Face It

I’ve loved Debbie Harry and “Blondie” as along as I can remember. I remember seeing Ms. Harry hosting on The Muppet Show when I was a child, admiring the striking Parallel Lines album cover in my parents’ vinyl collection, and loving the rocksteady beat of “Tide is High” from the way-way back of my neighbor’s wood-paneled station wagon at the cusp of the 80’s. Blondie is tied to many of my earliest memories.

In college, I came heavily under the sway of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. From there, I learned more about Television, (early) Talking Heads, the New York Dolls, Berlin-era Bowie, the Stooges, Iggy Pop, the Ramones (under guidance from Stephen King), and…Blondie. That era of NYC creativity is so interesting as Woodstock’s “Summer of Love” faded into, just a few short years later, “NYC Drop Dead” in the Ford administration. In that moment visually “Saturday Night Live” was born and, borne on the shoulders of Long Island or suburban kids come to rest in the Lower East Side, a striking and new music scene emerged.

Ms. Harry was there.

From that punk-era, Harry then underwent a series of interesting artistic transformations: as Warhol’s muse in an Amiga computer art demonstration, as a fatal siren in the disturbing body-horror work of David Cronenberg, and as a canvas for twisted biomechanical ideas under the airbrush of H.R. Giger.

I expected her memoir to reflect and reveal what life at Max’s Kansas City and CBGB’s was like. I wanted to see the dirt and the grim that gave her faux-Marilyn angel an edge. But I also wanted to see how she contextualized that lightning-in-a-bottle moment and then how she made sense of what came after, including the Blondie reunion.

But this book failed to meet my expectation. It lacked, and I think this might be an editing error, any “frame” to turn “and this happened and then this happened” into a grander narrative worthy of this icon.

Despite consistently being in the right place at the right time, the book makes it seem like Ms. Harry hasn’t thought about what it all meant. Yes, it was dirty; yes, it was sleazy; yes, everyone did drugs; yes, she’s lucky to have not died a few times due to drugs, violence, or carbon monoxide. But the book doesn’t really connect the dots. Colorful singers and guests appear, have an anecdote, and then disappear.

Maybe it’s unfair to expect that. Not everyone (and, based on the rest of the book, probably not Ms. Harry) lives with their head so far up their own analytical backside as yours truly. I"m not sure if the framing was lost in editing (pitchforks and tar for the editors) or if Ms. Harry simply doesn’t think that way about her own life. Whichever the case it ungled the narrative so that it felt like a series of facts on index cards versus a tale.

If anything, I walked away with seeing what a good person she is (her heart is very giving), feeling the agony and lifelong trauma of her childhood abandonment, and ick-factor for how everyone around her (adolescent through “Blondie”) thought was cute or funny for men (many of whom were famous and/or way, way too old for her) to go ga-ga over her.

I’m frustrated irked that the editors didn’t extract something more substantial from this person who was consistently at the flashpoint of big cultural shifts. Maybe more interviews, coaching, or editing was needed, but I was left wanting more: and not in the way that a master entertainer does, but rather in the way that happens when a second draft should have revealed and driven the authors to keep going.

{
  "title": "Face It: A Memoir",
  "author": "Debbie Harry",
  "highlightCount": 12,
  "noteCount": 1,
  "annotations": [
    {
      "highlight": "character in Blondie was partly a visual homage to Marilyn, and partly a statement about the good old double standard. The “Blondie” character I created was sort of androgynous. More and more lately, I’ve been thinking that I was probably portraying some kind of transsexual creature.",
      "location": 1106,
      "annotation": ""
    },
    {
      "highlight": "Marilyn really. She was a woman playing a man’s idea of a woman.",
      "location": 1111,
      "annotation": ""
    },
    {
      "highlight": "I wasn’t submissive or begging him to come back, I was kicking his ass, kicking him out, kicking my own ass too.",
      "location": 1115,
      "annotation": ""
    },
    {
      "highlight": "Blondie character was an inflatable doll but with a dark, provocative, aggressive side. I was playing it up yet I was very serious.",
      "location": 1116,
      "annotation": ""
    },
    {
      "highlight": "the universal thread was that we were pointing out the inconsistencies in a hypocritical society and the foibles of human nature and what a joke it all was.",
      "location": 1128,
      "annotation": ""
    },
    {
      "highlight": "A kind of big Dadaist up-yours.",
      "location": 1129,
      "annotation": "Punk"
    },
    {
      "highlight": "lesson was really the same as it ever was: survive and find a way to create while you’re hurtling through space.",
      "location": 1467,
      "annotation": ""
    },
    {
      "highlight": "There is the concept of a time being “ripe” but now time has sped up. No sooner ripe than rotten.",
      "location": 1783,
      "annotation": ""
    },
    {
      "highlight": "in those days, it was about making something happen. And over time, we did make some things happen.",
      "location": 1784,
      "annotation": ""
    },
    {
      "highlight": "the biggest seller is always sex. Sex is what makes everything happen. Sex is why people dress nice, comb their hair, brush their teeth, and take showers. In the entertainment field, sex appeal, looks, and talent are the primary factors.",
      "location": 1993,
      "annotation": ""
    },
    {
      "highlight": "Like most girls of my generation, I’d been programmed since childhood to look for a strong man to carry me off and look after me.",
      "location": 1998,
      "annotation": ""
    },
    {
      "highlight": "Abandonment, the most enduring pain that always lay within me, waiting for its moment to consume me again. With that insight, something shifted in me finally. A new clarity, an acceptance, an acknowledgment, and a kind of release. That moment will live with me forever.",
      "location": 3275,
      "annotation": ""
    }
  ]
}