First published 2023
Lucinda Williams opens her memoir with stark honesty about her childhood in the Deep South. Born into a working-class family, she moved twelve times before turning eighteen as her father chased jobs as poet, salesman, and professor. Her mother battled severe mental illness, cycling in and out of hospitals. Williams herself needed an emergency tracheotomy at age one. She traces her musical journey from living room performances for family friends to stages in Mexico City high schools and colleges. The book reveals how doomed romances with poets on motorcycles and the gothic landscapes of Macon, Lake Charles, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans shaped her songwriting. Williams worked day jobs at health food stores and record shops to fund her nighttime music career. Record companies rejected her work as unfinished or too genre-defying. Despite seventeen Grammy nominations and recognition as an influential songwriter, Williams maintains her fighting spirit shaped everything. She connects specific life events to her most memorable lyrics in this raw account of persistence against industry rejection.
Genres: autobiography, southern-gothic, biography-memoir, music
Vibes: emotional, intimate, lyrical
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, found-family
Setting: Baton Rouge, Lake Charles, Macon, Mexico City, New Orleans
Period: 20th-century, 21st-century
272 pages · Hardcover · Crown
Content warnings: mental-illness