Altogether a grand entertainment, effortlessly blending pop culture and high culture.
When in doubt, let David Bowie narrate your autobiography.
“It’s a strange world wherever you are.” So says Graham Greene as filtered through Momus, the pseudonym of Scottish pop musician Nicholas Currie. Born in 1960, Momus has been writing and making music for decades, yet he isn’t particularly well known except perhaps among fans of Vampire Weekend. It’s fitting, therefore, that he put writers and musicians better known than he to work in telling his life story. “Dead writers are unemployed,” he writes at the beginning. “It’s a shame, because they could be put to better use than rotting and being forgotten.” Benjamin Spock, the guiding light of the parents of boomers everywhere, turns up early to assure readers that because “children given autonomy will tend to become adult of their own accord,” his mother did just right to allow N—so he’s addressed throughout, akin to a certain literary K—to push the books in the bookshelves around as he crawled. Sigmund Freud shows up to validate an early expression of carnal interest while hard-boiled detective novelist Mickey Spillane is on hand to deliver a few nicely cynical lines about the nature of life. Some of the “pastiches” are less effective than others. For example, a longish contribution attributed to Ernest Hemingway doesn’t sound in the least bit Hemingway-esque as it recounts what it was like to be in New York on 9/11. Some are overstuffed, as when Karl Kraus, the Viennese satirist, delivers a soliloquy that draws in the biologist Ernst Haeckel, DSL technology, the iPhone, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Lord Haw-Haw, among others. Still, the appearance by David Bowie, N’s “lodestar, the single most decisive influence on his life,” is lovely, and it will make those who share the author’s love for him miss Bowie all the more as “life goes on in its innocent, incorrigible way.”
Altogether a grand entertainment, effortlessly blending pop culture and high culture.Pub Date: July 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-14408-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
An old-school Hollywood tell-all with all the trimmings, traumas, and bold-face names.
A great American character claims her double legacy of genius and addiction.
Calling herself “the original nepo-baby,” the daughter of Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli offers a raw and revealing look at a life shaped by fame and personal struggle. At the heart of Minnelli’s story is her fraught relationship with her volatile mother. While stressing that “our love was what mattered,” life with Judy was no picnic. The night before her fifth birthday, she accidentally kicked her mother in the head while watching TV, permanently scarred by lesson that “if Mama got angry, she was the most terrifying person in my life.” Garland’s addictions made her unstable and unreliable, forcing her daughter to take on adult responsibilities at a very young age. A veteran performer by the time she was in double digits, she won the first star in her EGOT crown (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards) at age 19 for her role in the musical Flora the Red Menace. This was also her first work with John Kander and Fred Ebb, musical collaborators in her most iconic successes: Cabaret, Liza With a “Z,” and New York, New York. Minnelli describes taking her first Valium in 1969 at the time of her mother’s death from an overdose, unwittingly assuming the mantle of addictions that would mar her public and private life for decades. In and out of the Betty Ford Center, she finally achieved sobriety in 2015, on the eve of her 70th birthday. As the title suggests, she has great stories, and, with the help of her dear friend Feinstein and co-writers Getlin and Evans, she leaves out none of the juice. From her torrid, cocaine-fueled romance with Martin Scorsese (both were married at the time, and she cheated on both husband and lover with Mikhail Baryshnikov) to her falling-out with Lady Gaga at the Oscars in 2022, she spares neither herself nor anyone else and, in the process, reclaims her once very tattered dignity in a moving and remarkable way.
An old-school Hollywood tell-all with all the trimmings, traumas, and bold-face names.Pub Date: March 10, 2026
ISBN: 9781538773666
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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