I spent time with Sects, Drugs & Rock n Roll, and what struck me most is how honestly the book refuses to simplify a life that was anything but simple. This isn’t a memoir that arranges experience into neat lessons after the fact, it allows the contradictions to exist. Faith and rebellion. Music and silence. Hunger for love and the long work of learning how to offer it to yourself.
What gives the book its pulse is the sense of motion, how one search leads to another, how music opens doors that spirituality later walks through, and how neither provides answers without cost. The early love of performance feels less like ambition and more like a need to be heard, to be witnessed. And when the stage gives way to deeper, stranger territories, spiritual awakenings, destructive relationships, moments of healing the book never pretends those paths were linear or pure. They were human.
Some of the most affecting moments come from your willingness to look directly at forgiveness not as a single act, but as a long, uncomfortable process. Forgiving others, yes, but also reckoning with the ways we abandon ourselves in order to belong, to be loved, or to survive. That tension between seeking God externally and learning to offer compassion inward is where the book quietly does its most important work.
Sects, Drugs & Rock n Roll isn’t about reinvention as spectacle. It’s about endurance. About continuing to search even when answers disappoint, even when belief fractures, even when love costs more than expected. That honesty is what makes the book resonate beyond any single era or cultural moment. Readers who have lived, stumbled, and kept going will recognize themselves here ~Valerie Woodson, Book Baby.
What gives the book its pulse is the sense of motion, how one search leads to another, how music opens doors that spirituality later walks through, and how neither provides answers without cost. The early love of performance feels less like ambition and more like a need to be heard, to be witnessed. And when the stage gives way to deeper, stranger territories, spiritual awakenings, destructive relationships, moments of healing the book never pretends those paths were linear or pure. They were human.
Some of the most affecting moments come from your willingness to look directly at forgiveness not as a single act, but as a long, uncomfortable process. Forgiving others, yes, but also reckoning with the ways we abandon ourselves in order to belong, to be loved, or to survive. That tension between seeking God externally and learning to offer compassion inward is where the book quietly does its most important work.
Sects, Drugs & Rock n Roll isn’t about reinvention as spectacle. It’s about endurance. About continuing to search even when answers disappoint, even when belief fractures, even when love costs more than expected. That honesty is what makes the book resonate beyond any single era or cultural moment. Readers who have lived, stumbled, and kept going will recognize themselves here ~Valerie Woodson, Book Baby.