"Composed"

Author: Roseanne Cash
Genre: Memoir
Publisher: Penguin Group, 2010
Pages: 256
My Rating: Recommend

Composed is more autobiography than memoir, but interesting nonetheless.

Synopsis: For thirty years as a musician, Rosanne Cash has enjoyed both critical and commercial success, releasing a series of albums that are as notable for their lyrical intelligence as for their musical excellence. Now, in her memoir, Cash writes compellingly about her upbringing in Southern California as the child of country legend Johnny Cash, and of her relationships with her mother and her famous stepmother, June Carter Cash. In her account of her development as an artist she shares memories of a hilarious stint as a twenty-year-old working for Columbia Records in London; recording her own first album on a German label; working her way to success; her marriage to Rodney Crowell, a union that made them Nashville's premier couple; her relationship with the country music establishment; taking a new direction in her music and leaving Nashville to move to New York; motherhood; dealing with the deaths of her parents, in part through music; the process of songwriting; and the fulfillment she has found with her current husband and musical collaborator, John Leventhal. Cash has written an unconventional and compelling memoir that, in the tradition of M. F. K. Fisher's The Gastronomical Me and Frank Conroy's Stop-Time, is a series of linked pieces that combine to form a luminous and brilliant whole.

Review:  It took me a few chapters to get into Cash's style and flow, but she manages to take what is surprisingly a pretty mundane life (her own) and makes it interesting. Not the most compelling, inspiring memoir I've read, but as a huge Johnny, Roseanne, and June Carter Cash fan I liked it. I especially enjoyed her memories as a young, working mother. She also wrote several amazing, moving eulogies for her father, stepmother, and stepsister. She can write, there is no doubt about that, but I'm not sure her style is 100% suitable to a memoir, it's more autobiographical in feel.