The Audio Book of Ginny Good

I've been listening to a real treat: The Audio Book of Ginny Good by Gerard Jones. I read the book last year, and it was the only book I had ever read that had me simultaneously crying my eyeballs out and laughing my head off.

I'm happy to report that it still holds that place of honor.

Right along with the audio version.

Actually, the audio version is even better. You see, I've always had it in my mind that the very best writing is meant to be read out loud. In fact, it begs to be read out loud: its honesty, its rhythm, its carefully-chosen words and nuances, the shades of meaning that emerge like butterfly wings from a chrysalis. Excellent writing is like an onion with infinite skins: enjoying it from different perspectives reveals subtle but exquisitely-formed layers you never dreamed existed.

Gerard's voice is the perfect complement to his prose. His style of storytelling -- both writing and speaking -- is unpretentious, relentlessly truthful, and shockingly beautiful. The listener experiences the stark recognition that all great art brings: "Yes, I've felt this, and this, and this, too." Gerard is talking about his life but not only his life: he speaks to the absurdities, agonies, and ironies that transcend any individual life -- those things are universal. That's what the very best storytellers do. They speak to us about what it is to be joyfully and painfully alive: they acknowledge life as a sexually-transmitted disease and life as its own numinous reward.

Ginny Good is a memoir as finely crafted as any novel. It's the story of Ginny Good, a gifted, wild and woolly young woman. According to Gerard, Ginny was the first hippie, and much of the story deals with the real hippie movement, not the media-manufactured one. And Ginny Good is Gerard's story: his story as a young man. But above all, it's a story of love and friendship and how life hurts and is hilarious and sad and gorgeous all at the same time.

The music clips Gerard includes throughout are a delight. They're interwoven seamlessly throughout the story and its telling. Sometimes a music clip follows an obvious referent: for example, when Gerard talks about his high school romance with Donna McKechnie, he weaves in "Donna" by Richie Valens. But the clips are always evocative and add depths of feeling, truth, and understanding to an already well-layered, thoughtful, brutally honest story.

It's hard to pick a favorite chapter, but Chapter Nineteen, La Honda, is a real trip -- pun definitely intended -- and Philip Glass and Ravi Shankar lend the perfect touch. And oh my goodness: Chapter Thirty-three, Scenic Hills. As intense as it is in the book, it's even more so in the audio version. I can't imagine anyone being able to listen to it all the way through, capped off as it is by Handel's "For I Know My Redeemer Liveth", without dissolving into a glob of goo, braying laughter like a donkey (referent definitely intended ;)) and sobbing as if their heart would break.

And to boot, Charles Bukowski (one of my favorite poets) makes a brief "guest" appearance. His poem "Bluebird" has a similar effect on me as Ginny Good. There are books, poems and pieces of music that move a person so deeply that language is inadequate to describe that movement. The best thing to do is to sit back, feel it and revel in it as a blessing, and marvel that the world offers such joys here and there, in rare and precious places.

The Audio Book of Ginny Good transported me to a world I'll happily revisit again and again. Thank you, Gerard, not only for sending me something I'll always cherish but for gifting the world with your amazing talent. You have somebody here in East Tennessee who appreciates it.