Last Chance Texaco

[A] gripping, lovely memoir...thrilling, funny, scary, sad, packed full of life and extraordinary characters....As a portrait of the artist as a young woman, this book could not be any more enthralling or fun to read. -- Nick Hornby * The Believer * a vivid memoir that traces the arc of her often turbulent life from unsettled childhood to uneasy fame...If Last Chance Texaco is haunted by the long shadows of the past, it is also a story of forgiveness and acceptance...Reading her wild and wonderful book, one senses that, in a very real way, music was a calling that saved her life. -- Sean O'Hagan * Observer * Throughout her pre-fame life she experienced moments of great adventure and shocking personal peril, all of which she has poured into her magnificent memoir...Very little seems off the table in this free-spirited book...It is at turns hair-raising, funny, melancholic and joyous. -- Ted Kessler * The New Cue * In this raw and roving life story, Jones depicts a child who recognized her humanity and worth even when others wouldn't, and a woman whose confidence helped her rise above heroin addiction, music-industry sexism and the traumas of her youth. * Washington Post * Candid, cosmic, so cool... An impassioned and cinematic trip through Jones's eventful life. I shouldn't be surprised that Jones manages to carry her originality, intimacy, and volcanic expressiveness into book form. * Boston Globe * Terrific... The prose is rich and rhythmic, filled with lines that are pithy ('Rickie Lee is a Frank Capra movie that had been overtaken by Stanley Kubrick') and poetic ('childhood traumas leave their dirty footprints on the fresh white snow of our happy-ever-afters')... Jones is as fearless in prose as she is on stage. * Minneapolis Star-Tribune * one of the most remarkable [memoirs] I've read from a musician, a first-person commentary on the life and early career of this extraordinary artist, full of romance and adventure, misadventure and indiscipline, anecdote and reflection - just the stuff we want from those free spirits who live the life so that we don't have to, inviting us to stand and watch in fascination, half admiring and half appalled. -- Richard Williams * The Blue Moment * One of the most compelling memoirs I've ever read... What really sucks you in, and lifts you up, is the dazzling magic of her prose. * Please Kill Me * This tender, fierce, intimate memoir is testament that Jones has lived a life as brave, idiosyncratic, and rich as her music - with love, heartbreak, addiction, and magic, sprinkled throughout. * O, the Oprah magazine * What makes this an inspiring memoir is her absorbing storytelling, facility with language and fealty to integrity - commerce be damned. * Mojo * In gorgeous prose ( I did drugs like I did everything else. On fire, with no back door ) interspersed with her lyrics, this is as distinctive as she is, a rich, bracing, and candid memoir dancing with the love of language. * Booklist (starred review) *