Storm Large’s Memoir, Crazy Enough, Will Crack You Up
By Carl Blumenthal
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
BROOKLYN — Within the sub-genre of memoirs of mental illness is a niche — family members writing about their sick relatives, specifically daughters wondering whether they’ll turn out as crazy as their moms.
Some examples are The Four of Us, (1991) by Elizabeth Swados, Broadway musical producer; National Public Radio correspondent Jacki Lyden’s Daughter of the Queen of Sheba (1997); and fiction writer Virginia Holman’s Rescuing Patty Hearst (2003).
Now comes 42-year-old Storm Large, one-time lead singer of The Balls, a West Coast punk rock band, whose name lives up to her block-busting autobiography, Crazy Enough (Free Press, 2012).
Compared to her mother, who spun in and out of hospitals with the monotony of a revolving door, Large quips, “Other than hypersexuality, addiction, hallucinations, panic attacks and general fits of blackout depression, I was totally normal.” (p. 218)