In between, we get the tales the author most enjoys telling from her own life. This unconventional memoir opens with a lyrical meditation on death and ends with a surprising sermon on pleasure.

And along the way, she defies and debunks every popular assumption about disability. From the streets of Havana, Cuba where she covers an international disability rights conference, to the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, to an auditorium at Princeton, where she defends her right to live against philosopher Peter Singer, she lives a life on her own terms. With assistance, she passionately celebrates her life's richness and pleasures. Born with a congenital neuromuscular disease, Johnson has never been able to walk, dress, or bathe without assistance. With help, however, she manages to take on the world. A Washington Post Book World Rave Harriet McBryde Johnson's witty and highly unconventional memoir opens with a lyrical meditation on death and ends with a bold and unsentimental sermon on pleasure.

Due to a congenital neuromuscular disease, she has never been able to walk, dress, or bathe without assistance. By the time she realized she wasn't a dying child, she was living a grown-up life, intensely engaged with people, politics, work, struggle, and community. In secret, she carried the knowledge of her mortality with her and tried to sort out what it meant. Then as now, she tended to draw her own conclusions. The message came from a maudlin TV commercial for the Muscular Dystrophy Association that featured a boy who looked a lot like her. The author isn't sure, but she thinks one of her earliest memories was learning that she will die. This unconventional memoir shatters the myth of the tragic disabled life. The era of flourishing live pub venues and record stores, and rock journalists as cultural arbiters and agitators, is now long gone.įeaturing cameo appearances from luminaries of the Seattle grunge boom and the Britpop response to it, and encounters with the likes of U2, The Cure, Pearl Jam, The Fall and Elvis Costello, It's Too Late to Die Young Now is an Almost Famous for Generation X, and a hilarious and heartfelt eulogy to a life that seems even less probable now than it did at the time.Summary: A civil rights advocate for people with disabilities describes the congenital neuromuscular disease that rendered her dependent on the assistance of others and her life-long struggle against assumptions about disabled people. Though it didn't seem like it at the time, the years Mueller was living the dream - the late-eighties to the mid-nineties - were actually the last hurrah for the music scene as we knew it. In barely two years, he went from a childhood bedroom with a poster of Robert Smith to The Cure's tour bus.

Starting out writing for the Sydney music street press in his teens, by his early twenties, Mueller was working for the legendary UK music weekly Melody Maker, earning a living by listening to records, going to gigs, hanging out in seedy pubs and travelling the world with his favourite rock groups. There is no field of journalism more mythologised or more derided than rock journalism - with good reason, according to Andrew Mueller.Īnd he'd know. It's Too Late to Die Young Now answers the question: what became of the rock writer the day the music died?

Too late to die young book