2023 re read: 3 years later and I still really adore this book. It is very organic, steeped in female solidarity but with characters with very present flaws. It’s quietly subversive, quick, and perfectly performed as an audiobook. I recently watched the show, which fell pretty short of the book, but was still descent. Much of what makes this works is its tapping into mythos of that time period, culture, and now defunct kind of documentaries; as well as the projecting of a particular notion of an audience onto musicians. I’ve read, literally, over a thousand books since last coming to this—much of it literary—and was very glad this provoked exactly the same feelings in me it originally did.

I don’t even like rock and roll stories. For me, they always miss the point. This does not miss the point. I had written it off as hype last year. But when it popped up as a suggestion on Libby, I thought I’d give it a shot. I listened to the audiobook with the full cast almost straight through. I could not stop listening. I loved everything about it. Idyllic about how a story like this usually ends, somehow presenting it in the documentarian way, especially from the lens of the interviewer, just worked for me.

I don’t give a fuck about that time some rocker died from drugs and then came back alive or whatever. Tell me about why they’re so broken. Not how pretty some broken thing is or was. Everything I never knew I wanted from a story like this.