After the Dance

April 15, 2015

Gaye's tell-all about her decadelong relationship with legendary R&B musician Marvin Gaye (1939-84) is a tragic story about an illicit romance that burned bright but flamed out in a tangled web of abuse. Her account begins with a tortured upbringing as one of bebop singer Slim Gaillard's neglected 17 children, raised in foster care until she was returned to her drug-addicted mother at 14. Jan's relationship with Marvin began shortly after her 17th birthday, and she became a mother to two children with the singer while still a teenager. The narrative gets darker as Jan describes her and Marvin's addiction to freebase cocaine, his bouts of violence, his declining career fortunes, and their subsequent divorce. The author is an astute and generous critic of Marvin's music, despite the tumultuous nature of their relationship, providing insightful commentary on Gaye's most cherished recordings. The book is at its most powerful, though, when it describes a woman's attempts to escape from a sexually, physically, and psychologically abusive relationship. VERDICT This title will surely interest and disturb fans of Marvin Gaye. Jan's writing, with help from Ritz (Divided Soul), is engaging, steamy, harrowing, and insightful. [See Prepub Alert, 11/10/14.]--Brian Flota, James Madison Univ., Harrisonburg, VA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2015
The long-suffering wife of Marvin Gaye (1939-1984) tells the story of her turbulent relationship with the legendary soul singer. Gaye's debut memoir, a faithful recollection of life with a difficult superstar, is as frustrating as it is compulsively readable. On one level, it's yet another tell-all confessional from someone who fell into the trap of loving an artist primarily through the idealized image his work publicly projected. But what separates this memoir from so many other cookie-cutter memoirs about celebrity romances gone wrong is that the author is so deeply in touch with her own flaws and vulnerabilities. A girlhood crush on budding superstar Marvin quickly expanded into something more when she met the soft-spoken musician through a friend of her mother's, who was Marvin's producer at the time. Besides the initial offbeat love triangle that the teenage Jan found herself in-Marvin was 33 years old and married to a 51-year-old at the time-she was getting involved with someone who had been the product of a profoundly warped household. After a torrid initial romance with her musical hero, the author found herself in the throes of marriage and motherhood, desperate to keep Marvin's increasingly flagging attention away from other women. As their relationship progressed to rockier, more adult stages-always accompanied by copious amounts of marijuana and cocaine-her psychological dependence on Marvin only grew, while Marvin's drug-crazed behavior became increasingly unhinged and unpredictable, right up until he was tragically shot dead in an argument with his father. Gaye's explicitly confessional account of her doomed uphill struggle to stay with Marvin is a prime example of how obsessive celebrity worship can so easily (and dangerously) masquerade as enduring love. A fascinating, unsentimental account of a be-careful-what-you-wish-for romance.

May 15, 2015
She had just turned 17 when she met singer Marvin Gaye in 1973, but she'd had a crush on him since the mid-1960s, when she used to watch him performing on American Bandstand. Even though he was twice as old as she was, and married, the author began a relationship with Gaye that led to marriage and that lasted until Gaye's murder in 1984. This is the first time Jan Gaye has spoken at any real length about her life with Marvin; she tells a story of love, fame, addiction, triumph, and tragedyin other words, she tells the story of being a music star's wife in the 1970s. Although the book doesn't break any new ground (this kind of story has been told so many times there might not be any new ground left to break), it is a story told honestly and directly, with real passion and plenty of behind-the-scenes insight. Fans of soul music in the sixties and seventies will be curious to read this one.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)