Blood: A Memoir

by Allison Moorer

Overview

The Grammy- and Academy Award- nominated singer-songwriter's haunting, lyrical memoir, sharing the story of an unthinkable act of violence and ultimate healing through art


Mobile, Alabama, 1986. A fourteen-year-old girl is awakened by the unmistakable sound of gunfire. On the front lawn, her father has shot and killed her mother before turning the gun on himself. Allison Moorer would grow up to be an award-winning musician, with her songs likened to "a Southern accent: eight miles an hour, deliberate, and very dangerous to underestimate" (Rolling Stone). But that moment, which forever altered her own life and that of her older sister, Shelby, has never been far from her thoughts. Now, in her journey to understand the unthinkable, to parse the unknowable, Allison uses her lyrical storytelling powers to lay bare the memories and impressions that make a family, and that tear a family apart.


Blood delves into the meaning of inheritance and destiny, shame and trauma — and how it is possible to carve out a safe place in the world despite it all. With a foreword by Allison's sister, Grammy winner Shelby Lynne, Blood reads like an intimate journal: vivid, haunting, and ultimately life-affirming.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780306922688
Publisher:	Hachette Books
Publication date:	10/29/2019
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	223,463
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Allison Moorer is a singer/songwriter who has released ten critically acclaimed albums. She has been nominated for Academy, Grammy, Americana Music Association, and Academy of Country Music awards. Allison holds an MFA in creative writing from The New School; her work has been published in American Songwriter, Guernica, No Depression, Libhub.com, and Bittersoutherner.com. She lives in Nashville.

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/03/2019

In this beautiful, heart-wrenching memoir, country music singer-songwriter Moorer describes how her life changed at 14 when her father shot her mother and himself dead in their front yard in Mobile, Ala. In lyrical prose, Moorer earnestly confronts an early childhood in the 1970s spent tiptoeing around a violent, alcoholic father, hiding behind a protective older sister (Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Shelby Lynne) who was “always too close to the middle of things,” and reaching out to her beloved mother: “ got between us when I was a girl, and he gets between us now, taking up all the space and spreading over my memories of her like coffee spilled on a white tablecloth.” But there were flickers of happiness when the family made music together. In single-page chapters scattered throughout, Moorer meditates on objects of her childhood, like her mother’s coffee cups and her father’s battered 1964 B-25 Gibson guitar, which Moorer plays on all of her records. Three decades after the crime, the sisters continue to make music together to get through their lives, always harmonizing: “I dip when she dives, I go under to catch her, she hovers above to lift me.” Moorer’s masterful, comforting storytelling may serve as solace for those who’ve faced abuse, a signal for those in it to get out, and an eye-opener for others. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Beautiful, heart-wrenching . . . Moorer's masterful, comforting storytelling may serve as solace for those who've faced abuse, a signal for those in it to get out, and an eye-opener for others."
—Publishers Weekly starred review

"Moorer's memoir is full of backstory-memories, current notes and thoughts, and well-described metaphors that come together fluidly, all told with grit and lyrical prose. ...Her writing is beautiful and gripping and will stop readers in their tracks...a must-read."
—Booklist starred review

"There is much wisdom in her experience as well as in her reflections on what she has read and heard....Much different from most musicians' memoirs and of much interest to all who wrestle to understand tragedies of their own."
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Allison Moorer is known for songs of ragged, poetic honesty — and for the emotional clarity of her country western ballads. Her debut memoir exhibits these qualities and more."
—LitHub, one of the most anticipated books of 2019

"There are few writers — few people, in fact — who could examine with such profound bravery the immense suffering and trauma in her story, infuse it with a lyrical sense of timelessness, and make us feel grateful for the telling. Blood is both unflinching and redemptive: a song of loss and courage."
—Rosanne Cash

"Like her songwriting, Moorer's prose is steeped in a rich sense of place, vivid characterization, and a story you will never forget. Not since Joan Didion's Blue Nights has grief been explored with so much beauty and complexity."
—Silas House, author of Southernmost

"Grit and grace, beauty and pain, on every wise page. Allison Moorer has given us a memoir as bloody, rich, and complex as red Alabama clay."
—Alice Randall, author of The Wind Done Gone

"Blood reveals the complicated mess of love and hurt that all too many readers will recognize. Moorer herself survived the unimaginable, and her poetic testimony should summon vigorous new attention to the public-health crisis that is male anger."
—Sarah Smarsh, author of Heartland

"Blood is the most vulnerable work you're likely to read for quite some time."
—Rick Bass, author of For a Little While


"[A] harrowing debut."—Elle

"Her voice rings with equal parts defiance and vulnerability."
—Blender

"[Moorer's] written this book like a symphony. It is expansive, and its three parts feel like movements. Moorer fills them with prose that has the sharp honesty of the greatest songwriters."
—The Bitter Southerner

"Written with brave, clear-eyed compassion for all involved, Blood is an astonishing and moving meditation on family inheritance and acceptance. Despite her family's singularly tragic circumstances, Blood tells a universal story about the things our parents pass down to us — what we learn to be grateful for, what we release ourselves from, and what we simply leave alone."
—Jennifer Palmieri, author of Dear Madame President

From the Publisher

★ 2019-08-18
Country music singer Moorer recounts a scarifying, life-defining event: the murder-suicide of her parents.

"Someone can take himself out, fine, but they leave behind those who love them with a never-ending list of questions and a shadow hanging over everything, like a dark triptych in the middle of the room." So writes Moorer, who, like her sister, fellow country singer Shelby Lynne, has been living for more than 30 years with the memory of the gunshots by which her father killed her mother and then turned the gun on himself. Moorer is her own Rashomon, exploring that terrible event from every possible side, examining the living, recalling the words of the dead, concluding that, given the abuse and alcohol that flowed through the relationship, the end seemed inevitable. The dark triptych of which she writes represents a hazy unknowability, the list of questions keys that can never be recovered since the answers can never come. Affecting in its cleareyed depiction of the lives that are shattered all around the immediate victims, including her then-14-year-old self, Moorer's account examines the lingering effects—e.g., mistrust and a habit of leaving relationships before they're over. "Let me store resentments like I'm canning vegetables for the winter" she writes, "so I'll slowly develop a deep, smoldering hatred in return for my deep disappointment." Yet she tried to think of herself in terms other than the daughter of a murderer, the daughter of a murder victim. There is much wisdom in her experience as well as in her reflections on what she has read and heard, as with her note that one great step forward is to "give up hope for a better past." That her past is worse than most has posed countless challenges, it's evident in these pages, but Moorer confronts it with an unblinking honesty that is sometimes long on self-doubt and short on comfort.

Much different from most musicians' memoirs and of much interest to all who wrestle to understand tragedies of their own.

Kirkus Reviews

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