Crazy Enough: A Memoir

by Storm Large

Overview

Yes, Storm Large is her real name, though she’s been called many things. As a performer, the majority of descriptions have led with “Amazon,” “powerhouse,” “a six-foot Vargas pinup come to life.” Playboy called her a “punk goddess.” You’d never know she used to be called “Little S”—the mini-me to her beautiful and troubled mother, Suzi.

Little S spent most of her childhood visiting her mother in mental institutions and psych wards. Suzi’s diagnosis changed with almost every doctor’s visit, ranging from schizophrenia to bipolar disorder to multiple personality disorder to depression. One day, nine-year-old Little S jokingly asked one of her mother’s doctors, “I’m not going to be crazy like that, right?” To which he replied, “Well, yes. It’s hereditary. You absolutely will end up like your mother. But not until your twenties.”

Storm’s story of growing up with a mental time bomb hanging over her veers from frightening to inspiring, sometimes all in one sentence. But her strength, charisma, and raw musical talent gave her the will to overcome it all. Crazy Enough is a love song to the twisted, flawed parts in all of us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781439192429
Publisher:	Free Press
Publication date:	01/10/2012
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	105,690
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Storm Large is a singer-songwriter best known as a contestant on the reality television show Rock Star: Supernova. Her acclaimed one-woman show, Crazy Enough, has appeared in the UK and Australia and is heading to off-Broadway in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

People think I’m nuts. They think that I am a killer, a badass, and a dangerous woman. They think that I am a boot-stomping, man-chomping rock ’n’ roll sex thug with heavy leather straps on my well-notched bedposts and a line around the block of challengers vying for a ride between my crushing thighs, many of whom won’t survive the encounter.

That’s what I like people to think, anyway. Some actually buy it. My manufactured mythology had begun on stage in San Francisco, and was full-on folklore here in Portland. My band, The Balls, had become a wild success over the past three years, and we packed a downtown club called Dante’s once a week, as well as clubs throughout the west coast from Seattle to San Diego. My sex thuggery is reserved for only one man, however. And though we fuck like we just got out of prison, home life is domestic. I help with the care and feeding of my boyfriend’s young son, cutting off crusts, giving back tickles. I even own an apron.

Despite my disenchanting normality, however, I get to sing for a living, drink free most places, and I get laid regularly. Life is good.

And now it’s Christmas time, so I’m all extra everything with good cheer. December in Portland can be a dreary spectacle. Right around Halloween, a big chilly sog plops its fat ass over the Pacific Northwest and stays parked there until Independence Day. Even in the gray, spitting rain, however, I’m all atwinkle, heading to Hawthorne Boulevard to skip through herds of wet hippies to Christmas shop. And even though I find those pube farmers highly irritating, I am humming “In Excelsis Deo” and in love with the world, so fuck ’em.

Hawthorne is a main thoroughfare in southeast Portland where, on one block, you can buy a latte, Indonesian end tables, pants for your cat, a vinyl corset, or a two-hundred-dollar T-shirt. It’s a great place to find perfect gifts for the loved ones in your life, and I am going to buy the greatest Christmas gift ever.

“The Greatest Gift of All”: I hear my little fourth-grade voice trilling in my memory bank. It was in a school Christmas play and was the first solo I ever took on stage. It was also one of the few times my mom saw me sing in front of a real audience.

“The greatest giiift of aaall . . . it can come from aaany wheeere!” I sang the heck out of it, if memory serves.

My mom had started beading and was taking it very seriously. She was selling pieces on eBay—seriously—so I’m headed to a store called Beads Forever to get her some killer imported beads, maybe some semiprecious stones. I have a vision of getting her a badass assortment and putting them in a cool, funky box. It’s the first Christmas gift I will buy for her in maybe ten years, and it will be perfect.

“Per-fect!” I sing in a fake opera voice.

I see the store ahead through my swishing windshield wipers and, “Fuckyouuu!!” I sing in triumph, to no one, as there is a perfect parking space directly in front of the store. “ Rock-star fucking parking!” I pull up, swoosh my wet car into the spot, throw it into park and my phone rings. The little lit-up window reads “BDLarge.”

“Dad? Hey, Dad.”

“Hi, sweetie.” His voice sounds heavy.

“What’s wrong?”

He sighed. Someone must’ve died. My grandmother. Neeny. God, at Christmas we lose Neeny Cat?

“Dad?”

“Your mom died last night.”

What?

“Who?” His mom. Neeny. Ninety-four, lost her mind when her husband of sixty-odd years passed.

“Your ma.”

“Who?” More sighing. Why the fuck is he sighing so much? Should I get out of the car?

“Your ma. Your mom died last night. They don’t know what happened yet sweetie, but . . .”

I’m literally looking into the store where I’m going to get her Christmas gift. Should I still? My hand is on the door, my car is parked . . . rock-star parking and the best gift ever. No. I say no to this. My dad says something about having to call my brothers and will I be okay? He’ll call me back right away. Love you. Bye.

Love you. Bye.

It’s dark and raining but people can still see into the car, and I must look crazy. I grab the steering wheel with both hands and suddenly I’m sobbing, screaming at the gauges. What the fuck to do? Where do I go, home? I can’t see. I can’t drive. I call my boyfriend at work.

“Hi. Can you come get me? My mom is dead and I’m on Hawthorne.”

She’s gone.

My first thought. She is gone. Not my first thought. No. Fucking no.

I’m thrashing around inside my body. What the fuck do I do?

What am I thinking? No. I peel my mind away like a child turning its face from a tablespoon of cough syrup. No. My first thought. My first?

Thank God. Thank God she’s gone.

“Thank God she’s gone.”

© 2012 Storm Large

Editorial Reviews

With a name like Storm Large, a larger-than-life destiny seemed natural for the rock singer and winning contestant on the TV reality show Rock Star: Supernova. Yet growing up in the ’70s in Southborough, Mass., where her father was a teacher and coach at Mt. Mark’s prep school, Large was plagued by her mother’s mental illness, as she recounts in this frank, funny, and caustically un-self-pitying memoir. Her mother’s manic depression and undiagnosed personality disorder required frequent hospitalizations, wreaking havoc on the whole family, and for love, Large found sex (“hypersexuality”) a suitable replacement, at a very young age, as well as drug abuse. An inconsistent student who excelled at such sports as crew in order to please her sports-fan dad, Large nonetheless failed at everything except singing, eventually graduating from New York’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts, convinced she couldn’t act. Gravitating toward San Francisco, heroin, and rock groups, she found some success with the band Dirty Mouth in the 1990s, then in Portland with the Balls. Yet the gritty druggie anecdotes and one-night stands aside, her memoir boils down to the tension inherent in her relationship with her mother, who used her sickness as emotional manipulation. In her gutsy, shrill way, Large exhibits an engaging insouciance in delving into very real, scary, emotionally weighty issues. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"Storm Large is an irresistibly rambunctious force of nature. Crazy Enough is shattering, gorgeous and uproarious fun."—Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love

"Storm Large has written a bodacious book, buy it, now!" —Gus Van Sant

“Like some twisted love child of Mae West and Keith Richards, Storm Large is a force of nature. Her ballsy, heartbreaking, hysterical tour de force of a memoir is not to be missed. Crazy Enough is vulgar and fragile, tragic and empowering, and like Storm, it is always entertaining.” - - Chelsea Cain, New York Times bestselling author of Heartsick and The Night Season

"With cleverness and honesty, she transforms a story that in most hands would be maudlin into yet another funny, passionate, and irreverently jarring adventure."— Portland Monthly

"Best recognized as a contender on Rock Star: Supernova, Large has the heart of a true exhibitionist...this project marks her first literary foray, and her memoir pulls no punches. A no-holds-barred coming-of-age story replete with mental illness, drugs and sex." —Kirkus Reviews

"We're in complete awe of the blunt, surprisingly memoir...told in honest, poignant prose... [Large shows] all of us how to let go—not without fear and doubt, but with it." —O magazine

"Storm Large performs with world-class symphonies and hard core rock bands...and she's written a book worthy of both audiences. If good writing is about taking chances and pushing readers to the edge, then this is a chart buster...as she takes us on a wild and sometimes painful ride into her world of crazy." —Larry Colton, author of Goat Brothers, Counting Coup and No Ordinary Joes

"A memoir that reads like an in-your-face mashup of Augusten Burroughs and Chelsea Handler, combining raw humor and an understandable bitterness with more than than a few oversexed anecdotes. Though not for the faint of heart, Crazy Enough proves to be a readable account of one woman's descent into madness—and back out again." —Shelf Awareness

"Frank, funny, and caustically un-self-pitying" —Publisher's Weekly

"It's too bad that readers can't have her actually in their lives and feel the true force of Storm, but her book is so true to who she is that it is still a powerful, funny, and outrageous experience. Plus, you won't have to deal with all of those strange sounds and dirty sheets." —Dan Stern, actor, director, writer"In Crazy Enough, Large tells if not all then a whole lot about her loves, her heroin addiction, her eating disorder, and in her voice, it sounds like crazy fun... Crazy Enough is a good time of a survivor's story, full of funny stories and candid talk from a sex thug who really is, deep inside, a little girl waiting for her mother. " —The Oregonian

"A most moving and entertaining memoir...The story is edgy, gritty, and fearless, and leaves little to the imagination as large presents a no-holds barred journey through her formative years and into adulthood." —The Portland Observer

"A helluva compelling story" —Elle magazine

"Heartbreaking, hilarious and affecting...Crazy Enough is a starkly honest memoir, a tale of sexual triggering, drug dabbling, and trying to fit in and rebel at the same time." —Willamette Week

From the Publisher

Indie singer and reality-TV star Large unloads stories about her volatile life. Best recognized as a contender on Rock Star: Supernova, Large has the heart of a true exhibitionist. She wrote and starred in a short-lived one-woman show off-Broadway, but this project marks her first literary foray, and her memoir pulls no punches. The book opens with the author's girlhood revelation about her hypersexuality, and goes on to describe her emotional, messy relationship with her mentally ill mother. Now in her early 40s, Large writes with brutal honesty about visiting her mother in mental hospitals, as well as being told by doctors that she would grow up to be just like her. That prediction had an enormous effect on her psyche, and she came out swinging against every part of herself she identified as being similar to her mother. Defensive to the point of violence, she was picked on at school, and she perpetuated mean gossip by acting out in ways that included profligate drug use and having sex with strangers from a very early age. "When I was high I felt like a rock star," Large writes--although after she began to develop her singing talent, it became acting like a rock star that led her to feel like one. She eventually fled New York and now lives in Portland, and she regularly tours with full-time musicians. The author's prose is casual and vernacular, rife with descriptions that are not for the faint of heart. Though not necessarily likable, she comes across as authentic and unapologetic. A no-holds-barred coming-of-age story replete with mental illness, drugs and sex.

Kirkus Reviews