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High Heels & Guitar Picks: Two Memoirs From Women Who Loved Music Men

High Heels & Guitar Picks: Two Memoirs From Women Who Loved Music Men

Sex, Drugs, and Broken Hearts… The True Cost of Rock Romance from Roxana Shirazi & Lorelei Shellist

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Rock-Paper-Shadows
May 03, 2025
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High Heels & Guitar Picks: Two Memoirs From Women Who Loved Music Men
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Rock ‘n’ Roll Babylon: A Review of “The Last Living Slut” by Roxana Shirazi

Sex, Drugs, and... More Sex, Actually

The mythology of rock ‘n’ roll excess has long been chronicled through the male gaze—the Keith Richards autobiography, the Mötley Crüe tell-all “The Dirt,” and countless other tomes documenting the exploits of male rock stars from their perspective. Far fewer are the accounts from the women who occupied the periphery of this world, the so-called “groupies” who have traditionally been relegated to footnotes in rock history.

My “hot take” on these books is posted below—I read them back-to-back

Enter Roxana Shirazi’s “The Last Living Slut: Born in Iran, Bred Backstage,” a 2011 memoir that promises to flip the mattress by allowing one such woman to tell her own story on her own terms.

Does it succeed? Well, that’s complicated.

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Shirazi’s memoir opens with the most compelling material—her childhood in pre-revolutionary Iran, where political repression collided with her burgeoning sexuality. Her eventual exile to England at age 10 introduces another layer of complexity: racism, alienation, and the discovery of rock music as both escape and identity. These early chapters showcase Shirazi’s genuine literary talent, deftly contrasting the warm but politically oppressive environment of her homeland with the cold bureaucratic efficiency of England. Her navigation between these worlds feels genuine, nuanced, and worthy of a full memoir in its own right.

Then the backstage passes arrive, and things go downhill faster than a drummer’s hotel room TV being thrown out a window.

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