Mid-Life Confidential: The Rock Bottom Remainders

This is a compilation of anecdotes by the members (at the time) of
The Rock Bottom Remainders about their first "tour" together in their
alter-ego roles as a rock and roll band. Also included are 100
photographs taken by Tabitha King. Chapters are written by:

Dave Barry

Tad Bartimus

Roy Blount, Jr.

Michael Dorris

Robert Fulghum

Kathi Kamen Goldmark

Matt Groening

Stephen King

Tabitha King

Barbara Kingsolver

Al Kooper

Greil Marcus

Dave Marsh

Ridley Pearson

Joel Selvin

Amy Tan

Last year, fifteen of America's most popular writers left their day jobs
for life on the rock 'n' roll road. They stayed up late, ate junk food,
traveled by bus, and actually tried to play and sing before paying
audiences. Here's the whole sordid story, in hard-to-believe words and
even harder-to-believe pictures.
"Rock 'n' Roll," says
Stephen King, "continues to renew and refresh those who practice its
mysteries." Hitching their tour bus to that star, he and the other
bestselling authors in the Rock Bottom Remainders spent two weeks
barnstorming the East Coast--playing clubs where the customers
brandished books, and clubs where the listeners brandished
clubs--massacring rock 'n' roll classics everywhere.
Mid-Life Confidential
tells their story, the how and why of one of the strangest journeys in
the history of rock 'n' roll (not to mention literature). Taking their
solos chapter by chapter, each of the Remainders celebrates the passion
for rock that united them. And each muses--provocatively, anecdotally,
often hilariously, occasionally even seriously--on what it means to
enter mid-life in one of the most isolating of the arts and try to get
away from it all, in a project that requires fourteen other people to
make it work.
You'll witness Amy
Tan get way, way past her previous image--in thigh-high leather boots
and a whip--while Roy Blount, Jr., tries to light her cigarette. You'll
learn what the Critics Chorus was up to--way off to the side. With 100
candid (and often