Face It

Debbie Harry is best known for her vocal work as a singer, but here the musician becomes a narrator to regale us with stories of her unique life as the lead female singer of Blondie in the mid-to-late 1970s. Fans of the group will be delighted that this book is punctuated with cameos by her band members Clem Burke and Gary Valentine, who pepper the drug-filled escapades with their gruff sense of humor. Listeners who grew up listening to punk music will be riveted by this tell-all behind-the-scenes romp of Harry's colorful life. She holds nothing back as she shares with frank honesty the toll of fame, drugs, and financial ruin. M.R. � AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

July 22, 2019
The singer of the New Wave band Blondie and star of art-house movies Videodrome and Hairspray looks back on lots of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll in this rough-and-tumble memoir. Harry recounts her plunge into bohemian New York in the 1960s and her navigation of the music scene as it shifted from hippiedom to disco to punk. It’s a story of creative ferment, as she infused the burgeoning punk aesthetic into her own glammed-up style—Marilyn Monroe with “a dark, provocative, aggressive side”—and used Method acting techniques to hone her singing while slogging through gigs in gloriously grungy clubs including CBGB’s and L.A.’s Whiskey a Go Go . Her portrait of Blondie’s success in the late ’70s feels less effervescent, full of wearisome touring and business wrangles. Harry offers a frank look at her life on the edge, including “oversexed” erotic adventures, a mugging and rape that she shrugs off (“the stolen guitars hurt me more”), an attempted abduction by a man she thinks may have been serial killer Ted Bundy, and unapologetic drug use. (“Heroin was a great consolation,” she reflects of a period when she supplied herself and her hospitalized bandmate and boyfriend Chris Stein with the narcotic.) The narrative rambles, but Blondie fans will love its piquant atmospherics and the energy and honesty of Harry’s take on her singular saga.