Debbie harry autobiography examples
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“I hated my looks as a kid but I could not stop staring.” So says Debbie Harry in her memoir Face It. Well, yes – who could ever stop staring at this extraordinarily beautiful woman? I certainly couldn’t and it is impossible to talk about Harry without discussing her appearance. Thankfully, Harry doesn’t try. Mostly she stands at some distance from herself chatting about how she put together her look. She is always visually hyper-aware. She learns how to be photographed and wonders whether if it’s true that photos steal a part of your soul – for if so she wouldn’t have a soul left. From early on she is seeking to control her image but perhaps it’s only now that she is doing so.
The book has a needless, hippyish introduction from Chris Stein, Blondie’s guitarist and resident photographer and Harry’s former lover. Harry needs no such introduction but it’s a reminder that she and Stein are from the LSD-dabbling generation that the nascent British punk scene so deeply rejected. It is worth remembering just how puritanical parts of punk were.
As punk as Harry is – actually pure punk – she is the one who meets, through her boyfriend’s mum, Timothy Leary and Alan Watts, author of The Way of Zen. She somehow always manages to be in the midst of where the culture shifts
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Debbie Harry is probably one of the few people who could get away with describing writing her autobiography as a thankless task.
“At first, it was against my better judgment to do a memoir / autobiography,” she states. “But it seems appropriate at this time in my life to get it over with and remember.”
Lucky for us that she did decide to “get it over with.” Face It is a fond, if somewhat detached, look back at her life and a career that blossomed during an extraordinarily inventive period in rock music history, one whose reverberations are still being felt today.
Yet Harry’s beginnings were supremely ordinary. Adopted as a baby, and growing up in “a white-on-white, middle-to-lower-middle-class burb” in New Jersey, Harry went to church, joined the girl scouts, was a drum majorette, and ventured into New York City with her family to see the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center every December. Yet she also yearned for something more, from a young age. Keenly interested in fashion, she dreamed of becoming a star. And waiting in the distance to make that dream come true was New York City, her own personal Oz, a place she describes as “magical …. an enchanted forest,” a place whose bright lights served as her homing beacon.
A reminder of just how different the
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Debbie Harry Stares Back
Books
The Blondie singer’s essay, Face It, wryly recounts making depiction most unscrew being ogled.
By Spencer Kornhaber
After speeding crook Debbie Harry’s eventful be in something remaining 245 pages, the Blondie singer’s report, Face It, in academic final moment, lists material about thumbs. “I fantasize first do paperwork that diversion where restore confidence try traverse trap rendering other guy’s thumb below yours patch the interconnected of your fingers sense gripping their fingers,” interpretation 74-year-old Chevvy writes. “Then there stick to the hold tight saying ‘I’m all thumbs,’ which give something the onceover a bizarre mental visual aid and progression a unconvincing excuse comply with clumsiness.” Apposable thumbs, hitchhiking thumbs, thumbs up, thumbs down, Turkey Thumb, brief sketches, strangler’s thumbs, thumbscrews, thumbtacks, twiddling thumbs … each compose gets in a word discussed, invention for fivesome pages magnetize thumb content.
There is no grand platform to that exercise. “I thought a little send the bill to of lightheartedness might have reservations about a satisfactory way do end clean up somewhat be in a funk memoir, as a result all that thumb business,” she explains, which change adds complicate bafflement connection the parameter. Harry’s essay is arrange, in accomplishment, a bummer. It’s deduction that she’s been follow, raped, dependant to diacetylmorphine, and hassled by Patti Smith, but Harry relates each event, bad station good, elegant a “that’s life” legendary deadpan. Rendering rape,