Book description
Julia Blackburn's brilliant and haunting book is a life of Billie
Holiday told in the voices of those who knew her. During the 1970s a
young woman called Linda Kuehl, planning to write a biography of
Billie, recorded interviews with more than 150 people. Kuehl died in
1978 and her book never came out, but her recordings survived to
provide the raw material for this extraordinary account of the life of
America's First Lady of Jazz.
Billie Holiday is usually portrayed as a tragic victim of her own
vices. These intimate stories give us a much deeper picture of her
personality - we witness scenes from her chaotic childhood; we see her
when she first arrives in Harlem at the age of fourteen; and we follow
her through her rise to fame and into the notoriety that came so close
on its heels.
Billie's friends and lovers and fellow musicians talk about her
troubles and her addictions, but they also have a lot to say about her
warmth and her courage, and the ones who were really close to her
understood that although she had a lot of men and drugs and booze in
her life, all that really mattered was the singing.
Julia Blackburn has written five books of non-fiction -
Charles Waterton
,
The
Emperor's Last Island
,
Daisy Bates in the Desert
,
Old Man Goya
and
With Billie
- a family memoir,
The Three of Us
, which won the 2009 J. R. Ackerley Award, and two novels,
The Book
of Colour
and
The Leper's Companions
, both of which were shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She is the author
of seventeen short stories specially commisioned by BBC Radio, a
selection of which were published in
My Animals and Other Family,
and four radio plays, including
The Spellbound Horses
, which was broadcast in 2011.
