This slim but wide-ranging volume shows the comparably slim but wide-ranging Liz Swados — composer, author, director, playwright — to excellent advantage. The topics covered include her upbringing in a Jewish family liberally cursed with mental illness to her own history of bipolar disorder and a gallery of unforgettable characters, including several eccentric relatives and such creative luminaries as Peter Brook, Marlon Brando, and Ellen Stewart.
Throughout, Swados appears as a creative artist possessed of both deep empathy and strong boundaries, able to get her casts, which tended to include untrained, non-professional (and often deeply troubled) adolescents, to deliver outstanding work without exploiting them or feeling any need to “save” them. The pieces that document her creative processes —especially her reimagining of the Book of Job as a clown show — are particularly compelling, as is her tribute to her schizophrenic brother, Lincoln.
Perhaps the most intriguing moment in the book recounts how her uncle Kim, an art director and artist of some renown, late in life received a generous commission to paint a series of realistic portraits of the leaders of the Third Reich. The family was pleased that Kim was finally doing well financially, and Swados’s father approvingly noted that the portraits were quite accurate. Swados muses, “Does anyone remember that we’re Jews?”
Swados’s prose style is delightful throughout. She is a firm believer in direct declarative sentences that pull no punches. “Because of their possessive and possessed relationship to sound,” she writes, “composers need to be tyrants.… Jealousy and cruelty are not unusual in any of the arts. But in music, wicked tongues and devious behavior are common. It’s an antisocial occupation.” Such writing is as refreshing as it is rare.
