Author(s): Jonathan Seidler

Biography & Memoir

IT'S A SHAME ABOUT RAY is an extraordinary and powerful memoir about family, love and the power of music. What tracks combine to make a family album? What do we carry from one generation to a next? What is the difference between leaning on and letting go? Blackly funny and frequently devastating, this memoir traverses death, hope, love, family, survival, compassion, and the deep relationship we can develop with music throughout our lives when all else is simply not enough. An album a lifetime in the making, with a tracklist of chapters that jump from genre to genre, these songs of innocence and experience unpick a life lived to the full - and sometimes spilling over the lip. At a time when they're statistically more likely than ever to take their own lives, men in It's A Shame About Ray contort themselves, confront troubling filial legacies and find new ways to process grief. This remarkable book asks what defines such men, young and old, and what can't, as well as how we shape new identities from old tragedies - and whether the answers might be hiding in the best-selling album of 2001.