Living Like a Runaway: A Memoir
by Lita Ford
Dey Street Books
With 40+ years in the music business now in the rearview, Lita Ford is a proven survivor – a bona fide rock and roll icon. And in her debut memoir, Living Like a Runaway, the platinum-selling guitar trailblazer endeavors to reveal her life story – warts and all.
For those who still crave salacious tales of the morally bankrupt ’70s and ’80s-era sex, drugs & rock and roll world, Ford’s F-bomb-soaked, conversational style will certainly scratch the itch. And her near-endless accounts of personal groupie-like sexploits with a “Who’s Who” list of arena rock legends will no doubt be titillating. However, for those hoping for a more substantive read, Ford’s unfiltered details of getting crabs, chronic alcohol consumption, and having a passport photo taken with “dried cum” in her hair, may fall short of meeting expectations.
Living Like a Runaway shines brightest and Ford’s writing cuts deepest when she detours from that oft-traveled low road and she begins to simply share from the heart. Even spirited insider dish regarding her role in the pioneering all-girl band, The Runaways, and clashes with various lovers, managers and record labels pale in comparison to Ford’s seemingly transparent accounts of intimate personal relationships with friends and family members. The stories Ford shares regarding her love for, and loss off, her parents, as well as the more recent separation from her children are moving, indeed – far more engaging than her explicit tales of rock and roll success and excess.
In sum, despite an occasionally jarring, and often glossed-over, fast-forward narrative, Living Like a Runaway does offer adequate payoff – providing a likely entertaining, quick and easy read for ever-faithful fans of the undisputed “Queen of Metal.”
