I just read a great book. I started out getting the book because of being a rock and roll fan. It ended up being about so much more than that. It ended up being a book about overcoming child abuse, forgiveness, and having a great life in spite of a very hard beginning.. It is just an uplifting book. It reminded me that jws don't have the market cornered on crappy childhoods and crazy parents! I think it would resonate with a lot of us here.
Catherine James was the product of beautiful, well-connected Beverly Hills parents who divorced: the father became a transvestite, coming out to James when she was a young adult at Musso & Frank's in Hollywood, as depicted in a wild opening chapter; the mother, Diana, went through a succession of husbands and eventually relinquished caretaking of her daughter to the state.
Having dated Bob Dylan by age 13, James ran away from the Visa Del Mar orphanage to New York and hung out at Andy Warhol's Factory. She met Denny Laine of the Moody Blues, who became an abusive husband and father of her child while she was still in her teens. She shopped on Kings Road in Chelsea and partied with members of the Beatles, the Who and the Rolling Stones, among others. When the marriage didn't work, she took her son back to California and romanced Jackson Browne.
Somehow James makes do with a little help from her friends, finding modeling work, doubling for Diane Keaton and going back to school. Ever cheery, never self-pitying, her memoir is by turns insipid and sweet.