While her fans would expect nothing less, songwriter-musician Williams' memoir is remarkable for its true insight into the author as a person and as an artist. Love affairs and failed flirtations, bad hangovers and bad press, day jobs and speechless-moment meetings with idols like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen--it's all fair game. (Readers will want to find out for themselves which fellow musician didn't take kindly to being bitten during a make out session.) Starting in Williams' peripatetic childhood spent moving around the South for her poet father's pursuit of teaching jobs and on through her early love of music and the career it bore over decades, the book also shines light on the facts of being a woman in music and a woman in her amorphous blues, folk, "alt-country," non-category specificity. Woven into Williams' story, which moves mostly chronologically and discusses family trauma and mental health with openness, are the nitty-gritty of album-making and the lyrics to many of her songs, with the stories behind them.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Reading like it was written on a series of cocktail napkins in the absolutely best way, this ever-quotable memoir of a born songsmith has something to offer nearly any grownup who has listened to music for the last half-century.

The veteran singer/songwriter captures the essence of her life and career. In this revealing memoir, Williams (b. 1953) writes that her Southern "childhood informs so many of my songs." Her mother struggled with mental illness and alcoholism; her father was a poet and "a struggling itinerant professor moving around and working at various colleges." Family provided her a "progressive streak," and her music "borrows from southern gothic elements and blues and folk and rock." At 12, Williams got her first guitar and started playing from songbooks. In the late 1960s, her parents divorced; Jordan, one of her father's former students, became her stepmother. As a teenager, living in Chile and Mexico "made an imprint on me that lin-gers still today." Her move to Austin in 1974 "started to liberate me from a lot of that southern Christian guilt and hippie bullshit that was very exclusive and limiting." The author fondly recalls her friendship with the young Arkansas poet Frank Stanford, who committed suicide in 1978, the same year she signed her first record contract, with Folkways. She had a "vision" for her music but had to wait for it to happen "well into my forties." In the mid-1980s, Williams lived in Los Angeles, performing in many clubs and opening shows for other bands. After starting her own group, a "British punk label" gave her a "chance to make a commercial record." The author chronicles the many highs and lows of dealing with record labels and recording sessions. As she gained notoriety, she wanted to try new things. In 1998, her fifth album, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, won a Grammy. Her 2001 follow-up, Essence, "would be all about the groove." The author writes candidly about dealing with emotional problems and OCD, and she shares personal stories about many of her songs. A poignant, plainspoken life story from a dedicated musician. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Singer-songwriter Williams flexes her linguistic chops in her soulful debut memoir. She begins with her tumultuous Deep South childhood that nonetheless offered bright spots: "Yes, my family was dysfunctional, fucked up. But that's not what really matters to me. What matters is that I inherited my musical talent from my mother and my writing ability from my father." Her teenage years were shaped by obsessive guitar playing, a love for Chilean composer Violeta Parra, and full-blown worship of Bob Dylan. Williams chased her musical dreams into early adulthood, playing gigs in Jackson, Miss., before signing her first record contract in 1978. Throughout her career, Williams cycled through romances, tours, and struggles with mental illness and professional insecurity. Describing her decision to skip the 1994 Grammys after winning the award for Best Country Song, the musician is forthright: "The truth is that I was not just self-conscious but also scared. I feared that I didn't belong. It's a feeling I've been trying to shake my entire life." Raw and honest, this must-read account soars on the back of Williams's hard-won wisdom about making art and overcoming struggle. Fans and non-fans will be rapt. Agent: David McCormick, McCormick Literary. (Apr.)