In 1981, Grace Jones wrote and sang the lyric "I'll never write my memoirs" on her fifth album, Nightclubbing. Happily for readers, she's changed her mind. "If you do not want to limit yourself, then be prepared to change your mind--often," she writes. With I'll Never Write My Memoirs, Jones proves to be as captivating and eccentric a memoirist as she is a performer.
The Jamaican-born Jones is an original thinker and her writing reflects her quest to learn about the world and her place in it. She explains, "To write this book is being vulnerable, and it is the only way it will work--not to close off but to open up, which takes a lot of strength." This is a woman who devotes four pages to her first orgasm and an entire chapter to why she never arrives on time. When she turns her laser-sharp attention to celebrities around her, she creates concise and illuminating portraitures.
At almost 400 pages, I'll Never Write My Memoirs never slows its pace. Jones captures the raw hurt of her abusive childhood, the confusion of watching her friends die during the early AIDS outbreak, and the joy of becoming a grandmother. Although she studied acting and was cast in a few high-profile films (A View to a Kill; Vamp), she writes, "The film business was a motherf*cking monster, and one that would have killed me if I had kept going." Jones and her co-author, music journalist and producer Paul Morley, spin a fascinating epic of life among international models, musicians and filmmakers. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant