Crazy Enough
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4.9 • 7 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
From indie rock sensation Storm Large comes a rough, raw, and compulsively readable memoir about living with the terror of losing your mind-and losing it, only to find yourself.
What would you do if you thought you were going crazy? That, at any time, the voices in your head would finally overwhelm you, hijacking your senses, leaving you a babbling mess, locked up and all alone? Would you tell someone? Who, your family? A doctor? What if the doctors agreed with you, that you were going to lose it one of these days, then what? Storm Large (her real name) knew the toll of mental illness from an early age. She spent major portions of her childhood visiting her mother in mental hospitals and the rest of the time by herself. During a visit to one of these institutions, she jokingly asked her mother's doctor: "I'm not going to end up crazy like her, right?" To which he replied to the nine year old, "It's hereditary. You will absolutely end up like your mother." At that moment, Storm's life changed forever.
Figuring her only chance at any semblance of a life was to run away from everything she saw in her Mom, the weak, the sad, the drug addled and suicidal. She stomped her size twelve boots through sex, drugs and rock n roll, on safari for her sanity. One by one she battled her demons of self-destruction, promiscuity at age thirteen, developing an insatiable hunger for drugs and awful men, eventually becoming addicted to heroin.
It was a chance performance with a friend's band that finally pulled Storm back from the edge. When she discovered her rich talent and deep love for singing, that passion became her salvation and gave her the will to overcome. Storm's one-woman show, which inspired her to write down her story and serves as the foundation for the book, was praised by press as "gritty" and "unapologetic," as well as "funny and direct and insightful." Crazy Enough is a brash, in-your-face account of how one unstoppable woman lost her mind-then found it again in a song.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With a name like Storm Large, a larger-than-life destiny seemed natural for the rock singer and winning contestant on the TV reality show Rock Star: Supernova. Yet growing up in the '70s in Southborough, Mass., where her father was a teacher and coach at Mt. Mark's prep school, Large was plagued by her mother's mental illness, as she recounts in this frank, funny, and caustically un-self-pitying memoir. Her mother's manic depression and undiagnosed personality disorder required frequent hospitalizations, wreaking havoc on the whole family, and for love, Large found sex ("hypersexuality") a suitable replacement, at a very young age, as well as drug abuse. An inconsistent student who excelled at such sports as crew in order to please her sports-fan dad, Large nonetheless failed at everything except singing, eventually graduating from New York's American Academy of Dramatic Arts, convinced she couldn't act. Gravitating toward San Francisco, heroin, and rock groups, she found some success with the band Dirty Mouth in the 1990s, then in Portland with the Balls. Yet the gritty druggie anecdotes and one-night stands aside, her memoir boils down to the tension inherent in her relationship with her mother, who used her sickness as emotional manipulation. In her gutsy, shrill way, Large exhibits an engaging insouciance in delving into very real, scary, emotionally weighty issues.
