Jen Trynin
Everything I’m Cracked Up To Be: A Rock & Roll Fairy Tale (Harcourt, Inc.)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Amplifier, March-April 2006

Jen Trynin put out two excellent major-label albums a decade ago – her flawed but keen 1995 debut Cockamamie and 1997’s confident and altogether more triumphant followup Gun Shy Trigger Happy – that barely made a dent despite the massive bidding war that landed her on Warner Bros. Her terrific memoir Everything I’m Cracked Up To Be chronicles what happened from start to finish but manages to avoid turning into either of the two things it could easily have become: an anti-majors screed or an epistle to her erstwhile faithful. Instead, it’s something all the rarer, a genuinely engrossing story (one which doesn’t rely on its readers’ familiarity with her music) told with wit, skill and a love of the power of simple but effective language. With a novelist’s eye for detail, Trynin peppers her career trajectory, upwards and otherwise, with subplots like the self-destructive flirtation with her bass player and the stealth ascent of a parallel performer whose debut album, released the same day as Cockamamie, would eventually be her downfall (the first, unnamed reference to a Canadian singer with the unusual moniker of Alanis appears on page 75 in a moment of subtly ominous foreshadowing). Too fascinated by the whole experience to be bitter about it, Trynin neither glamorizes being the Next Big Thing nor rails against it, refusing to descend into a nuts-and-bolts exposé of how artists get screwed (two or three brief rundowns of contract economics take up approximately ten pages total) and noting how anticlimactically it all ended: “There’s no bang. No definitive moment. Just a slow petering out.” More The Commitments than typical rock-star memoir, Everything I’m Cracked Up To Be proves that there’s a crucial difference between someone who can write things that happened to her and a good storyteller.

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