On My Radar: Monday Edition

Crazy Enough
by Storm Large

Free Press / Simon & Schuster
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

Yes, Storm Large is her real name, though she’s been called many things. As a performer, the majority of descriptions have led with “Amazon,” “Powerhouse,” “a six-foot Vargas pinup come to life.” Playboy called her a “punk goddess.” You’d never know she used to be called “Little S”—the mini-me to her beautiful and troubled mother, Suzi.

Storm spent most of her childhood visiting her mother in mental institutions and psych wards. Suzi’s diagnosis changed with almost every doctor visit, ranging from schizophrenia to bipolar disorder to multiple personality disorder to depression. As hard as it was not having her at home, Storm and her brothers knew that it was a lot safer to have their beautiful but unreliable mom in a facility somewhere. Then one day, nine-year-old Storm jokingly asked one of her mother’s doctors, “I’m not going to be crazy like that, right?” To which he replied, “Well, yes. It’s hereditary. You absolutely will end up like your mother. But not until your twenties.”

That was the starting gun for a wild race to escape what Storm believed to be her future. Desperate to delay the lonely sickness and sadness that haunted her mother, Storm stomped her size-twelve boots straight toward as much sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll as she could find. Losing her virginity at thirteen, she sprinted through her young life, trying to smoke and fuck and wail away the madness that she feared would catch up to her at any moment. Instead, she found herself deep in a life of craziness of her own making.

Then, in her twenties, with nothing to live for and a growing heroin addiction, Storm accepted a chance invitation to sing with a friend’s band. That night she reconnected with her long-term love of music, and it dragged her back from the edge. She has been singing and slinging inappropriate banter at audiences worldwide ever since. Storm’s story of growing up with a mental time bomb hanging around her neck veers from frightening to inspiring, sometimes all in one sentence. But her strength, charisma, and raw musical talent gave her the will to overcome it all. With tremendous honesty and tremendous dirty language, Crazy Enough is about an artist’s journey of realizing that the mistakes that make, break and remake us are worth far more than our flailing attempts to live a life we think is “normal.” It is a love song to the twisted, flawed parts in all of us and a nod to the grace we find when things fall apart.