Blondie’s Debbie Harry decided to write a memoir before she forgets it all

By mbrooks on October 2, 2019
BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA – MAY 16: Blondie performs onstage during the 36th annual ASCAP Pop Music Awards at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on May 16, 2019 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)

By Matthew Brooks

Debbie Harry has been fronting Blondie for about 45 years. In all that time she has witnessed, or been at the center of, much of modern rock history.

“It was an amazing time,” Harry told The Philidelphia Inquirer.

“For all the mistakes I’ve made, I don’t live with a lot of regret. … I had big dreams, but I had no real connection to the music business or the art world or show business and I was just basically winging it.”

She says she was determined to write a memoir, a story only she can tell. And there’s not much time for her to tell it, she says.

“Ultimately,” she told the Inquirer, “I felt like it was the time to do it before I forgot everything.”

She wrote her memoir, Face It, in collaboration with music writer Sylvie Simmons.

Harry knows her entrance and stability in the music scene is not a common story.

“I know how lucky I’ve been, and I got to do something with my life that I never, never expected to have happen,” she says.

She has been fully living her life in recent days. Blondie released an album, “Pollinator” in 2018. Harry has been involved with activist issues, including the environmental issues.

She was also an opening act for Elvis Costello.

In the book, she notes how living a full life is a matter of living and leaving something of yourself for others.

“The lesson really was the same as it ever was: survive and find a way to create while you’re hurtling through space,” Harry writes.

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