Editorial Content for Porcelain: A Memoir
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Reviewer (text)
Thanks to Moby, I have found that it is not sad or depressing to read about your past through the eyes of someone else who lived alongside you at the same time --- and that doing so did not make me go blind with fear about my advancing age. Rather, thanks to a delightfully honest writing style, it instilled in me a nostalgia and pride about surviving a certain time in American history that was hard yet eventful and totally worth it. PORCELAIN did that for me, and I am eternally grateful to Moby for the experience.
Moby’s memoir traverses one of the most important times in my life: my almost two decades as a New York City dweller. I intend to do it again someday, thinking about new adventures and the excitement the city provides after too many years in the New Jersey suburbs. But I feel as if my love for the city has been renewed by the trip down the ’80/’90s memory lane that Moby offers so poignantly and with loads of humor.
Maybe it’s because he’s from Connecticut originally as I was, and all of us kids in CT were just waiting for the day when we took the Metro North train into the city and found a home there instead. For those of us who did that, and stayed for a long time, Moby’s story stirs up amazing memories of the time before New York was Disneyfied and tourist-fied, and we were proud of ourselves for finding ways to make a very expensive life work out without having the money to do so in the traditional sense.
"PORCELAIN is a masterful memoir worthy of my all-time favorite, Mary Karr. You can learn a lot from Moby…and I promise you will!"
PORCELAIN lays it all out for you.
The book opens in a laundromat in The Dock shopping center in Stratford, CT, where my dad practiced law up the street for over 50 years (he still practices but not in that office anymore). We see Moby as a young kid, a poor kid, hanging out in the rain while his mother does laundry. He hears a song in the car, and his life changes.
PORCELAIN is just as much about the transformative abilities of music and art as it is about Moby’s transformation into a world-famous DJ. And he is quite sly when he introduces us to the equally or even more famous cast of characters who populate some of his best set pieces. The book gives Madonna, Run-D.M.C., Jeff Buckley and many more outstanding musical icons their proper place in the history of the burgeoning ’80/’90s club scene.
His squatting in a factory in Stamford, CT and the scary living quarters he shares with some off-the-wall folks in dirty downtown NYC remind us all of the follies and fun of our youth, when there was fearlessness and a resolve to make things work out that tends to soften like chamois after the friction of one’s adult years. It is a hopeful book, a grateful one, and is all the more delightful because of that.
Even if you don’t know who Moby is, even if you are not one of the millions of people who thought his album Play was a masterpiece, even if you bypassed a city adventure in youth to stay put in the suburbs, PORCELAIN is a music memoir like no other. It reads like the quiet yet compelling journal of someone you thought you knew but then discovered there was so much more to him than originally considered. It is filled with surprises and emotional moments. If you are a DJ, perhaps you could treat it like a how-to book; Moby works his way up in the club scene and becomes a musician by some pretty hard work and fascinating efforts.
I couldn’t put it down.
It was like a memoir for me, too, and reminded me of the commitment to rediscover that youthful mind frame of “can do” instead of “can’t do.” It is uplifting, inspiring and shocking, especially since Moby never stops letting you remember that he’s just a Christian vegan from New England, a small town boy who could have been lost to poverty but instead discovered a musical galaxy that had a place for him if he was willing to do whatever he could to take ownership of it. This isn’t exactly a beach read, but I promise you that if you take it home, everything around you will seem that much more interesting in its context.
PORCELAIN is a masterful memoir worthy of my all-time favorite, Mary Karr. You can learn a lot from Moby…and I promise you will!
Teaser
At once bighearted and remorseless in its excavation of a lost world, PORCELAIN is both a chronicle of a city and a time and a deeply intimate exploration of finding one’s place during the most gloriously anxious period in life --- when you are on your own and betting on yourself, but have no idea how the story ends, and so you live with the honest dread that you’re one false step from being thrown out on your face. Moby’s voice resonates with honesty, wit and, above all, an unshakable passion for his music that steered him through some very rough seas.
Promo
At once bighearted and remorseless in its excavation of a lost world, PORCELAIN is both a chronicle of a city and a time and a deeply intimate exploration of finding one’s place during the most gloriously anxious period in life --- when you are on your own and betting on yourself, but have no idea how the story ends, and so you live with the honest dread that you’re one false step from being thrown out on your face. Moby’s voice resonates with honesty, wit and, above all, an unshakable passion for his music that steered him through some very rough seas.
About the Book
From one of the most interesting and iconic musicians of our time, a piercingly tender, funny and harrowing account of the path from suburban poverty and alienation to a life of beauty, squalor and unlikely success out of the NYC club scene of the late '80s and '90s.
There were many reasons Moby was never going to make it as a DJ and musician in the New York club scene. This was the New York of Palladium; of Mars, Limelight, and Twilo; of unchecked, drug-fueled hedonism in pumping clubs where dance music was still largely underground, popular chiefly among working-class African Americans and Latinos. And then there was Moby --- not just a poor, skinny white kid from Connecticut, but a devout Christian, a vegan and a teetotaler. He would learn what it was to be spat on, to live on almost nothing. But it was perhaps the last good time for an artist to live on nothing in New York City: the age of AIDS and crack but also of a defiantly festive cultural underworld. Not without drama, he found his way. But success was not uncomplicated; it led to wretched, if in hindsight sometimes hilarious, excess and proved all too fleeting. And so by the end of the decade, Moby contemplated an end in his career and elsewhere in his life, and put that emotion into what he assumed would be his swan song, his good-bye to all that, the album that would in fact be the beginning of an astonishing new phase: the multimillion-selling Play.
At once bighearted and remorseless in its excavation of a lost world, PORCELAIN is both a chronicle of a city and a time and a deeply intimate exploration of finding one’s place during the most gloriously anxious period in life, when you’re on your own, betting on yourself, but have no idea how the story ends, and so you live with the honest dread that you’re one false step from being thrown out on your face. Moby’s voice resonates with honesty, wit and, above all, an unshakable passion for his music that steered him through some very rough seas.
PORCELAIN is about making it, losing it, loving it and hating it. It’s about finding your people, your place, thinking you've lost them both, and then, somehow, when you think it’s over, from a place of well-earned despair, creating a masterpiece. As a portrait of the young artist, PORCELAIN is a masterpiece in its own right, fit for the short shelf of musicians’ memoirs that capture not just a scene but an age, and something timeless about the human condition. Push play.
