It's not at all easy to talk about Grace Jones - disco queen, new waver, Bond villain, diva, android, androgyne - as if she is a real person. Both odd and reassuring for the reader of her memoirs is the sense that Jones herself has the same problem.
Here's a passage from near the end of the irresistibly titled I'll Never Write My Memoirs: "Even death won't stop me. It never has. You can find images of me from centuries ago. Faces that look like mine carved in wood from ancient Egypt ... I have been around for a long time, heart pounding, ready to pounce on my prey ... tripping, grieving, loving, hunting, conquering, seducing, fighting, dreaming, laughing, and I always will be."
This turn for the mythic comes at the end of a chapter about why nearly every current music star is a shameless and yet strangely unadventurous Jones rip-off (Rihanna earns contempt for wearing "a painted bodysuit", unlike Jones, who used to let Keith Haring paint directly on her skin). If Jones is often copied now, it's partly because she was always so adept at surfaces, masks, personae. Images of her from the 1980s still look risky and futuristic. Her friend Andy Warhol, she writes here, "knew what was coming" - and clearly, so did she. No surprise, then, that the book, ghostwritten by Paul Morley, doesn't do much self-examination.
Indeed, the moments when she does analyse her own history and emotional life are often the most generic. When her parents left Jamaica for America, she and her siblings remained behind, so Jones spent much of her childhood living with her religious relatives, primarily her grandmother and the grandmother's much younger, abusive boyfriend; but hearing that Jones learnt to be rebellious in response to early constraints, or that she channelled her abuser to achieve her intimidating stare, doesn't seem much more intriguing than what we can glean from looking at the pictures.
Jones makes a point of obfuscating her age, but by the early 70s she was modelling for major Parisian designers. By 1980 she was an established musician, already abandoning disco and adopting New Wave and, in the following years, grew so well known that being Grace Jones, on her hit records, videos, album covers and occasional movies, became a more or less full-time job. In the book, Jones hops from the United States to Paris and back, shot by Helmut Newton, dressed by Issey Miyake, rooming with Jessica Lange and Jerry Hall. She advises Michael Jackson on how to break away from his family, hangs around Studio 54, "a place of secrets and secretions, the in-crowd and inhalations", and frequently takes off all her clothes, whether in the recording booth or for the airport metal detectors.
