Living Like a Runaway

Initial disclosure: my primary interest in a Lita Ford autobiography stems from her time with The Runaways; my interest in her solo career is tangential. The title, of course, certainly suggests ample Runaways material.

It would not be fair to limit a guitarist as talented as Ford to her teenage career, but, in this book, she does herself a disservice by writing as if she were still a teenager: she is the center of every event. Nothing that has ever happened is/was her fault. She is always the good guy. She is misunderstood. Doubtless, these claims are sometimes true, but they're made so often, it becomes impossible to tell when she's telling the truth and when she's not. In the end, it all seems overblown and dubious.

Speaking show more specifically of The Runaways, there is so much that is a mixture of truth and legend: who knows what really happened? However, she tells many stories I have never seen in any other context and which I am extremely tempted to cast as Ford-fables. A primary reason for this, which I will address again, is that Ford tends to be either the hero or the victim in these stories. I admire her for admitting that she first quit the band in 1975 because realizing that some bandmates were gay or bisexual "fucked with [her] head" (p. 29). She does not sugarcoat this reason, and she does attempt to place her ignorance in the context of the what a teenager in 1975 knew. However, on the next page she refers to "[coming] to terms with their behavior" (p. 30), which is not precisely the way I would have hoped she would have phrased this as an adult in 2016.

In final Runaways issues, the memoir is truly notable for what it does and does not discuss. I will not parse individual events in a review, but I would suggest comparing this with Queens of Noise by Evelyn McDonnell.

I was hoping for a memoir that focused on music and what it has been like to evolve as a female musician from the 70s to the present. This book doesn't even scratch the surface of that. Ford's only refrain is that she wanted to show men she could also play guitar, no matter what anyone said or believed. Potential topics of interest that go unexplored are the role that the presentation/packaging of female sexuality has played in her career, relationships and collaborations with other female musicians (unless I miscounted, she gives unqualified thanks to exactly one other female musician in the book), gender dynamics on- and off-stage-- I could go on. I am not saying that this should have been a theoretical manifesto; my issue is that it's 262 pages of name-dropping, celebrity gossip, and grievances about who has done her wrong.

A very specific complaint is that she outs several people in the text, something that I cannot condone. At the same time, she drops a cloth over much of her married life. That's her right if she does not feel safe discussing it, but she is apparently unaware that the same right to privacy extends to other people (in multiple situations involving multiple disclosures).

I do not feel like I know any more about Ford as a musician after reading this. I tried to imagine what it would be like for someone entirely unfamiliar with her to read this book, and I'm fairly certain that reader would not even be able to figure out such basic things as which albums were commercial successes. It's as if Ford wrote this book in order to present a very specific picture of herself for some agenda completely unrelated to fans and music lovers. As such, it's extraordinarily alienating. show less