I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone by Stephanie Kuehnert

But as time passed, the emotional wounds remained raw. “I thought the music would heal me because that was the only time I felt okay,” Louisa believes. Though no one suspected her guilt in the killing, Louisa was tormented by her actions.ĭespite her love for her husband and daughter, she fled her family, feeling unworthy of her idyllic life. “She had smiled at us and kissed us good-bye and said it was time to meet Iggy and Joey and Patti,” Emily says.īut the truth, we learn, is far less romantic: While still in high school, Louisa was raped by her boyfriend, whom she shot and killed in self-defense. The reason Louisa leaves? To follow the music, according to Dad. However, soon after Emily’s birth, her mother, Louisa, flies the coop, leaving Emily to be raised by her father, Michael. Dad was onstage with a guitar Mom was in the crowd. It was a bloodline she shared with both parents, who met at River’s Edge, a warehouse on the outskirts of Carlisle, Wis.

At first, Emily Black is just another angry small-town teen raised on rock: “Music was in my blood,” she declares by way of introduction. The music can save you, but it can just as easily break your heart, or much, much worse. The author clearly understands the pitch-black flip side of rock’s transformative power. It’s an empowering new twist on a girl’s coming of age, replete with the true-to-life struggle of commercial hand-wringing versus angsty art. In “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone” (named after the 1996 track by female punk trio Sleater-Kinney), Kuehnert taps the energy of punk to fuel her blunt prose. Suffice to say, there’s no groovin’ on a Sunday afternoon on these pages. “The first time I heard Courtney Love scream that she was ‘pretty on the inside,’ it saved my angry, thirteen-year-old girl soul,” the author explains in the foreword to her jagged-edged debut novel, “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone.” Kuehnert, 28, grew up in the era of Nirvana and Riot Grrrls, a time when punk “broke” after more than a dozen years of bubbling under the cultural radar. Stephanie Kuehnert found her own personal Jesus in the early 1990s. Those three-minute bursts of music can serve as our tickets out of the Nowheresvilles of our formative years, giving us the confidence to move forward and embrace the great unknown.

We hand ourselves over to it, drawing upon its melodic force to push us past life’s dead ends.

After 50 years, rock ‘n’ roll still maintains a messianic hold on a great many of us: It makes us move, shapes our identities, infects our souls.

I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone by Stephanie Kuehnert