Shawn Colvin reflects on her pain in memoir, CD

By Brad Buchholz

Austin American-Statesman

AUSTIN, Texas

Singer Shawn Colvin is a child of the prairie, born in South Dakota. But the emotional top-ography of her life is jagged and rocky and rough. Beyond the Grammy Awards, beyond the acclaim, her story is a mountain range of pain.

Colvin lays it all out in a new memoir, “Diamond in the Rough” — a book not so much about transcending personal suffering as explaining its diverse manifestations over the course of decades. Her demons: Depression. Anorexia. Alcoholism. Anxiety. Panic attacks. Hypochondria. Esteem issues. As recently as 2008, Colvin’s feelings of despair were so severe that she considered suicide and checked herself into a psychiatric facility in the midst of a nervous breakdown.

“I got a big dose of stuff. I did. And for generations,” Colvin says softly at home, in Austin, the picture of composure as she reflects upon the range of afflictions addressed in her memoir, released in June in tandem with her new CD, “All Fall Down.” “But I have no other story to tell.”

Colvin’s memoir feels a lot like her songs — naked, vulnerable, dappled with restlessness and longing — as it intertwines twin story lines of music and sorrow. As she’s proved on her albums, Colvin is very good with words that reflect the scariest interior sensations: “I’m riding shotgun down the avalanche.” Yet outside the realm of rhythm and meter, “Diamond in the Rough” is often shocking in its directness.

“Who doesn’t have a bit of pyromania in them?” she writes in the prologue, the first sentence of the book. “There’s something thrilling about making fire — it’s primal, right?” Colvin confesses she’s been “setting fires” throughout her life — literally, since childhood, often in the context of failed love — and all have backfired. Colvin references her most famous song, “Sunny Came Home,” which details arson as an act of personal desperation.

“Sunny is me,” she writes in the memoir.

Conscientiously, Colvin spent a lot of time second-guessing herself during the writing, fearing the revelation might be received as “too maudlin.” No need to worry. “Diamond in the Rough” is more likely to leave readers shaken or empathetic for its uninhibited, unresolved account of a gifted artist who seems never to have known inner peace.

Colvin hopes her memoir will comfort others who suffer from depression. Yet some readers will be more concerned whether the author can save herself. Colvin never says it explicitly in the book, but it’s hard to imagine she’d be here, at all, if it weren’t for music.

Colvin’s story of sorrow and estrangement began in childhood. She had a hard time in school. She abhorred school. Colvin was so shaken by her experience at Lincoln Junior High School in Carbondale, Ill. — “it felt like a cold, vast prison, and I was a new inmate” — that she’d walk out of class in the middle of the day ... and hide.

She didn’t do it for thrills. Colvin was genuinely terrified.

Colvin’s grim depiction of her childhood legitimizes the gritty, unglamorous perspective of the entire memoir. She is no folk princess, and this is not a fairy tale. Colvin portrays herself coarsely throughout — first as a girl who liked to gross out her friends, and later as a young artist who watched “Silence of the Lambs” five times and found humor in the PBS documentary “The Donner Party.”

Sometimes, Colvin comes across as a tortured artist in her memoir. Other times, just tortured — yet smart enough to convey a sense of what’s happening to her in the midst of depression.