Talking to My Angels

[cornerofmadness]

Talking to My Angels by Melissa Etheridge

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I feel like three stars might be a bit generous for this barely-there memoir but a) I only read this for a reading challenge prompt as I don't like memoirs and b) apparently I backed the wrong horse in getting this in book form. Based on other reviews the audio book would have been better because she sings the lyrics and those make up like a quarter of the book. Also if there is any credence given to the other reviews here on GR, the whole first half of this book (it's 200 pages) is a rehash of her first memoir.

I didn't much enjoy reading about her mother and her sexually abusive sister but I think my biggest issue is there's no more depth to this than a puddle after a gentle rain. There's also no focus. It just skims along her life. The dust cover sets up undelivered promises about it being raw and vulnerable (no, not really) and covering the changes in the music industry, her cancer and the loss of her son. No, not really.

The most emotion I got from this was how excited she was about the 'heroic dose' of cannabis she accidentally ingested which swung wide the doors of perception (as anyone about 10 years younger than her could have attested to) and even that isn't really the focus (though the first chapter certainly suggests it's going to be). The shift to streaming barely rated a couple paragraphs. Her breast cancer a chapter (though dealing with my own recent diagnosis I can understand that and maybe it was better to just say I don't want to dwell on it and omit it entirely). Even her son Beckett takes up only the last 20-30 pages of this.

I can't escape feeling she had enough for a couple articles in a magazine and the rest was filler and song lyrics. I would have been happier sticking to her music because the only thing I really got out of this was her ex Julia blames her for everything (down to Beckett's death) , that she's really pro-cannabis and that she sees herself as wanting to be a paragon of homosexual relationships but fails to live up entirely.



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