Everyone once in awhile you come across a book that so exquisitely explains your life experience it makes you feel less alone in the world. For me, these books include The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken, Geek Love by Kathrine Dunn, Beezus and Ramona by Beverly Clearly, and now All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung.

In her memoir, Chung documents what it was like to grow up the adopted Korean daughter of a white couple in a predominantly white town in Oregon and the journey she takes to find her birth parents. I cannot count how many times this book made me gasp with recognition. I’m not Korean, though the pain of not looking like your family is not lost on me. I don’t look like anyone in my family, even though I was only adopted by my dad.

What we really got me was how she too was sure that if she passed her biological mother on the street, she would just know. I often thought the same thing about running into my biological father. I wonder, do all people who were adopted think that?

This is a lovely memoir and I’m so glad I read it.

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In her memoir Living Like a Runaway Lita Ford, writes about how unimportant high school was to her and how she skipped out on her graduation to play a show with The Runaways. This apathy toward learning is pretty easy to see in this poorly-written, reflection-lacking, yet still entertaining memoir.

The writing is bad. Like cringe-inducing, eye-rollingly bad. Throughout the book she uses female (adjective) when she should use woman (noun). It makes her come off as, well, not very smart. Plus there are a lot of anecdotes that end with “Yeah, that was a good time” or “it was so funny.”

The book reads as a kind of “this is how I spent my summer vacation” essay written by a high school sophomore. Only instead of summer vacation it’s the past fortyish year of and then this happened and then that happened and then this happened.

Ford only spend a few chapters on her time as a Runaway, which was a little disappointing for someone who adores Joan Jett. And ol’ Joanie doesn’t come across too well in this one. You can tell there’s not a lot of affection between Ford and Jett, and it’s tough to figure out why. Perhaps Jett really is the emotionless automaton controlled by her manager that Ford paints her. Or maybe Ford never really connected with Joan because as a teenager Ford was ooged out by homosexuality, something she kind of glosses over in her re-telling of her time with The Runaways.

Its kind of tough to take Ford at her word. There are many times throughout the book where her actions don’t match up with her words. She says she’s a kind, loving, nice person. She had a great relationship with her parents (the doted on only child of Italian and British immigrants). Yet the book is rife with stories of fight fights (both drunken and sober), black eyes, broken noses, and in one weird incident a burrito thrown at a waitress.

Either Ford has no problem reconciling her violent tendencies with being “nice” or there’s a real lack of self-reflection. I tend to think it’s the latter, which is kind of disappointing.

Ford spends very little time on what it was like being virtually the only woman in heavy metal. And a lot of it is self-aggrandizing, as though she was the only woman with the courage and talent to break into the sexist boys club. If there is one thing we learn about Lita Ford, she is not lacking in the self-esteem department. She tells us endlessly about her hot body and skimpy costumes, which is sad in its own right. Lita Ford, you are more than a hot piece of ass!

But this doesn’t mean the book isn’t any fun. It is. Ford is unapologetic about the way she has lived her life, boozing, drugging, and fucking her way through the 80s. She’s totally one to kiss and tell, which makes her memoir fun to read in a wholly shallow way. She pretty much tells a story about every famous dude she had sex with (Eddie Van Halen, Jon Bon Jovi) and she’s very frank about how her engagement to Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath) ended because he was an abusive, face-punching asshole.

The last part of the book is a bit weird and veers on coy. Ford had a contentious seventeen-year-marriage with a man she refuses to name (though Google tells me it was Jim Gillette). They have two sons and eventually move off to a secluded island in the Caribbean where Ford is pretty much cut off from society and spends her time home-schooling her boys. She says she really lost herself and eventually she had to leave. Ford also claims that her ex-husband turned her sons against her and now she tries to raise awareness about parental alienation. It’s weird, because Google tells a very different story about the end of her marriage and the relationship with her sons.

This one is quite the mixed bag, a poorly-written mixed bag sure, but I still kind of liked it.

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I have a strange compulsion to read all the memoirs written by women in music. I’m not exactly sure when it started. Maybe as a sort of research for my own book-in-progress. Maybe it’s because I love rock & roll and want to know more about the women who make it. Maybe I am slowly turning into my mom and instead of memoirs by 40s & 50s Hollywood actresses, my drug of choice is women in rock.

So of course when I stumbled across Carly Simon’s memoir on Audible with a credit burning a hole in my pocket, I downloaded Boys in the Trees quicker than you can say “anticipation.”

First, let me get this out of the way — even though the book is read by Simon I would not recommend the audio version. Throughout there is music played behind her narration at a volume that makes it hard to understand her. It was super frustrating and never stopped being annoying.

This is kind of shame, because Simon’s memoir was surprisingly delightful. I had very little Carly information going in: “You’re So Vain,” James Taylor, and her father co-founded Simon & Schuster (yeah, that famous publishing house).

The memoir starts with her childhood growing up the ugly duckling with two beautiful sisters and a younger brother. She was named Carly because her parents were keen on having a boy and had already picked out the name Carl. She tells tales of dinner parties at their home with guests like Jackie Robinson and Benny Goodman; summers in the Hamptons; and all those kinds of things you hear about wealthy New Yorkers doing. Of course it’s not all grand, Mummy moves her nineteen-year-old lover into the house ostensibly as a tutor for Simon’s brother Peter, Daddy is a depressed alcoholic who is being pushed out of his business and dies when Simon is sixteen.

As for Simon she has a stutter, bad hair, and struggles with depression, which she calls The Beast.

She starts singing with her sister as a way to fight the stutter, and eventually drops out of Sarah Lawrence to focus on singing. She bounces around Europe with a boyfriend for awhile. She spends a lot of money on therapy, and mentions being kind of broke, but an actual job never appears.

Eventually she gets signed, gets famous, and things get really good. Carly is totally the kind to kiss and tell and it is so fun to read, especially her thing with Mick Jagger. I loved the thing with Mick Jagger, which was more flirtation than affair. She was already with James Taylor at this point and Jagger was married to Bianca, but that didn’t stop him from sending a dozen red roses to every hotel she stayed at with James while on some tour. It also didn’t stop Bianca from calling Taylor on the eve of their wedding to tell him Carly and Mick were carrying on.

Hoo boy!

Then there is the relationship with Taylor, which isn’t all that great, but you can tell she still has a deep love for him even though they’ve been divorced for more than thirty years.

This one is a good’un with just enough dirt and emotion to keep you going and none of the boring stuff about how boring touring is.

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I feel as though admitting that Carrie Brownstein’s memoir Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl left me a little ho-hum feeling is going to get my something card revoked. Indie cred? Rock & Roll lover? Feminist? Music memoir junkie? I don’t know. Sometimes it’s isolating to be in the minority on a book people seem to universally revere.

Perhaps my problem is that the bulk of the book is an episodic, repetitious explanation of each of Sleater-Kinney’s albums (the early ones, not last year’s “No Cities to Love”). Since I’m not the biggest fan (though I do love that last record) a lot of this was lost on me. Plus, it was formulaic. These are the songs we recorded and they’re kind of about this. This is where we recorded. Anecdote about recording. We went on tour and it was boring except for two quirky anecdotes + one sad anecdote . . . rinse and repeat.

Ho hum.

Brownstein tells the story of her life with a sort of cool remove. She mentions things that seem like emotional bombs — her dad coming out to her, her mother’s battles with anorexia, her mom leaving their family — but doesn’t really delve into how she felt about these big reveals, merely that they happened.

You can tell there’s a whole heap of something going on with her relationship with her mom, her mom’s illness, and here eventual leaving but you never get to figure out what that is, which feels like a missed opportunity. I had hoped we’d get some connection between the title of the book Hunger Makes me a Modern Girl, her mom’s eating disorder, and the song the title comes from “Modern Girl”. There’s some kind of connection there and it would have been nice for Brownstein to make it for the reader. It never comes.

Also, if you’re looking for anything about “Portlandia” or her partnership with Fred Armisen, you won’t find it here.

What you will find is a lot of vague talk about her romantic relationship with Corin Tucker (and how Spin magazine outed them), an exhaustive account of Olympia and the politics of that scene in the 90s, and an inexplicable chapter about her pets.

It’s not to say the book is without its charms, Brownstein is, after all, super charming. When she writes about her youth and her desire to perform and be the center of attention, you can feel her desperation and her desire. When she talks about how music made her less lonely and helped her find her people, you can relate to that search.

She’s also great when writing about the sexism of rock and roll, citing in particular a City Pages review.

For Sleater-Kinney superfans, this one is a must read. For those of us who are more casual fans the first half is worth your while, but put it down once the band gets to Australia and don’t pick it up again, you aren’t missing anything.

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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.

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