I don’t just write stories, I study them. I’ve noticed that nearly every major hero/ine’s journey and epic tale has an adoption component. From Bible stories and Greek myths (adoption worked out well for Moses, not so much for Oedipus) to Star Wars through This Is Us, we humans are obsessed with origin stories. And it’s no wonder: “Where do I come from?” and “Where do I belong?” are questions that confound and comfort us from the time we are tiny until we take our final breath. As an adoptive mother and advocate for continuing contact with birth families, I love stories about adoption, because no two are alike. They give us light and insight into how families are created and what it means to be a family—by blood, by love, and sometimes, the combination of the two.
In this exquisitely written poem of a memoir, Jillian Lauren splays her heart wide open, on every page as she transforms from an addict whose used up most of her luck to a mother whose role requires great stores of grit, determination, and love. We’re right there with her as she and her husband decide to adopt a boy from Ethiopia, and we’re along for the bumpy, often painful, occasionally joyful, ride through the challenges of parenting this tiny person who has already lost so much, but has so much to give. Outside of motherhood, she’s so funny and interesting I kind of want to be best friends with her. Not in a weirdo-stalker way, though.
A Best Memoir of 2015, "This memoir is compulsively readable and full of humor and heart."-AdoptiveFamilies.com
"A punk rock Scheherazade" (Margaret Cho) shares the zigzagging path that took her from harem member to PTA member...
In her younger years, Jillian Lauren was a college dropout, a drug addict, and an international concubine in the Prince of Brunei's harem, an experience she immortalized in in her bestselling memoir, SOME GIRLS. In her thirties, Jillian's most radical act was learning the steadying power of love when she and her rock star husband adopt an Ethiopian child with special needs. After Jillian loses…
I am, have always been, and always will be a realist. Therefore I find ‘Faction’ books, biographies, and memoirs more interesting, as I can learn from them and know that some or all of the events are true. They say ‘write what you know’ and so when it came to writing A Rather Unusual Romance I did just that. I was diagnosed with Stage 4 thyroid cancer back in 2005, and decided to weave the 15-year journey back to health I undertook into the pages of a fictional romance, with Alan and Erin similarly affected by thyroid cancer. Every procedure they had to endure was true because I had to go through it as well (without the romance)!
If you were a teenager (like I was) at the same time as the book’s main character, John Burton, you will be swept away on a journey of nostalgia back to your youth in the 1970s. Memories will come flooding back about that special time in your life when you were young and finding out about love, sex, loss, and death. Recommended!
John Burton is seventeen, it’s the long hot British summer of 1976 and his life is about to change, in ways he has carefully planned, and ways he cannot yet know, as he embarks on a roller-coaster journey to maturity.
John’s world is populated by those who have helped mould his character. His parents, proof that opposites attract; Penny, his girlfriend, evidence that persistence can sometimes pay off; his grandmother, incorrigible and unshockable; Craig, his best friend, confidant, and sounding board; Alan, who holds a secret only John knows; Katie, object of John’s pubescent fantasies; Deborah, who collects underpants; Graham,…
I’ve been thinking about and researching obscured narratives for a long time, now. As a lawyer, I learned about how systems and structures marginalize and hide important voices because of overt discrimination and implicit biases, and I took that knowledge with me while I earned a PhD in literary studies. I’ve learned — and am still learning! — that if we want to remedy exclusions from cultural histories, we’ve gotto learn to think about what voices are missing and why. I hope reading my book and those recommended here will give you a chance to learn with me. Let’s change the ways we think about so-called “definitive” histories of music.
This is an essential history for anyone interested in the story of punk, andfor anyone who loves comics or graphic novels!
Not only does the book convey untold stories of Black artists in punk, post-punk, new wave, and more, but it tells those stories through incredibly drawn images. Yes, it’s a comic book! It also pushes back against the idea that “punk” is centered around a specific period or sound, highlighting crucial artists like Sister Rosetta Tharpe alongside Black women of the original UK punk scene like the fabulous Poly Styrene.
You’ll be making yourself a playlist and buying this book as a gift for readers of all ages in your life.
I've written about a dozen books, all about football (or soccer, depending on your denomination), but that was never the plan. The plan was always to write about music. The first piece I ever published in a proper magazine was a profile of Wayne Kramer, formerly of the MC5. It ran in the German edition of Rolling Stone. The honeymoon didn't last long, though, as I gradually ran out of ideas what to pitch to the magazine, until one day I asked: "Would you be interested in a non-music piece about how football has grown out of the Dark Eighties and become hip?" They said yes, and that was that.
Marky's drinking almost managed to do what even the hate-love-hate triangle between Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee couldn't do, namely derail the band.
But what makes his book truly special for me is not so much his account of what he calls his "dog days" but his life before becoming a Ramone. He was in a hard rock band called Dust, he played in Richard Hell's Voidoids and he auditioned for the New York Dolls. If he had gotten this job, and he came very close, he would have been in no less than three seminal and legendary New York bands.
When punk rock reared its spiky head in the early seventies, Marc Bell had the best seat in the house. Already a young veteran of the prototype American metal band Dust, Bell took residence in artistic, seedy Lower Manhattan, where he played drums in bands that would shape rock music for decades to come, including Wayne County, who pioneered transsexual rock, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids, who directly inspired the entire early British punk scene. If punk has royalty, Marc became part of it in 1978 when he was anointed 'Marky Ramone' by Johnny, Joey, and Dee Dee of…
I was a participant in the D.C. punk scene during the 1980s and helped start an organization known as Positive Force. I remember hearing about the group “Parents of Punkers,” the head of which compared punk to a violent cult. They would go on television and scare watchers about what their kids might be doing. I remember at the time that this missed the realities of my own experiences and made me want to protest this moral panic. But I knew this required some distance from the “punk rock world” I had inhabited. I kept thinking about writing this book and the timing was right.
Known mostly as the bassist for the noise band, Sonic Youth, Gordon was also a sophisticated critic and supporter of the growing punk movement in America during the 1980s. In this collection of essays (many of them originally published in art magazines), she explains one of the most distinct movements within 1980s punk – “straight edge,” refusing drugs and alcohol, thereby disassociating the classic mantra of sex, drugs, and rock n roll. With a sharp eye, she explains, “These kids are antidrugs, antidrinking, anti-Reagan, and antisex – not so much out of puritanism as from a desire to be in control, and to avoid being manipulated by the consumerist system.” She praises the Do it Yourself (DIY) spirit of 1980s punk, enjoying watching bands “jam econo” (that’s a Minutemen term). She also holds this sort of activity in contrast with the blasé spirit she gets from observing new wave nightclubs…
Throughout the 1980s and early '90s, Kim Gordon—widely known as a founding member of the influential band Sonic Youth—produced a series of writings on art and music. Ranging from neo-Conceptual artworks to broader forms of cultural criticism, these rare texts are brought together in this volume for the first time, placing Gordon's writing within the context of the artist-critics of her generation, including Mike Kelley, John Miller, and Dan Graham. In addressing key stakes within contemporary art, architecture, music, and the performance of male and female gender roles, Gordon provides a prescient analysis of such figures as Kelley, Glenn Branca,…
Certain books have the ability to inspire you or help you go beyond the boundaries of your understanding, to teach you something new or to show you how to look at things differently, to alter and enhance your perception. Each of these texts have encouraged and enchanted me, with hard-won truths. I appreciate the style of writing which draws you further and further into the author's psyche, and thus into your own, like deep diving into uncharted depths. Also, as someone who tries to write poetry and prose, I find each of these writers have a refreshing and interesting technique and method of communicating their thoughts and ideas.
The book describes the performance, arrest, and prison term, of Maria Alyokhina, in deft, immediate, and succinct ‘beat’ style lingo, illustrated with her drawings. The text is refreshing on the open page, well spaced out. As one of the key members of Pussy Riot, her bravery shines out for her courageous activism which continues to this day. On 21 February 2012 the band performed their anti-Putin, anti-patriarchy Punk Prayer, called "Holy Shit", on the altar at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Critical of the relationship between the orthodox Church and Putin, with lines including “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, chase Putin out”, or “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, Be a feminist! Be a feminist!” the band managed to escape after the performance, but the video went viral, leading to their arrest and imprisonment. Testament to her punk character and iron resolve, the book describes the terrible prison conditions, and…
From activist, Pussy Riot member and freedom fighter Maria Alyokhina, a raw, hallucinatory, passionate account of her arrest, trial and imprisonment in a penal colony in the Urals for standing up for what she believed in.
'One of the most brilliant and inspiring things I've read in years. Couldn't put it down. This book is freedom' Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick
'Reading: RIOT DAYS, by PussyRiot member MariaAlyokhina. A women's prison memoir like no other! One tough cookie!' @MargaretAtwood
'In oppressive political systems, some of the most effective weapons are sarcasm and dark humour. It is exactly these…
My interest in the decade and in the Cold War came during graduate school. This was where I discovered Carl Sagan’s theory of a nuclear winter: that after a nuclear war, the debris and smoke from nuclear bombs would cover the earth and make it inhabitable for life on earth. Tracing debates between this celebrity scientist and U.S. policymakers revealed a hesitancy on either side to even consider each other’s point of view. This research made me reconsider the pop culture of my youth—films like The Day After and Wargames, music like “Shout” and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” and books from Don DeLillo’s White Noise to Dr. Seuss’ Butter Battle Book—and ultimately see them as part of a political contest in which lives—our lives—were in the balance.
If Andrew Hunt’s book covers swaths of American popular culture to reveal levels of public dissent, Martin’s book takes a similar approach, but with a particular focus on grassroots activism. Across the U.S., activism took many forms. The Nuclear Freeze campaign, with its simple call to halt the arms race, inspired (in June 1982) the largest public protest in American history. Others rebelled against Reagan’s painfully slow response to even recognize the AIDS epidemic, while on college campuses students rallied against Reagan’s policies towards apartheid-era South Africa. Martin’s examination of how various strands of feminism reacted to the conservative backlash of the Reagan Era is an especially welcome addition to the decade’s historiography.
Ronald Reagan looms large in most accounts of the period, encouraging Americans to renounce the activist and liberal politics of the 1960s and '70s and embrace the resurgent conservative wave. But a closer look reveals that a sizable swath of Americans strongly disapproved of Reagan's policies throughout his presidency. With a weakened Democratic Party scurrying for the political center, many expressed their dissatisfaction outside electoral politics. Unlike the civil rights and Vietnam-era protesters, activists of the 1980s often found themselves on the defensive, struggling to preserve the hard-won victories of the previous era. Their successes, then, were not in ushering…
I can never get enough books on Zen, and Brad Warner has to be the most unique voice in the field. He's almost like a modern Chuang Tzu in terms of drawing our attention to false conceptions with humor, wit and much firmness of clarity that avoids the dogmatic.
This is not your typical Zen book. Brad Warner, a young punk who grew up to be a Zen master, spares no one. This bold new approach to the "Why?" of Zen Buddhism is as strongly grounded in the tradition of Zen as it is utterly revolutionary. Warner's voice is hilarious, and he calls on the wisdom of everyone from punk and pop culture icons to the Buddha himself to make sure his points come through loud and clear. As it prods readers to question everything, Hardcore Zen is both an approach and…
Sadly, I was born without an ounce of musical talent. After realizing I was never going to effortlessly play the guitar or sing in tune, I focused a lot of my energies on listening to music. I came of age in the 80s and the rise of MTV brought loads of fantastic music to explore: punk, new-wave, post-punk, pop. My love for music grew and expanded as I grew up in the 90s. It was those I reached back to musical memories in creating my books, 80s Redux and Lived Through That. I also host a popular podcast called Lived Through That that combines my love of music and storytelling.
Before taking a darker turn in the second half, this book almost reads like a Steven Spielberg movie: wise grandmother advises her young grandson to stick his hands in cow patties out in the field to rid himself of warts. After this hilarious beginning, the book goes into detail on Zabrecky’s rise through the Los Angeles music scene of the early 90s, finding some success with his band Possum Dixon, the inevitable lure of drugs, and a surprising third act. This book reads almost like fiction and you’ll likely read it in a sitting or two, it’s well-paced and well-written.
Strange Cures is a turbulent, against-all odds memoir of self-discovery, success, failure, and reinvention, told by one of LA's most interesting natives. With an unflinching gaze, musician/magician/actor Zabrecky recounts his bizarre coming-of-age tale and his quest to find a place in the arts--and the world.
The author reveals a young life filled with both physical miracles and subversive role models, including an uncle who impersonated an FBI agent and, in a drunken delusion, shot and nearly killed him. He takes readers on a roller coaster ride through the nascent days of Silver Lake's music and art community, as seen through…
I can say in truth and with humor, that I’m overqualified on this topic. My parents are both alcoholics, I followed suit along with two siblings and married into the club, not once but twice. Thank God my second marriage was to a recovering alcoholic. Today I’m approaching 30 years of sobriety while hubby remains in the lead with 34 years. Knowing what it’s like to live with another alcoholic, practice the art yourself and find a way through it, should be the equivalent of a doctorate on addiction. I know the pain, denial, struggle, and all the lies. Most importantly, I have the heart to help others who, like myself, march on the front line of this battle.
I recommend this book because it pulls no punches. It’s not easy to get sober, and it’s not glamorous. Jack Grisham--lead singer of the punk band T.S.O.L., has 33 years of sobriety at the time of this writing. He shares that journey honestly with a heart for those needing to hear of his struggles. It’s a good read that teaches what’s behind the 12 steps of recovery.
A guided journey through the 12 Step process. A Principle of Recovery is a look at sobriety through the eyes and heart of Jack Grisham--lead singer of the punk band T.S.O.L., and the author of 'An American Demon'. Grisham has been clean and sober since January 8th, 1989. This book cuts through the myths and misconceptions of what it is to live in recovery and gives us a glimpse into the freedom that being sober can bring. An agnostic libertarian Grisham challenges some of the "cult" like practices in today's groups and encourages you to think for yourself, live without…
