Low Down

*Now a major motion picture starring John Hawkes, Elle Fanning, Glenn Close, Lena Headey, Peter Dinklage, and Flea Albany re-creates a landscape of her childhood where misery is a faraway sound floating above a voice speaking in tones of affection, terror, rage, love, and, most of all, a hipster's defiance. --Greil Marcus In this beautiful memoir of jazz and junk, loyalty and abandonment, A. J. Albany--the daughter of pianist Joe Albany--writes with such straight-up charm and unsentimental lucidity that she makes her harrowing childhood seem as romantic and thrilling as she remembers it. --Francine Prose Truly affecting ... Though slim, Albany's well-wrought memoir contains emotional and lyrical volumes. --Publisher's Weekly Lots of drugs and loneliness, some jazz: the author has perceptively written what she knows. --Booklist Her prose resembles the shimmering complexity of bop, with its feelings of tight yet improvisational dartings through memory. From the slag heap of the junkie lifestyle, she manages to spin literary gold. --Kirkus Harrowing ... an authentic trip through Hollywood's lower depths. --Los Angeles Times Book Review Only the slyest and boldest writing about music, and families, comes to mind as you read Low Down: James Baldwin's 'Sonny's Blues,' or David Goodis's Down There. Yet A. J. Albany's spirit and voice are fully her own--fierce, funny, troubling, sad, rueful, joyous. --Robert Polito