"Nerd Girl Rocks Paradise City"

Anne Thomas Soffee

Reviewed by Marie Braden

In the glut of heavy-metal memoirs (cf. Fargo Rock City by Chuck Klosterman and Hellbent for Leather by Seb Hunter), one thing missing was the story of a female who felt the call of Aquanet and power chords. Unfortunately, while an entertaining read, this book is slight and really sheds little light on Sunset Strip life during the dying days of the glam-rock scene.

Soffee can be bitingly funny, but her tale, much like life itself, meanders and leaves out the details that would appeal to those people still trying to make sense of the fishnet days of yore. This saddened me because I could see far too many similarities between myself and the author: we both worship at the altar of Lester Bangs, we both come from what passes for major metropolitan areas in the Deep South, we both have tastes that range from Iggy Pop to tranny bars, and we are both seventeen kinds of sarcastic.

There are many bon mots within the book that make it worth picking up if there is a paperback version, but the two major plot points (recurrent encounters with Glenn Danzig and Soffee's tryst with Legs McNeil) are quickly swallowed up by the mind-numbing repetitiousness of "yet another night at Boardner's." Unfortunately, while this makes her point about her time in LA, it just isn't very interesting reading, and the tacked-on denouement where she embraces AA before leaving LA for her MFA was just bland.

Soffee's book might appeal to those who are looking (as she puts it) for something in the Elizabeth Wurtzel category, but for someone looking to make sense of the hair metal years, this is not the book. I would have liked there to be more introspection, or, as the book's subtitle implies, more about the image displacement suffered by a self-described geek trying to be cool with a vengeance. While I hate to criticize any memoir, as it seems like criticizing the life that was led, I feel quite certain that there were more interesting tales to tell, and would have loved to have seen her acerbic wit gleaning some sort of meaning from her experiences.