Here's a description of the book from an article on Nola.com. The article does mention the book will be released early next year.
Dr. John appears in the pages of her forthcoming autobiography, which she started writing years ago. The photos have now been selected, and the book is being typeset ahead of final edits.
“It’s an emotional thing, to hold a mirror up” to your life, Jones said. “My book is about my family’s life long before you get to me. My grandfather’s and mother’s and father’s lives are told in some detail, because I feel like my family is one of the great American families.
“They’re an unknown family, and they were poor, but my grandfather was a vaudevillian and my mother was raised in an orphanage. These are powerful stories, and I wanted to tell them. It’s one of people without any means, without any chance, who kept pounding away.”
Her own success, then, came with the “weight of that responsibility of all those ancestors going, ‘You made it. Now don’t f*** up.’”
The book presents her life and career in the context of her lineage. Her ancestors “had cinematic lives, iconic touchstones. My grandmother running off with my mother in her arms through the cornfields so the social worker couldn’t get ‘em. My 14-year-old dad jumping freight trains during the Depression. These are icons in American history, and the family is there for all of ‘em.
“I hope it reads well. It’s kind of like ‘Forrest Gump’ as told by Charles Dickens.”
She opted for a broader story rather than a kiss-and-tell compendium of salacious details.
“I gave ‘em some Tom Waits (a long-ago boyfriend), because they like Tom Waits. I talked a little bit about love. But it’s not salacious.
“Part of why they buy the book is they want to know something that you never told anybody else. You have to decide what you want the whole wide world to know. It feels like you’re whispering a secret in their ear, but this will be less of a secret than anything else.
“I tried to tell it in an honest and classy way. Whatever I said that was personal, to be honest, I don’t go in too deep, because it’s nobody’s business. I said as much as I was comfortable saying.”
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