A sweet-and-sour study of a songwriter’s coming-of-age.
The alt-rock and country singer recalls childhood abuse, misogyny, and a wayward path to success.
Case’s memoir is informed by injustice, betrayal, and the serial mistreatment of women. Growing up in Washington state, her family was a study in dysfunction; when she was in second grade, she was told that cancer had killed her mother, who returned home a year-and-a-half later, apparently cured. (She wouldn’t get the full story till years later.) Date-raped at 14, Case spent her teens and 20s in a drug-addled world, then all but stumbled onto a music career. Though her experiences are despondent, the tone of this well-turned book is lively and often funny. That’s partly because Case has a songwriter’s gift for potent imagery. Her parents started out “poor as empty acorns” and drove a car that “looked like a nauseous basking shark”; during winters in Chicago, where her career took off, she felt the “wind hammering in like a bouquet of cold fists”; at a soundcheck, her voice “sounds like it’s being piped through a thrift-store whale’s carcass into a pirate’s wet diaper.” That imagination and wit speak to the other prevailing theme in the memoir, the element that gives it a lift: Case’s observations of her hard-won resilience. By turns, that has meant processing the psychic damage of her rape and her family’s betrayals, a disastrous fit of heatstroke at the Grand Ole Opry, an even-worse encounter with country legend (and overt bigot) Charlie Louvin, and more. Case chronicles her various career achievements as a singer-songwriter (including three Grammy nominations), but those feel almost secondary to her study of her emotional growth, which she discusses with a rare candor. “There are moments so lonely they become like personal national parks,” she writes, but the life of a touring musician is irresistible: “It’s both harder than the myth and also contains a more terrible, crunchy joy.”
A sweet-and-sour study of a songwriter’s coming-of-age.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781538710500
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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