Some Girls: Books By Susanna Hoffs And Adele Bertei

Two recently published books, both by women who rock, are each fascinating in their own way, yet very different. One is a novel by Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles; the other by Adele Bertei of James Chance and the Contortions.

Susanna Hoffs’ novel, This Bird Has Flown, (Little Brown) is a fun read. Hoffs’ heroine, Jane Start, is a 33-year-old rocker who had one big hit a lifetime ago, a song written by the enigmatic British rocker Jonesy. Now she’s doing private appearances at Las Vegas parties, singing to a backup track and asked to don the costume of her decade-old video and sing the hit. And then Jonesy calls (or his people call) asking for her to appear with him to sing “the song” in London.

On her flight to London, intending to bunk at the home of Pippa, her best friend/publicist, fleeing from a former live-in partner, a film director who has left her to marry the star of his film, and an almost fling with a much younger heartthrob rocker, she makes out with her seatmate in first class, Tom, an Oxford professor. And so begins a love story where seeming opposites want to know if they are more than to borrow a phrase from Elvis Costello, Attractions.

If you are looking for a Bangles tell-all roman-a-clef, this is not it. However, in Jane, Hoffs is able to share a good amount of backstage insider rock star info, as well as her own enthusiasm for certain Sixties bands and songs that someone who has herself released several wonderful albums of covers (with Matthew Sweet) knows well (the Zombies, for example). The title of the novel is from a Beatles song on Norwegian Wood.

The plot of This Bird Has Flown does offer one biographical tease — the ‘did she or didn’t she’ have a romantic entanglement with the writer of her hit song; which Hoffs afficionados might see as a thinly veiled drama surrounding Hoff’s relationship to the Purple One, and the hit song Prince wrote for her, Manic Monday.

Given the current popularity of Daisy Jones and the Six, Hoffs’ novel will make a wildly entertaining movie or limited series, all the more so because Hoffs is writing the screenplay.

What Hoffs has delivered with This Bird Has Flown is that same feeling one has when listening to a Bangles song: clever introspection wrapped in retro music referenes and as the Beach Boys coined it, Fun, Fun, Fun.”

By contrast, Adele Bertei’s Twist (Ze Books) is a memoir of growing up in the foster care and juvenile justice system in Ohio. For this account, Bertei has created an alter-ego Maddie Twist – that given the harsh experiences Bertei went through, makes perfect sense. It is hard to imagine revisiting those experiences oneself.

At each stop along her personal Via Dolorosa, Maddie finds momentary refuge and companionship with other girls who are themselves regarded as society’s outcasts.

Twist is beautifully written in crystalline prose without judgment or stigmatization. What carries her through is music and singing and Bertei writes memorably about both. This is a story about a gay teenager in the 1960s and early 70s at a time, and in institutions. which had little understanding and less tolerance for gay youth.

There are episodes of horrifying brutality and violence against Bertei. Yet the great accomplishment of Twist is that it ends on an uplifting and positive note, as Maddie/ Bertei becomes herself — the person we know will go on to be a force in the New Wave No Wave scene in New York.

So, as I said, two books by women rockers, telling stories of music through alter egos, one fiction, one memoir, both to be placed on your hit parade.