Cash has had big hits and serious lows and a family life that’s ripe, to say the least. But the author is a craftswoman, and in her memoir, as in her songs, she places more emphasis on emotional resonance than on filling in the blanks.
Cash is the oldest child of the late country music icon Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto. She was born in 1955, a month before her father’s first single, “Cry, Cry, Cry,’’ was released on Sun Records. Before long the family traded East Memphis for Southern California and the disruptive glare of stardom, and over the next decade Cash’s family would be splintered by her dad’s constant traveling, drug addiction, and love affair with June Carter. It was a turbulent youth, which the author dutifully chronicles, noting that the 2005 film “Walk the Line’’ was “an egregious oversimplification of our family’s private pain, writ large and Hollywood-style.’’
But the facts of Cash’s extraordinary life do not a self-portrait make, and it’s the author’s weaving of history and experience with a deep sense of reflection, at once clear-eyed and nearly impressionistic, that makes “Composed’’ such a pleasure to read.
“If Magritte had painted my childhood, it would be a chaos of floating snakes, white oxfords, dead Chihuahuas, and pink hair rollers,’’ she writes. “Bolts of gold lamé and chiffon would be draped over everything, stained with coffee and burned with cigarettes, and garden hoes would be wielded by drunks with guitars. Glass jars full of spiders and amphetamines would line the walls behind the sliding mirrored doors.’’
The picture is hardly complete. But the choices that Cash — who has published fiction and essays in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere — made about which moments to plumb and what to leave untouched are themselves revealing. Her marriage to and divorce from country artist Rodney Crowell are not given much ink, but she describes at length the outfits she wore to a string of funerals.
