This book was suggested to me by an algorithm, and although I was not a particular fan of Tracey Thorn's band, Everything But The Girl, reading this book made me a big fan of Tracey Thorn as a writer. This book tells her story, tracing the emergence of her love of punk music out of the most mainstream suburban upbringing, through her career in her bands the Marine Girls and then EBTG with her husband Ben Watt, into her life of marriage and motherhood, including her husband's frightening long-term illness, and then back onto the stage for EBTG's comeback hit and dance club staple, Missing You.  She writes with a mix of sensitive insight and really funny wry asides, which make this book engaging even during career lulls.

I was drawn in immediately by her first chapters, which draw heavily on her childhood diaries, described with bafflement and amused affection by the grown woman who looks back. Her early self describes an extremely ordinary, bland, safe suburban life. Then she pinpoints the exact time when her musical tastes shifted from the day's pop hits to punk rock based on whose picture she had pasted inside the diary's front cover. I had to look up the date she was born because it sounded so similar to my own suburban childhood.

When I finished this book it led me to her other books, which go into this book's themes in more depth. One covers her advice on developing a strong voice on stage, and one is a meditation on her friendship with Go-Betweens drummer Lindy Morrison. So, those await you as well, but this comprehensive history is a good place to start.