Review: When I Grow Up by Juliana Hatfield
Not Just Another Rock Star's Memoir from Blake Babies Lead Singer
It's easy to imagine hearing Juliana Hatfield's soft, girlish voice reading alongside while devouring through her memoir, When I Grow Up. After all, Hatfield is most recognized as singer-songwriter for the 90s band Blake Babies and later as a solo artist. Her writing is a well-blended mix of literary, funny and open, and the content she exposes sheds new light on Hatfield as artist and woman.
Not Your Typical Rock-Star
One of the first and most refreshing parts of this book is realizing how sincere and reserved Juliana Hatfield is. Throughout each chapter, the reader immediately feels the conflicted passion of an artist who genuinely loves creating music, while at the same time feeling the disillusionment of the industry as a whole. The memoir is written as half-memoir, half tour-diary style, churning up Hatfield's past and recounting her journey on the road in 2005 with her side project band, Some Girls.
Haunted by Demons
With respect to Hatfield's demons, they are not the typical ones expected from a rock star. There's no drug addiction or hard partying, in fact as far as celebrities go, hers are more subdued and a bit surprising. Hatfield's personality seems to be most influenced by her painful shyness, her bouts of depression and her anorexia, all of which she manages to divulge in an honest, forthright manner.
Paying Her Dues in the Music Industry
Hatfield achieved some commercial success and acclaim with her album Become What You Are (1993). But with the end of the indie/alternative rock boom in popular music just around the corner, fame was short and bittersweet. Though she continued writing music, she quickly got placed on the back burner at her major label and mutually decided to part ways due to creative differences.
This was a defining moment in the life of Juliana Hatfield, the artist. After putting out a self-released album, Juliana took a self-proclaimed "year of no music" where she got to indulge in life as anything and everything other than a musician. It turned out that after her year of musical abstinence was up she was able to emerge fully in "the act of creation" writing the songs that would end up on her album How to Walk Away (2008).
After more than 20 years in the music business, Hatfield had managed to do the unthinkable: continue writing her music the way she wanted to without becoming a pre-packaged commodity. Forging her own way, against the grain of conventionality, she took control of her career and produced an album that Entertainment Weekly called "rueful and gorgeous". Not bad for someone who asked in the prologue, "what happens when a rock star starts to wonder if maybe it's time to grow up?"
Book Stats:
When I Grow Up by Juliana Hatfield
ISBN# 0470189592
Wiley Publishers, 2008
Hardcover, 336 pages
Singer Juliana Hatfield writes memoir
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When I Grow Up: a refreshing rockstar memoir
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