Publisher's Weekly Review
In this ribald memoir, Green describes her rise from aimless college graduate to rock journalist and writer/producer for The Sopranos and Blue Bloods. Green grew up in Providence, R.I., and attended Brown University in the late 1960s, where she became the only woman on the editorial staff of the Brown Daily Herald. In 1971 she got an interview with Alan Rinzler, an editor at Rolling Stone, and soon had her first assignment from Jann Wenner to write a feature on Marvel Comics, which became the cover story. While Green never goes deeply into how it felt to be the first woman on the masthead or her own personal and professional struggles at the magazine, she does write of her worries that others viewed her as "sleeping her way" onto the masthead (especially as she was in a relationship with an editor). Green wonderfully tells of her various assignments, including a failed interview with a stoned and evasive Dennis Hopper (so "cruel, so high") and how she escaped his compound and later wrote an eviscerating article; riding in a car with Annie Leibovitz, with Hunter S. Thompson at the wheel loaded on Wild Turkey and pills; and sleeping with RFK Jr. in his dorm room at Harvard but refusing to write about him. Green stopped writing for Rolling Stone three years after she got the job because of disagreements with Wenner. Green's book is an entertaining look at the early era of Rolling Stone and rock journalism. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A lusty, reflective, score-settling memoir from the woman who steered a chaotic career course between Rolling Stone and The Sopranos.In this debut book, Green recounts the lively, raucous tale of how she found, lost, and regained her groove, smoking dope and winning Emmys in the process. The well-educated daughter of "upwardly striving East Side Jews," she headed west in the late 1960s with a diploma from Brown University, a rich boyfriend, and only a vague sense of what to do when she got there. By dint of luck, as well as talent, Green wound up at Rolling Stone, scoring a cover story on Marvel Comics (where she had briefly worked) that established her trademark droll tone. "Go be ironic" was her mission, and she delivered with numerous significant pieces, including profiles of Dennis Hopper at his most obnoxious and David Cassidy at his most nave. Besides breaking a pot-befogged glass ceilingshe distinguished herself among "the brainy and evolved sugar candy that was the girls of Rolling Stone"she happily indulged her inner wild child. She also got sloppye.g., setting out to interview the children of the late Robert F. Kennedy, she "crossed a journalistic line" by sleeping with his son. Although her career briefly bottomed out, Green staged an impressive comeback as a TV writer who could navigate both the high (Northern Exposure, The Sopranos) and mid-range (Blue Bloods) plateaus. Her story is wildly picaresqueupper-middle-class to rags to homes in New York and Los Angelesrevealing (especially when dealing with the backstage politics of TV production), and at times wearyingly materialistic and self-absorbed.Arriving on the heels of Sticky Fingers, Joe Hagan's biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, Green's memoir is both a solid insider's account and a happy-go-lucky, lifelong coming-of-age story. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Green walked into her interview at Rolling Stone with a ribald jeans jacket and a dog. It was 1971, during the magazine's heyday as a counterculture bastion, and she was about to become its only female writer. In this candid memoir, she shares how she earned a reputation as a bitch, what it was like working alongside the intimidating Annie Leibovitz and witnessing the drug-fueled ravings of Hunter S. Thompson, and why she was fired over a Kennedy story. Green regularly peers into the future to reveal how the young iconoclasts around her wound up later, lending their stories a tinge of destiny even as they are told. While Green offers a smorgasbord of insider information on Rolling Stone, the trajectory of her eventual career as a television writer, where she would become one of the forces behind The Sopranos, only to be fired in its last season, is fascinating as well. Filled with plenty of sex, drugs, and some rock 'n' roll, this offers a one-of-a-kind perspective on the people behind a cultural phenomenon.--Bridget Thoreson Copyright 2018 Booklist
Library Journal Review
For Green, the first female writer on the masthead of Rolling Stone magazine, who went on to have a lucrative career as an award-winning TV writer for Northern Exposure and The Sopranos, a conventional middle-class life like her parents had in postwar New England was not meant to be. Here, the creator and producer of Blue Bloods crafts a vivid memoir, capturing the heady days of her time in San Francisco in the early 1970s writing for the iconic music magazine and partying alongside notables such as Hunter S. Thompson and Annie Leibovitz. With humor and candid self-reflection, the author details her struggles after being fired from Rolling Stone and returning to her family's home in Providence, RI, for a time. Determined to channel her love of writing into a career, Green enrolled in the University of Iowa's famous MFA Writers' Workshop, where she met her future husband and writing partner, Mitchell Burgess, and met people who were key to her entry into Hollywood. VERDICT Reading like a real-life road novel, Green's memoir is a must for aspiring writers.-Donna Marie Smith, Palm Beach Cty. Lib. Syst., FL © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
