Cherie Currie

Currie was the singer for the 70's teen band The Runaways. One of the first songs she ever recorded was the band's hit "Cherry Bomb", when she was fifteen years old. This memoir covers Currie's childhood and home life, her meeting with Svengalie Kim Fowley and the other members who would become her bandmates for the next two years. Currie goes into detail, often horrifying detail, as to the treatment of these very young girls by creepy Fowley, who seems to have gotten their parents to sign them over to him in the hopes of fame and wealth.
She's had a highly dramatic life, with some really terrible things happening to her, yet it's often due to her poor judgement. The reader should keep in mind that this book is very much Currie's version of events, helped along by a co-author. The writing is often simplistic, especially in the beginning, with lots of exclamation points, which I noticed seemed an awful lot like the foreword attributed to Joan Jett. It's when the story gets to The Runaways years that things really pick up, and that's the reason anyone would be reading this, so it delivers.… (plus d'informations)

Cherie Currie is one of my idols. In the ninth grade, we had to do a report on authors and I did mine on her since, technically, she is one. She'd been a drug addict since her mid teens to her mid twenties but then turned her life around. She'd survived two sexual assaults, calling herself a survivor rather than a rape victim. She's just so amazing.

I read this book at first because of the Runaways movie, a movie about a girl group in the 70s, that had come out in 2010 that I saw on DVD. And I saw the documentary Edgeplay. Having seen both of those and having listened to the Runaways, I wanted to read Cherie's memoir to read about the events of the Runaways. Of course, this book covers her life before joining the band, during her two years as a Runaway, and her life after quitting, which included getting kidnapped and raped by a lunatic, almost getting killed in a car crash, living with a drug dealer, hitting rock bottom of her drug addiction, her dad's death, the rise and fall of her acting career, her solo album, her album with her twin sister and the end of her contract at her record company, her fallout with her twin sister, rehab, sobriety, reunion with her sister, getting married and having a kid, plus her current career as a chainsaw carver in California.

In 1989, she first published this, but the edition I read was a new 2011 edition (it was new then, of course) with an afterword chronicling the Runaways biopic starring Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett and Dakota Fanning (Cherie's favourite actress) as Cherie Currie, fellow former Runaway Sandy West's tragic death due to lung cancer (RIP), a forward written by Joan Jett herself, and two "deleted feature," added chapters which include Cherie's meeting and asking out of her husband and now ex-husband, Robert Hayes, and how she gave birth to Jake Hayes, her son.

This is the third time reading it because I found her story so inspirational. Warning: there's a part where it details how she lost her virginity to her sister Marie's creepy ex Derek when he barges in her room and rapes her, but it's not too explicit, just disturbing. And there's another chapter, titled The Terrible Green Limousine, where I madman lures her into his car and kidnaps her and takes her somewhere so he can beat and rape her for six hours or so. The second rape scene isn't inherently graphic, and she doesn't talk as much about being raped, but it's still disturbing and messed up.

This is really good. Plus the discussion about her drug use and how it eventually alienated and hurt her loved ones and wrecked her acting career is enough to make me vow never to do drugs. Fellow former Runaway, Lita Ford, is coming out with her own memoir, so I'm looking forward to her side of the story, as admittedly Cherie did't paint her in the best of lights, and I'm sure Lita has her reasons for acting the way she did toward Cherie.
… (plus d'informations)

This was a very tough book to read because it was a very tough story. This is a rewrite of an earlier edition and you can definitely feel that in parts. The beginning could be tough because there was less edit help than there was at the end. There seemed to be a conscious attempt to retain as much as Cherie's voice as possible and that did make reading the story tough at times. I wish there had been a little less voice and a little more editing in places because that would make the story easier to read simply from a language perspective - because it is a very powerful story.

If you didn't hate Kim Fowley before, you will by the time you're done.

… (plus d'informations)