Alternating chapters of her life and being on the road I recommend the book to fans and anyone interested in music. JH informs her readers about her childhood, songs, shyness, relationships, feelings, experiences on the road, thoughts about autoktonia and self doubts.
Juliana Hatfield is a talented, determined recording artist. I particularly have enjoyed her live performances, mostly for her inventive guitar work.
A fascinating ready from a very private and enigmatic (not to mention brilliant) musician. I couldn't put it down upon starting!.
Fans will enjoy it. I think the book could also be interesting to anyone who has toured with a band, or tried to make a living in music.
I bought this a couple years back & never got around to reading it. My Kindle died the other day, so I picked it up & read almost the entire book last night.
Singer-songwriter and former Blake Babies member Juliana Hatfield’s solo career was taking off: She was on the cover of Spin and Sassy. Ben Stiller directed the video for her song "Spin the Bottle" from the Reality Bites film soundtrack.
"When I Grow Up" is a detailed account of Hatfield's personal and professional life in a unique format. Chapters switch back and forth, from autobiographical stories to tales from the road with her all-girl band, "Some Girls.
If you want to read this book in the hopes of reading interesting anecdotes of the rock and roll lifestyle, this is a pretty boring read. The tour diary is pretty uneventful and her history as a mildly successful musician is only mildly interesting.
I've been a big fan of Juliana Hatfield since the early '90's and it was a real treat to read her thoughts about playing on the road and understand how she's seen life through her lens over the years. I think she is one of those rare talents who run the corporate rock business gauntlet that eats people up then spits them out who not only survived, but blossomed afterward.
I was pretty excited to read this book, not because I'm a Juliana Hatfield fan (I have never heard any of her songs prior to reading this memoir) but because I, myself, am a female musician and enjoy reading memoirs in general. Going into this book without any knowledge or background on Juliana and her music career didn't leave me in the dust, as she did a fairly good job at explaining her road to success from Day One (as a young teen).
It's been about a year since I read this book and I still think about it once in a while. Yes, Juliana complains a lot and makes the life of a rock star seem like endless aggravation.
A major disappointment. I understand her desire to write a 'warts-and-all' memoir, but instead of giving us gritty reality, Hatfield does nothing but throw herself one long pity party - 300 pages of it.
When I was in high school, Juliana Hatfield was my idol. The former front person for Boston indie rockers, The Blake Babies, Hatfield exuded coolness and her lyrics seemed as if they were plucked from my brain.
When I Grow up is an awesome book for the 90's pop lover, and I liked learning more about Juliana and her music career. In the early 90's I was too young to see any of the bands that I liked but I still listened to her and find it nice that I can still learn things about 90's music I never knew.
I desperately wanted to love this book, but taken in context of Juliana's recorded history, her blog and website, and now her self-absorbed Twittering it reads like a rush of valium to the head.Because I love her as a musical artist I wanted to embrace her musical life story, and although extremely well written, it's a turgid, meandering, repetitive and blank faced recitation of her various neuroses and self image issues, repeated ad infinitum.
