

ISBN
9781771669498