Dear readers,
This week’s authors have a good deal in common. Both women were fetishized for their looks, entangled romantically with musical superstars, situated at the epicenter of 1960s culture, veterans of yearslong heroin addictions. And both were profoundly underestimated.
In their memoirs, both also divulge a preposterous amount of glamorous detail. But that’s not what makes these books remarkable. Every addiction story comes with a proof of fire testing. The best ones speak frankly, without euphemism or hosanna, and both of these make the cut.
When you consider that the authors spent years chasing a numbed, obliterated existence, their books are all the more meaningful for their clarity of feeling, vision and memory. Thank goodness they were paying attention all those decades ago. Thank God they made it out alive.
—Joumana
“Faithfull: An Autobiography,” by Marianne Faithfull with David Dalton
Nonfiction, 1994
Faithfull, who died in January, is an exception to the rule that writers are more interesting on the page than off it. That’s not to diminish her literary talent; each time I open this book I’m struck dumb by her sentences. Only a true writer (or a sharp observer with a good co-writer) could have captured this vivid, astral life — as a musician and actress, notorious wearer of a large fur rug, muse to Mick Jagger, heroin-addicted squatter, preparer of tarragon-scented roast chicken — in such freakishly lucid prose. To take just one example, she describes Bob Dylan’s attempts to explain his lyrics to her as sexy “cerebral jangling.”
But in Faithfull’s case, nothing beats the life. Born to an Austrian baroness in decline who raised her daughter “like one of her cats,” Faithfull says that even as she was becoming a young pop star she remained a bookish misfit who brought Jane Austen and Keats with her on tour. She is devastating on the music scene that tried to shape her image. One news release “projected an eerie fusion of haughty aristocrat and folky bohemian child-woman. It was a tantalizing ready-made fantasy. Unfortunately, it wasn’t me.”
So who was Marianne Faithfull? The book leaves little doubt: a sardonic, wickedly intelligent and fallible woman — during a particularly low period, she retrieves her 17-year-old son from the airport and offers him cocaine — whose life mission was to “translate my hieroglyphic inner life into words.” I don’t know how anyone so proximate to controlled substances and media glare managed to preserve her memories in such Technicolor.
I permit myself one occasion per calendar year to call writing beautiful and I’m taking it now: This is a beautiful, redemptive book.
Read if you like: “Sister Morphine,” curtain bangs, Anjelica Huston’s memoir “A Story Lately Told.”
Available from: Daunt Books or your coolest aunt’s bookshelf; Tower Records (R.I.P.) ought to have stocked it.
“I Ran Into Some Trouble,” by Peggy Caserta and Maggie Falcon
Nonfiction, 2018
I first learned about Caserta from her New York Times obituary last year. Though she is best known for her connection to Janis Joplin, which she immortalized in a lurid 1973 tell-all she later disowned, Caserta was a bell-bottomed, track-marked multihyphenate, a lesbian Haight-Ashbury storekeeper and entrepreneur at the dawn of the counterculture, when “the San Francisco fog was rapidly being replaced by color.”
She did love Janis. But that came after.
Her shop Mnasidika, named for Sappho’s lover, was a boutique on the corner of Haight and Ashbury catering to other gay women with homemade double-breasted blazers, sweatshirts in deep tones and lots of jeans. It seems inevitable that she would meet Joplin, a fellow Southerner whose tastes aligned with her own. The fact that both had a measure of financial freedom allowed their friendship and occasional romance to flourish.
Some blamed Caserta for Joplin’s death, though she maintains it was Joplin who got her into heroin, not vice versa. She was doubly reviled after her first memoir, “Going Down With Janis,” was published three years after Joplin’s death: Promising an insider’s account of life with the star, it was widely seen as a tawdry attempt to profit off tragedy. Caserta frames it as a hack job by a morally deficient ghostwriter who played up the sex and the drugs to sell copies, and swears she never saw a proof before the book went to press.
By the time she wrote this later memoir, Caserta had put to rest a decades-long drug addiction, which also coincided with stints in jail, the loss of her house and the bottoming out of her life time and again. One particularly memorable episode involves her living in a Mexican prison under the guise of an extended conjugal visit in order to abet a jailbreak. It may seem extreme, but to Caserta it was a simple calculation: The drugs there were good and cheap, and the weather was fabulous.
The writing in this book is somewhat uneven. There are, appropriately for a daughter of Louisiana, a number of “Jeezuses.” But those quibbles are edged out by Caserta’s insistent affection for life itself, whether it entailed outfitting the Grateful Dead in denim and leather or helping her aging mother shuttle between the porch and the living room in the drop-dead bayou heat.
Read if you like: Fashion history, bespoke leather goods, Muir Beach.
Available from: This seems to have been a more or less self-published affair, so your best bet is a big book retailer.
Why don’t you …
- Grieve anew for the Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis by way of “Unknown Pleasures,” a memoir by the rough-and-tumble Mancunian bassist Peter Hook (who, with the band’s other surviving members, went on to form New Order)?
- Stare down a rival for a mixed martial arts rematch in Katie Kitamura’s debut novel, “The Longshot”?
- Roam around with soccer-loving hooligans in Bill Buford’s “Among the Thugs”?
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