Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway

A great look into the darker side of becoming a celebrity at a young age and having no boundaries set. Entertaining in a way that's a little dark and somewhat depressing in it's honesty but a great story about how you can go through your own (mostly self-created) hell and come out better on the other side.

Currie was the singer for the 70's teen band The Runaways. One of the first songs she ever recorded was the band's hit "Cherry Bomb", when she was fifteen years old. This memoir covers Currie's childhood and home life, her meeting with Svengalie Kim Fowley and the other members who would become her bandmates for the next two years. Currie goes into detail, often horrifying detail, as to the treatment of these very young girls by creepy Fowley, who seems to have gotten their parents to sign them over to him in the hopes of fame and wealth.
She's had a highly dramatic life, with some really terrible things happening to her, yet it's often due to her poor judgement. The reader should keep in mind that this book is very much Currie's show more version of events, helped along by a co-author. The writing is often simplistic, especially in the beginning, with lots of exclamation points, which I noticed seemed an awful lot like the foreword attributed to Joan Jett. It's when the story gets to The Runaways years that things really pick up, and that's the reason anyone would be reading this, so it delivers. show less

This was a very tough book to read because it was a very tough story. This is a rewrite of an earlier edition and you can definitely feel that in parts. The beginning could be tough because there was less edit help than there was at the end. There seemed to be a conscious attempt to retain as much as Cherie's voice as possible and that did make reading the story tough at times. I wish there had been a little less voice and a little more editing in places because that would make the story easier to read simply from a language perspective - because it is a very powerful story.

If you didn't hate Kim Fowley before, you will by the time you're done.

Cherie Currie is one of my idols. In the ninth grade, we had to do a report on authors and I did mine on her since, technically, she is one. She'd been a drug addict since her mid teens to her mid twenties but then turned her life around. She'd survived two sexual assaults, calling herself a survivor rather than a rape victim. She's just so amazing.

I read this book at first because of the Runaways movie, a movie about a girl group in the 70s, that had come out in 2010 that I saw on DVD. And I saw the documentary Edgeplay. Having seen both of those and having listened to the Runaways, I wanted to read Cherie's memoir to read about the events of the Runaways. Of course, this book covers her life before joining the band, during her two show more years as a Runaway, and her life after quitting, which included getting kidnapped and raped by a lunatic, almost getting killed in a car crash, living with a drug dealer, hitting rock bottom of her drug addiction, her dad's death, the rise and fall of her acting career, her solo album, her album with her twin sister and the end of her contract at her record company, her fallout with her twin sister, rehab, sobriety, reunion with her sister, getting married and having a kid, plus her current career as a chainsaw carver in California.

In 1989, she first published this, but the edition I read was a new 2011 edition (it was new then, of course) with an afterword chronicling the Runaways biopic starring Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett and Dakota Fanning (Cherie's favourite actress) as Cherie Currie, fellow former Runaway Sandy West's tragic death due to lung cancer (RIP), a forward written by Joan Jett herself, and two "deleted feature," added chapters which include Cherie's meeting and asking out of her husband and now ex-husband, Robert Hayes, and how she gave birth to Jake Hayes, her son.

This is the third time reading it because I found her story so inspirational. Warning: there's a part where it details how she lost her virginity to her sister Marie's creepy ex Derek when he barges in her room and rapes her, but it's not too explicit, just disturbing. And there's another chapter, titled The Terrible Green Limousine, where I madman lures her into his car and kidnaps her and takes her somewhere so he can beat and rape her for six hours or so. The second rape scene isn't inherently graphic, and she doesn't talk as much about being raped, but it's still disturbing and messed up.

This is really good. Plus the discussion about her drug use and how it eventually alienated and hurt her loved ones and wrecked her acting career is enough to make me vow never to do drugs. Fellow former Runaway, Lita Ford, is coming out with her own memoir, so I'm looking forward to her side of the story, as admittedly Cherie did't paint her in the best of lights, and I'm sure Lita has her reasons for acting the way she did toward Cherie. show less

If people have seen the preview for the film The Runaways and wondered why Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie seems to have more screen time than Kristin Stewart as Joan Jett, it’s not merely that Fanning possesses more talent than Stewart. NEON ANGEL: A Memoir of a Runaway by lead singer Cherie Currie inspired the film. Currie joined The Runaways a year after its formation. Guitarist/singer Joan Jett and drummer Sandy West met Currie at a local teen hangout in Los Angeles. Soon after, the band really took off. It was a novelty for five teenage girls [guitarist Lita Ford and bassist Jackie Fox rounded out the band] to perform powerful rock sings in the early 70s. Unfortunately I can only think of one completely female band since The show more Runaways-- The Donnas. In NEON ANGEL, Currie chronicles her days in the groundbreaking band The Runaways as well as her life before and after her one-of-a-kind experience as the band’s sultry blonde lead singer dubbed “The Cherry Bomb,” after one of the band’s songs penned by Joan Jett.

The good part of this memoir: Currie presents an honest recollection of the sex, drugs and rock n’ roll that took over her teenage years. Older men fantasized about [and more often than not acted on] being with these teenage hot-shots. One night, The Runaways’s manager basically lent Currie out for the night to another teen idol. Another time this same manager made all five girls watch him have sex with a younger woman. He claimed he was showing them the way to do it. She sugarcoats nothing. Currie recalls the plethora of drug-use and her subsequent addiction to cocaine, over-the-counter Benzedrine [speed], prescription pills and alcohol.

When The Runaways toured, Currie found herself so homesick that she couldn’t function without drugs. Once home, she still couldn’t even make it through a day without being drugged out on something. Currie has a twin sister Marie who felt a bit slighted that her sister catapulted to such fame and left her behind. Up to the moment that Currie joined The Runaways, Marie had been the popular one. Currie finds herself in many turbulent relationships especially with family members. She writes about two rapes [one that included abduction], an abortion, and some pretty rotten relationships.

Currie remembers positive moments with The Runaways as well: her friendships with Joan Jett and Sandy West, the fame and the surrealness of being in such a popular band that opened for Cheap Trick and The Ramones and played some of the hippest venues like CBGB’s in New York. She relished some of the opportunities to meet bands she adored and other people she might have never encountered had she not been in this band.

The only negative of this memoir: Currie repeats herself often, perhaps to pound home the point that drugs destroy lives. Or that she managed to overcome her drug addiction and now leads a fulfilling life as an artist, mother, and occasional actress. Parts of the memoir drag on and there’s a simplistic writing style, it could have used additional editing. I’m sure the memoir proved to be a cathartic experience for Currie and honestly, how much fault can I find in that? show less

(3.5)

Several months ago I sat down to watch The Runaways (the movie) staring Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning. I ended up really enjoying it. Going in of course I knew about Joan Jett (I love her stuff) and I knew the song Cherry Bomb, but I didn't know much about the band itself or their history.

I was intrigued enough to picked up Cherie Currie's Neon Angel, the book the movie was based on. It's rare for me to read a memoir but I definitely wanted to learn more. I was absolutely enthralled with this book. Cherie's story is exciting, horrifying, inspirational and above all honest. It was shocking to see how much this girl/woman went through, especially at such a young age. Really it's a miracle she's alive today. Although it wasn't easy show more and took a few tries, she was able to drag herself out of the black hole she was in and land in a better place. show less