Henry Rollins will tell the story of his troubled youth in a book set to be released in 2027.
Random House will publish the punk rocker’s Bait Dog Boy next winter, the press announced in a news release. It calls the book “a searing memoir of a broken childhood and the hope of escaping it.”
Rollins, a Washington, D.C., native, began his musical career as the singer for the hardcore punk band State of Alert, before joining the band Black Flag in 1981. After the band broke up in 1986, he formed the Rollins Band, which had a modest hit with the 1994 single “Liar.”
In recent years, Rollins has concentrated on acting, writing, and journalism. He is the author of dozens of books, including Black Coffee Blues; Get in the Van: On the Road With Black Flag; and Art To Choke Hearts.
In Bait Dog Boy, Random House says, Rollins “tells the story he spent most of his life trying to avoid, taking us through his childhood and adolescence—from a volatile Washington, D.C., childhood spent shuffling between indifferent parents, to his encounters with a seemingly endless parade of abusive adults, to his eventual meeting with Ian MacKaye, and their ultimate discovery of punk rock, which would become a lifeline.”
“I have no desire to be a survivor,” Rollins writes in the book. “I’d rather accept, absorb, adapt, fight and break that which seeks to break me—to be that which remains.”
Ben Greenberg, vice president and editor in chief at Random House, said in a statement, “I haven’t read another book like Bait Dog Boy. Henry writes about a profoundly loveless childhood in such a clear-eyed way that we feel no pity for him, because he so convincingly feels no pity for himself. His incandescent memoir reads like a paean to the pain of life, every bit as singular as he is.”
Bait Dog Boy is scheduled for publication on March 2, 2027.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
