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One life, many stories

By Walter Tunis Contributing Music Writer

The first question a curious reader might ask before delving into a newly published autobiography, especially one written by someone with any level of celebrity status, is whether the subject has lived a life worth reading about in the first place. In the case of folk singer and songwriter Janis Ian, the answer is a profound yes.

She has lived several lives, in fact. You could even say she accumulated enough life experiences for a Tolstoy-length novel while still in her teens.

"I went to an astrologer one time who did my chart," said Ian, who will sign copies of her life story, Society's Child, on Tuesday at Joseph-Beth Booksellers. "The next time we met, he shook his head and said, 'I knew that you have led an active life. But I had no idea you decided to lead three at once.' I thought that was pretty apt."

To the pop/folk mainstream, Ian is defined primarily by two songs: the 1975 saga of coming of age and social graces, At Seventeen; and the tune that gave her book its name. The single Society's Child was a controversial love song dealing with an interracial romance that made serious cultural waves when it hit radio in the mid-1960s. She was 16 at the time.

Plenty of trauma

Ian's recording career has spanned five decades and has earned her the company of folk, pop and rock royalty. She was the musical guest on the debut of Saturday Night Live in the fall of 1975. But her offstage life got rocking long before At Seventeen lit up the charts.

Among the episodes that play out in her autobiography:

■ Spending her childhood under FBI surveillance because her father was suspected of being a communist during the Cold War era.

■ Being molested repeatedly by her dentist at age 11.

■ Getting hit and threatened at gunpoint by her husband.

■ Watching Janis Joplin shoot heroin.

We will get to the more heartwarming chapters — and there are several — in a moment. But when you look at these four experiences, a second question presents itself. How uncomfortable is it to share such accounts with the world?

"I'm just getting used to that," Ian said. "It's a little weird dealing with the idea of people holding this book in their hands and knowing all these things about me. But I didn't see much choice in the matter.

"It was either, 'Write it real, keep it real,' which is what I try to do with my songs, or write a piece of crap. I just couldn't see myself not taking chances."

In conversation, Ian comments succinctly and, at times, bluntly about the darker years of her youth. When the abuse by her dentist is brought up, she said matter-of-factly, "Yeah, well, he's dead. That's how I look at that."

There are certainly affirmative, even celebratory passages in Society's Child, as when Ian discusses being gay. But the sun really shines when the book deals with the very art we know her for: music. Appropriately, a double-disc career retrospective album of her songs, Best of Janis Ian: The Autobiography Collection, is being released in conjunction with the book.

The drug episodes notwithstanding, Society's Child details the almost parental affection shown to her by Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and an "inarticulate proposition" offered by Bob Dylan. Best of all is a remembrance of when Ian discovered that the great Ella Fitzgerald not only knew who she was but enjoyed and respected her music.

"Isn't that amazing? Just talking about that now lights me up."

Different kind of writing

But how difficult was it for a veteran songwriter accustomed to brief, emotive narratives set to music to tell a lengthier, detailed and often scarier-than-fiction account of her own life?

"Well, with songs, at least you get the instruments and, of course, you have the music. You can take a song like At Seventeen and make it more palatable for an audience to be sucked into. But with a book, you have to nail readers in the first two or three sentences, or else you lose them."

As with any auto biography, Society's Child affords Ian the greatest narrative privilege of all: the right to tell her story her way. After all, inaccuracies surface from time to time. USA Today even asked the singer recently what the biggest misconception about her life was. Ian's reply: "That I'm dead."

"This radio show recently did a eulogy for me. I just said, 'Wait, wait, not so fast.' It wasn't a joke, either. This show really thought I was dead. I mean, how weird is that?"