What’s better: the music or the dirt?

Shawn Colvin

Last night I saw Shawn Colvin perform live at Nashville’s beautiful Cheekwood Botanical Garden. And I was tickled to get more than just a great live show: On stage, Colvin chatted about her upcoming memoir from HarperCollins, A Few Small Repairs, named for her 1996 album that featured the hit “Sunny Came Home.”

She asked the audience what they’d prefer: information about the music she’s played—or dirt. Surprisingly, the audience was split in their reactions. (Confession: I hollered for “dirt.”)

Colvin gave more information about her book in a March interview with The Birmingham News:

“It’s a combination of stories about my life and stories I’ve told on stage, but they’re not presented in chronological order,” Colvin says. “I include some of my musical thoughts, and stories that I find amusing and other people have found amusing—or not amusing.” The challenges she faces as a woman, a parent, a musician and “someone who suffers from depression” will be fused into the narrative, Colvin says. Crafting a memoir proved to be quite different from songwriting, she says, and Colvin prepared by reading the work of Mary Karr, the best-selling author of a memoir trilogy, and Open, a frank autobiography by former tennis champ Andre Agassi.

Are you a Shawn Colvin fan? Will you read A Few Small Repairs? (No word on a pub date yet.) Is a memoir only good if it’s packed with lots of “dirt”?

Also on The Book Case: See a recent post on celebrity memoirs.