November 7, 2011
With a name like Storm Large, a larger-than-life destiny seemed natural for the rock singer and winning contestant on the TV reality show Rock Star: Supernova. Yet growing up in the ’70s in Southborough, Mass., where her father was a teacher and coach at Mt. Mark’s prep school, Large was plagued by her mother’s mental illness, as she recounts in this frank, funny, and caustically un-self-pitying memoir. Her mother’s manic depression and undiagnosed personality disorder required frequent hospitalizations, wreaking havoc on the whole family, and for love, Large found sex (“hypersexuality”) a suitable replacement, at a very young age, as well as drug abuse. An inconsistent student who excelled at such sports as crew in order to please her sports-fan dad, Large nonetheless failed at everything except singing, eventually graduating from New York’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts, convinced she couldn’t act. Gravitating toward San Francisco, heroin, and rock groups, she found some success with the band Dirty Mouth in the 1990s, then in Portland with the Balls. Yet the gritty druggie anecdotes and one-night stands aside, her memoir boils down to the tension inherent in her relationship with her mother, who used her sickness as emotional manipulation. In her gutsy, shrill way, Large exhibits an engaging insouciance in delving into very real, scary, emotionally weighty issues.
November 15, 2011
Indie singer and reality-TV star Large unloads stories about her volatile life. Best recognized as a contender on Rock Star: Supernova, Large has the heart of a true exhibitionist. She wrote and starred in a short-lived one-woman show off-Broadway, but this project marks her first literary foray, and her memoir pulls no punches. The book opens with the author's girlhood revelation about her hypersexuality, and goes on to describe her emotional, messy relationship with her mentally ill mother. Now in her early 40s, Large writes with brutal honesty about visiting her mother in mental hospitals, as well as being told by doctors that she would grow up to be just like her. That prediction had an enormous effect on her psyche, and she came out swinging against every part of herself she identified as being similar to her mother. Defensive to the point of violence, she was picked on at school, and she perpetuated mean gossip by acting out in ways that included profligate drug use and having sex with strangers from a very early age. "When I was high I felt like a rock star," Large writes--although after she began to develop her singing talent, it became acting like a rock star that led her to feel like one. She eventually fled New York and now lives in Portland, and she regularly tours with full-time musicians. The author's prose is casual and vernacular, rife with descriptions that are not for the faint of heart. Though not necessarily likable, she comes across as authentic and unapologetic. A no-holds-barred coming-of-age story replete with mental illness, drugs and sex.
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December 15, 2011
Rock singer Large recounts how, as a child, her world revolved around grappling with her mother's many bouts of instability and worrying about the next time her mother would wind up in the hospital. Large's great fearthat she might suffer the same fatewas confirmed by a careless comment by a doctor who told her that her mother's condition was hereditary and she was doomed to fall prey to it as well. Large withdrew from her family and turned to sex and drugs as an outlet for her pain and anger. She slept with older men and did a wide array of drugs, resulting in, among other woes, nearly being arrested and getting kicked out of school. Rock and roll, specifically the formation of her band, saved Large, giving her a focus for her energy and creativity. Raw and ultimately downright inspiring, Large's chronicle of her ascension to rock fame as her band achieves indie cred and she competes in a reality TV show will leave readers gratified that she escaped her mother's sad fate.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)