Customer Reviews

Melissa Etheridge: Our Little Secret

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Melissa has always been a favorite artist of mine since my girlfriend and I found a tape of hers on the dollar rack in a Walgreens in CA. We discovered that she had more than one tape, and we immediately went to find the others. Everything us nosy fans wants to know is in this book. That and more! I would most definitly encourage and Melissa fan to read this book and to buy a copy to add to your personal library. It is a must have info book!!!

This is a wonderful biography on Melissa Etheridge. I have followed Melissa's carreer for quite a number of years now and still found a ton of information in this book that I never knew. It is extremely well-written and obviously well-researched. And the pictures are just stupendous. A real MUST for even the most casual Melissa fan!

The biographer's perspective is most often the key factor in a successful biography, and when the bio is unauthorized, that loss of first person perspective is often the weakness of such a project. For this reason, I always approach an unauthorized bio with a lot of skepticism. In the case of Joyce Luck's Our Little Secret, this skepticism was completely unfounded. The narrative perspective in Our Little Secret maintains consstant attribution of information to first hand sources, either by quoting friends of the performer who were willing to be named in the book, or quoting directly from a wealth of interviews given by Etheridge to magazines, television and radio interviewers. No information is included without being attributed to a good source, and Luck never presumes the facts of any personal or professional vignette presented, instead providing quotes and substantiated facts and leaving the reader to draw their own conclusion. The book is awash with detail and depth of setting, and frames the path which Etheridge took from small town girl to Rock Star with new personal information provided by former friends and acquaintances. While this new information, much of it never previously published, adds to the total picture this fan previously had of Etheridge, it is never personal enough to make the principled reader cringe, and never goes beyond the admittedly revealing boundaries set by the artist herself. More importantly, this version of Etheridge's life includes detail and nuance of her early days which flesh out the lesbian culture she lived in and which created much of her frame of reference in her early work. Emphasis on the personal life only leads up to the establishing of her career, though, and beyond that chronological point the focus is on the music and the lyrics which have made Etheridge the Rock Star. Most uniquely, I have never seen a bio which so includes the Fan in the phenomenon of the Star, and in this case its such an accurate picture. Photos taken by fans and first hand accounts of their meetings with Etheridge keep the book personal, and add a great deal to its appeal. Fitting for an artist who seems to like her fans more than most who suffer fame at the level she does. Overall, a fun read and a good mix of career and personal highlights, and a superior collection of not previously published photos, both color and b&w.

This was the book both Lifetime's "Intimate Portrait" and VH-1's "Behind the Music" used as a reference for their specials on Melissa. Can't get much more definitive than that!!!

This is the most informative and entertaining book about Melissa Etheridge. The book is well written, well organized and has some detailed information on how each CD was made and what the stories were behind them. It's the only book about Melissa Etheridge you will ever need.

The book, to me, was very good. It was very vivid in the telling of Melissa's life. It wasn't like reading an exam paper like the first book I read about her. All in all, the book was excellent.

Joyce's book is simply the best! It's so much better than that OTHER (ick!) book! The pictures are wonderful and the content is superb. There's no better! :)

one of the best "rock" biographies out there! joyce did an excellent job of researching melissa's life, by including thoughts from fans and old friends. it was great to read melissa stories from people i've "known" online from the MLE internet mailing list. two thumbs and two big toes waaaay up! :-)

This book is a MUST for all ME fans!! Joyce does a wonderful job at detailing the events in Melissa's life and gets first hand accounts from friends from her past. With a total of 54 photos, this will not dissapoint!! Joyce writes with honesty and with nothing but total respect for Etheridge!

im a great fan just want to express my thoughts the web site contains to many commercial thoughts i dig all the cds you have releasded the one that striked home is yes i am #5 that is the greastest tune ever released melissa is cool just a human like me