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Porcelain: A Memoir

Review

Porcelain: A Memoir

Thanks to Moby, I have found that it is not sad or depressing to read about your past through the eyes of someone else who lived alongside you at the same time --- and that doing so did not make me go blind with fear about my advancing age. Rather, thanks to a delightfully honest writing style, it instilled in me a nostalgia and pride about surviving a certain time in American history that was hard yet eventful and totally worth it. PORCELAIN did that for me, and I am eternally grateful to Moby for the experience.

Moby’s memoir traverses one of the most important times in my life: my almost two decades as a New York City dweller. I intend to do it again someday, thinking about new adventures and the excitement the city provides after too many years in the New Jersey suburbs. But I feel as if my love for the city has been renewed by the trip down the ’80/’90s memory lane that Moby offers so poignantly and with loads of humor. 

Maybe it’s because he’s from Connecticut originally as I was, and all of us kids in CT were just waiting for the day when we took the Metro North train into the city and found a home there instead. For those of us who did that, and stayed for a long time, Moby’s story stirs up amazing memories of the time before New York was Disneyfied and tourist-fied, and we were proud of ourselves for finding ways to make a very expensive life work out without having the money to do so in the traditional sense.

"PORCELAIN is a masterful memoir worthy of my all-time favorite, Mary Karr. You can learn a lot from Moby…and I promise you will!"

PORCELAIN lays it all out for you. 

The book opens in a laundromat in The Dock shopping center in Stratford, CT, where my dad practiced law up the street for over 50 years (he still practices but not in that office anymore). We see Moby as a young kid, a poor kid, hanging out in the rain while his mother does laundry. He hears a song in the car, and his life changes.

PORCELAIN is just as much about the transformative abilities of music and art as it is about Moby’s transformation into a world-famous DJ. And he is quite sly when he introduces us to the equally or even more famous cast of characters who populate some of his best set pieces. The book gives Madonna, Run-D.M.C., Jeff Buckley and many more outstanding musical icons their proper place in the history of the burgeoning ’80/’90s club scene. 

His squatting in a factory in Stamford, CT and the scary living quarters he shares with some off-the-wall folks in dirty downtown NYC remind us all of the follies and fun of our youth, when there was fearlessness and a resolve to make things work out that tends to soften like chamois after the friction of one’s adult years. It is a hopeful book, a grateful one, and is all the more delightful because of that.

Even if you don’t know who Moby is, even if you are not one of the millions of people who thought his album Play was a masterpiece, even if you bypassed a city adventure in youth to stay put in the suburbs, PORCELAIN is a music memoir like no other. It reads like the quiet yet compelling journal of someone you thought you knew but then discovered there was so much more to him than originally considered. It is filled with surprises and emotional moments. If you are a DJ, perhaps you could treat it like a how-to book; Moby works his way up in the club scene and becomes a musician by some pretty hard work and fascinating efforts.

I couldn’t put it down. 

It was like a memoir for me, too, and reminded me of the commitment to rediscover that youthful mind frame of “can do” instead of “can’t do.” It is uplifting, inspiring and shocking, especially since Moby never stops letting you remember that he’s just a Christian vegan from New England, a small town boy who could have been lost to poverty but instead discovered a musical galaxy that had a place for him if he was willing to do whatever he could to take ownership of it. This isn’t exactly a beach read, but I promise you that if you take it home, everything around you will seem that much more interesting in its context.

PORCELAIN is a masterful memoir worthy of my all-time favorite, Mary Karr. You can learn a lot from Moby…and I promise you will!

Reviewed by Jana Siciliano on June 3, 2016

Porcelain: A Memoir
by Moby

  • Publication Date: May 16, 2017
  • Genres: Memoir, Music, Nonfiction
  • Paperback: 416 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin Books
  • ISBN-10: 0143110209
  • ISBN-13: 9780143110200