Robin Green

What a long, strange trip Robin Green has had, and why she titles her memoir after her very brief stint as a Rolling Stone writer is a complete mystery. Growing up in Providence, RI, in a Jewish enclave, Robin flees her neglectful mother and ends up living in Chicago and San Francisco in shambolic circumstances and with men who treat her with vague disinterest and contempt. Although it’s clear that she can put together thoughts and sentences, there's very little in here to interest the reader – it’s all kind of grey and gloomy and mopey. Here's a woman who attended the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, who wrote for the fine, groundbreaking TV shows Northern Exposure and The Sopranos and won Emmys, and somehow her focus is on Jann Wenner and his cabal of sexist jerks at Rolling Stone. Much more interesting is Robin's reaction to the suicide of her childhood friend Ronnie and her dealings with the horrible David Chase, producer of The Sopranos and all around neurotic nasty. Maybe her final success, the formulaic show Blue Bloods, adored by the Matlock crowd, has made her wealthy and secure, but she and this book are really all over the map, and not much feels consequential for the reader.

Quotes: ”In 1965, for the first time, I hear the Stones’ “Satisfaction” and then “Get Off My Cloud” and when someone played either one of the jukebox, the whole place stopped and listened in awe, everybody looked at each other with expressions that read What the fuck is that? because nobody had heard anything like it before.”

“Not fifteen feet from my window as I lay sleepless in the saggy iron-framed single bed, the trains would come to a stop outside the black Iowa night, sounding for all the world like a herd of giant mechanical buffalo, clanging into each other one by one, all the way down the line ad fucking infinitum.”… (plus d'informations)