Chasing Down the Dawn
by Jewel Kilcher

Harper Entertainment, 2000
ISBN: 0060192003
Memoir, 142 pages
Hardcover, $24.00 

 

ABOUT THE BOOK
Stockholm, The Grand Hotel Outside the canals are weeping, rising silently beyond their cement banks. Soundlessly, they spill onto the sidewalk, like a frayed edge. The ground will freeze soon. The night is cold. I can feel it reach my skin through the glass of my window. My pane. My lamp. My towels. Funny how every hotel room becomes my own. My home. If only for one night.

Welcome to a world set to the ever-changing rhythms of an artist's life. Since childhood, Jewel has turned to her own short stories, vivid narratives, and starkly honest writings to revisit the past, chronicle the many characters she's encountered, and trace the intricate, unpredictable patterns of her days. In Chasing Down the Dawn, recording artist, actress, and best-selling author Jewel opens her intimate journals to create a vivid montage of the people, places, relationships, and passages that colored the life she came from and marked the last magical, turbulent, and ultimately transformational year.

Drawn from her remarkable chronicle of life on the road during the Spirit World Tour, this unforgettable collection of freeze-frames captures unusual images from Jewel's childhood in Alaska, her beginnings as a struggling artist, and her challenges as a daughter, sister, and woman. Jewel paints an unblinkingly honest picture of the exceptional journey that carried her to the world's stage. 

Here, as if pulled from a stack of snapshots, are Jewel's moment-by-moment observations on life as she now lives it: the pleasure of sold-out performances and the pressures of her industry .. the sweetness of love and bitterness of loss ... friendship, freedom, and the small miracles we ourselves create. And herein a book that allows the reader a rare glimpse of life's turning points as if viewed from over the author's shoulder -- are Jewel's deeply personal insights on the events that shaped her understanding: her parents' divorce, her experience of poverty, the healing of her difficult relationship with her father, and the development of her unique talent. 

With the publication of her best-selling collection of poetry, A Night Without Armor, Jewel established herself as a light on the literary horizon. With acutely observed, elegantly written depictions of the musicians, lovers, bikers, strangers, celebrities, and characters that inhabit the singer/songwriter's world, illustrated with Jewel's own drawings and never-before-seen photographs from her family archives, Chasing Down the Dawn is more than a collection of vignettes, observations, and stories. It is a finely wrought mosaic in prose and poetry, set to the rhythms of life. 

Other books by this author:
A Night Without Armor