3rd March, 2025 in Recommended Reads

Mit Out Sound by Rick Lenz

“Men and women got up from wooden folding chairs, walked up to the podium, and talked about their day-to-day troubles living in and out of other people’s skins. Emily had a feeling they were silently, between the lines, betraying deeper narratives than would ever be spoken aloud.” The novel, Mit Out Sound, by Rick Lenz, treks into the taxing burden of imposter syndrome by leading us through not only Jimmy Riley and Tom Manfredo’s lives in relation to the novel’s protagonist, Emily Bennet, but their performance as actors in roles that must exude and imitate the underlying essence of James Dean and John Wayne, respectively, through characters of an unfinished and long forgotten Western film starring the two legends. Though the central focus is on the completion of the film, Mit Out Sound explores a tangle of relationships and the depths that prior experiences can resonate through the psyche years later in a multitude of self-destructive behaviors.