NOBODY EVER ASKED ME ABOUT THE GIRLS

A longtime music writer empties her files.

Vanity Fair contributing editor Robinson has sorted through decades of interviews with scores of female artists and divided their quotes and anecdotes into chapters entitled "Hair and Makeup," "Fame," Abuse," "Motherhood," "Sex," "Drugs," "Business," “Age,” etc. The premise of the book—that nobody has been interested in stories of stars like Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, Beyoncé, Rihanna, or Courtney Love until now—lacks evidence-based support and fails to justify this stitched-together jumble of retreads and outtakes. Though Robinson makes the point that she was never a critic, rather an interviewer, an editor of fan magazines, and a writer of “chatty columns,” she does have her likes and dislikes. She credits Madonna with "ruining the culture" in the 1980s, and she is particularly enraged by Taylor Swift, whom she met as “a fledgling country music singer with buck teeth. The second she heard I was from Vanity Fair, she grabbed my hand with such force that I thought she might break it, and her eyes lasered on me like something out of The Exorcist….The idea that she, or anyone, thought she could play Joni Mitchell in the still unmade ‘Ladies of the Canyon’ movie is laughable. (Joni told me she put a stop to that.)” Even the stars Robinson admires don’t come off well in these pages: Lady Gaga confides, "I feel like if I sleep with someone they're going to take my creativity from me through my vagina.” Sheryl Crow reports that Stevie Nicks told her, "if you ever have kids you'll never write a great rock song again.” The author also quotes Adele's maunderings about motherhood at numbing length. One might conclude that decades-old gossip isn't that interesting, but Ben Widdicombe's recent stylishly written memoir, Gatecrasher, suggests that isn't the problem.

For devoted Robinson fans only.