I have zero doubt that I spent large swaths of time in 1995 driving around in my 1979 Chrysler Newport singing along to “Who Will Save Your Soul” with as much sincerity and passion as 23-year-old me could muster. It might have been You Were Meant for Me.” Chances are it was both of them.

Jewel was probably one of the driving reasons I attended Lilith Fair back in 1997. I was a fan. However, back when I turned 40 I decided to go back through all the things I loved at certain points of my life and see how they held up. Jewel did not fare well.

That did not stop me from reading her memoir/self-help book Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story. Because of course I did. Actually, I listened to this one, read by the author herself. I mention this only because sprinkled throughout this book are song lyrics. In the audiobook version Jewel reads the lyrics, then sings them acappella. It is awkward. Every time she did this in the audiobook my insides quaked with embarrassment for her. It felt a little like when you were at a party and one of the theatre kids got all carried away with some dramatic accent or just burst into some showtune right there next to the keg while everyone else was content listening to “Closer to Fine” again.

Bah.

I will say this, Jewel’s story is pretty interested and had she stuck to telling it, I’d have dug this one much more than I did. However, there’s a crapton of psychobabble, self-help bullshit that really weighs this one down. And it only serves to make Jewel appear as someone who is wholly unaware of her privilege.

She grew up very poor in Alaska with her brothers and a set of parents who were ill-equipped at parenting. She spent a lot of her youth performing with her dad and moving around Alaska quite a bit. There are tales of no indoor plumbing and the cold, cold Alaska wilderness; walking to school in subzero temps and fighting with her brothers; longing for her artist mom and developing a little kleptomania habit.

Jewel’s story is interesting in the same way all people who have really fucked up parents stories are interesting. And make no mistake, Jewel’s mom is a selfish super villain who stole millions of dollars from her own daughter. It’s super sad the way she manipulated her daughter.

And yet, despite that, Jewel still comes of as kind of annoying and a little oblivious.

The self-help nonsense included in the memoir is grating and makes Jewel seem wholly unaware of the privilege she has and had despite growing up in poverty. Sure, she had it rough and lived in her car for awhile. But she was a beautiful white woman who could get away with hounding coffee shop owners for gigs and band dudes for advice. She jetted off to Italy with her boyfriend, Sean Penn (ugh, he is the worst) and recorded at Neil Young’s ranch. So some of the ‘woe is me’ stuff is a little hard to swallow.

Plus, she was a megarich superstar by the time she was like 22. So taking life advice from someone who was all ‘then I took a year off to discover my creative center and focus on my relationship’ is, well, come on. . . I would venture to guess it’s a lot easier to recover from emotional upsets when you have nothing but time and money at your disposal. Had she stuck to her story and her experiences, this one would have ranked a lot higher on my list, but the oddly arrogant feel of the self-help bullshit kind of left a bad taste in my brain.

The post Did I Read Jewel’s Memoir? Of Course I Did. appeared first on I Will Dare.

It would be impossible to measure how excited I was when I first hear that Chrissie Hynde was going to publish a memoir. After all, in their memoirs both Linda Ronstadt and Pat Benatar named Hynde the Queen of Rock & Roll. That’s some pretty high praise from women who had both been labeled the queen by the media at some point in their careers.

All hail the Queen of Rock & Roll, just don’t read her memoir if you want to keep that illusion.

This one was, for lack of a better word, yucky. Reading it made me feel yucky. It sounded like Hynde felt yucky writing it. For the most part, with a few shining spots, this one is a giant bummer.

I’m not a doctor and I don’t play one on TV, but man does Chrissie Hynde sound like she has the lowest of self-esteem. It rolls off every page. She consistently mentions what an aimless fuck-up she was, how she had no drive, and was basically a big disappointment. There was no way to know if this was self-deprecating humor or not. It was yucky.

Hynde grew up in the baby-boom heyday around Ohio. She had two loving parents, a loving older brother, and an almost inborn sense of restlessness. The one thing Hynde loved early on, music? She snuck out to Akron and Cleveland to see bands. She learned to play the guitar, she tried to figure out her sexuality.

HIGHLIGHT: ?I can?t remember having sexual fantasies about actually getting it on with one of my rock-star heroes. I wanted to be them, not do them,?

After bumbling her way through high school she bumbled her way through Kent State for a few years. However, Hynde is an indifferent student, though she liked art. She flits about doing drugs going to rock shows, working as a waitress, traveling to Mexico and California and not doing much of anything.

HIGHLIGHT: Hynde talking about being there when the Kent State shooting took place in 1970.

At some point she is raped by a gang of “heavy bikers” and then takes responsibility for the event because she was drugged up and there. It’s a horrifying context for “Tattooed Love Boys.”. And really makes clear this from the book’s prologue: ?I regret half of this story and the other half is the sound you heard.?

There’s another disturbing scene where she is kind of held-hostage and raped by another heavy-biker for a few days. Her retelling is a little disjointed, but ewww.

Yuck.

Eventually she hightails it to Europe and spends the rest of her life (thus far) there. She bums around London and Paris. She writes for NME though she says she sucks as a writer (this memoir is a testament to that). Almost marries Sid Vicious for immigration reasons. She works with Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. There’s a lot of drugs, a lot of squats and homelessness, a lot of near-misses she almost joined The Damned. Almost played in The Clash. Almost writes an interesting book.

Near the end of the book she talks about finally forming The Pretenders, sleeping with her idol Iggy Pop who apparently has a giant penis, and then losing two of her bandmates to drug overdoses.

It’s a sad, emotionally-distant book. Hynde’s love for music does come through and that was always fun to read. However, so much of the book is overwhelmingly about how much she sucks and fucked everything up that the good doesn’t over come the yuck.

The post Chrissie Hynde’s Memoir Was Yucky appeared first on I Will Dare.

As I sit here in front of my computer and try to come up with the words to explain why I enjoyed reading J. Ryan Stradal’s Kitchens of the Great Midwest so much and why I have so much affection for it, I have a goofy grin on my face. The kind of secret smile you get when you think of that person you have a crush on and that funny/sweet/kind thing they said about you.

Confession MNReaders: I have a big, goobery crush on Kitchens of the Great Midwest and I’m about to tell you about it.

First of all, you should know, I was a little hesitant going into this one. I used to do a podcast with J. Ryan and a bunch of his friends way back in the olden days. It’s always a little scary reading a book by someone you know because your desire to be honest does battle with your desire not to diss your friend’s book.

This novel, told through interconnected stories that orbit around chef Eva Thorvald, is a good’un so my hesitation was for naught.

We see Eva through the eyes of her father, a chef from Duluth who grew up making lutefisk; her jock cousin; a boy who likes her; and many more. Only once do we see Eva’s life through her eyes, when she’s a taller-than-everyone, bullied sixth grader who is growing hot-hot-hot peppers in her closet in Iowa. In fact, the peppers are so hot that the best Mexican restaurant in Des Moines has to put warning labels on the dishes that include the chili pepper oil Eva makes.

When Eva’s culinary star starts to rise she recedes further and further from the reader, from the story and while this might seem like a bummer the characters we meet along her journey more than make up for her absence. Plus, it’s really fun when the people from various parts of Eva’s life bump into each other. Whenever one of them would pop up unexpectedly I’d be all, “Hey, I know him!”

I’m not entirely sure what I loved the most about this book: the exquisite food writing and satire, the recipes, or the very Minnesotainess of it — from the Lutheran county fair entrants and bitchy-entitled Uptown moms to the deer hunting, hard drinking bros and the sensitive, young garageband dudes — reading this book felt like reading about people I know written by someone who cares as much about them and their quirks as I do. While the satire about foodies is cutting and hilarious, J. Ryan Stradal never looks down on his midwestern characters — not even the Country Fair Ladies (this chapter might have been my favorite, because bars. . . who doesn’t love bars?). While he might poke fun at them, he never treats the midwesterners like yokels from the fly-overs, and that’s refreshing.

Kitchens of the Great Midwest is one of those books that hit me in all my wheelhouses from the awkward 6’2″ main character to the one who hums The Replacements when she’s happy to all the luscious and delicate food writing. I’m calling it now, in September, this one will be on my year-end favorites list for sure, doncha know.

The post The Great Midwestern Novel appeared first on I Will Dare.

I’d probably need all my fingers and toes to count the graphic novels that didn’t live up to their hype (Watchmen, Black Hole, Ghost World, Jimmy Corrigan. . . just to name a few). However Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s This One Summer, doesn’t just live up to the hype, it blows the hype out of the water because the hype could never, ever live up to this beautiful and touching graphic novel.

Pre-teen Rose and her parents spend every summer at a cottage in Awago. They’ve been doing this so long, Rose has a summer friend, Windy. Windy just a year(ish) younger than Rose, but they are great summer buddies. There is a sameness to their summers, a sort of childish monotony that rings true. They explore the small beach town together, swim endlessly, and buy candy from the corner store.

Unique to this summer is that Rose is starting to discover her interest in boys, especially the clerk at that corner store where they buy Twizzlers and rent horror movies much too mature for them. In fact, Rose is starting to pay attention to the emotional lives of people around her and she notices that things aren’t so great between her parents. Mom’s going through some heavy fertility-related funk and dad is frustrated at his inability to comfort her.

Boy howdy, did I love reading this one. The art is gorgeous — done in all blue. But, what I loved so much about this book and what is captured so beautifully in the art and in the story is that 18ish-month difference in the ages of Rose and Windy. Both girls are on the precipice of adolescence, but Rose is a little closer and you can see it in her self-consciousness, in her interest in the boy at the store, and in her concern for people around her and how their emotions impact her life.

Windy, however, is still joyfully childish — unconcerned about what people will think of her or what they are feeling. Windy is still of that age where everything she likes is the best thing ever regardless of what others think.

I cannot think of another book that so accurately and wonderfully captures this age.

Reading this one is a lot like those lazy, unending summer days when you’re eleven or twelve. The days blend together, the time stretches out endlessly with a few emotional highs and lows. This one is just glorious. So languid and beautiful.

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It took me months to finish James Hannaham’s Delicious Foods, which is more a statement of fact than a comment on the book.

The novel opens with a scene that you will read breathless and unblinking. Teenage Eddie is driving from someplace in Louisiana or Texas to St. Cloud, Minnesota in a stolen car, navigating with bloody stumps where his hands used to be. Yowza.

And this isn’t even the most harrowing thing to happen in a book where crack cocaine is a main character, Scotty, with a point of view that takes over large sections of the story.

Scotty often tells us the story of Darlene, a college-educated woman and former loving wife and mother, who literally becomes a crack whore when grief consumes her. Darlene’s addiction leads her to the Delicious Foods farm where she is held captive by her addiction, literally, and by the nefarious farm owners. The farm work at Delicious Foods is done under slave-like circumstances, with the supervisors meting out violence, paltry pay, and crack as they see fit — which is often and without reason.

When Darlene escapes to the farm, lured there by the promise of drugs, fancy accommodations (they workers end up staying in an unventilated chicken house), eleven-year-old Eddie is left to fend for himself and search the streets of Houston at night for his mother.

Every bit of this story will break your heart, which is why it took me months to read it. There are bits of light and love, humanity and humor in the unrelenting darkness of Delicious Foods, but even so it wasn’t always the way you wanted to end your day drifting off to sleep with images of modern-slavery in your head.

Nope.

But the writing is so good, you can’t leave the book unfinished. Scotty, you know the crack, has a voice that is so engaging you wanted to go back for more. He have is sly and funny, and often treats his addicts like lovers. If you had told me, “so like crack is an actual character” before I picked up this book, I’d have rolled my eyes. I would have missed out.

This is a toughie in the way that good, moving books can be — dark, unrelenting, depressing — but so worth the effort. Finding out how Eddie went from an eleven-year-old Texas orphan to handless Minnesota business-owner is engaging, but the story of love and how you reconcile loving someone who does such unthinkable things to you is what will stick to your ribs after you close the book.

The post It Took Me Months to Finish ‘Delicious Foods’ & it was Totally Worth it appeared first on I Will Dare.