In the decades since, Ian's music has continued to move me. I was thrilled when we had the opportunity to work together on last month's Janis Ian: Live From Grand Center one-hour concert filmed for KETC Channel 9.

Society's Child: My Autobiography

by Janis Ian

Tacher/Penguin

348 pages, $26.95

Her career has been fascinating. What do you do for an encore when Leonard Bernstein features you at the age of 15 on national television, your first single charts in the top 10 garnering a Grammy nomination, and The New York Times anoints you "a new boldness in popular music" and "radiant new talent?" Most child prodigies fade quickly from view, but Janis Ian is thriving 40 years later, though not without immense struggle as detailed in her just released "Society's Child: My Autobiography."

Born a red diaper baby (ie., born to parents sympathetic to communism) on a chicken farm in New Jersey, Ian began playing the piano at 3, wrote her first song at 12, and was performing at hootenannies in New York's Greenwich Village one year later. At 14, this wunderkind walked into pop producer Shadow Morton's office and the very next week recorded Society's Child.

It was 1967. David Geffen was her agent. The Byrds opened for her on tour. She shopped with Janis Joplin, did cocaine with Jimi Hendrix and performed on the Johnny Carson, Mike Douglas and Smothers Brothers television programs. Life magazine followed her, wanting photos of her "acting like a teenager" to intersperse with pictures of her on stage and in TV studios.

Perplexing times for this woman child, who in a few short years crashes and burns, sequestering herself in Philadelphia to recover from emotional exhaustion. Suicide attempts and youthful angst-ridden loneliness could make for maudlin reading, but in Ian's adept writing, the reader walks alongside her during this desolate period.

Three years later, after "intensive therapy," she scores a hit with Roberta Flack's recording of her song Jesse; and Ian returns to the music business, eventually selling more than 10 million records and earning multiple Grammy awards, with such songs as the iconic lament, At Seventeen; disco hit, Fly Too High; and jazz duet with Mel Torme, Silly Habits.

The autobiography catapults the reader along her career trajectory. When At Seventeen begins to get radio play, initially she and the band drive a station wagon from one 200-seat club to another. A month later, they play 2,000-seat theaters and a month after that are playing 5,000-seat auditoriums being shuttled around in tour buses and limousines. In this mid '70s period, she lived openly with girlfriends and was "outed" by The Village Voice to the consternation of her record label. The glory, drugs, sex and isolation on the road are intimately captured with unvarnished clarity and insight.

Throughout, Ian entertains with marvelous gossipy bits about Donovan, Laura Nyro, Frank Zappa, James Brown and Nina Simone, but more powerful are her poignant observations about surviving her own life. She walked away from music again in the early '80s, thinking she had enough money and wanting to settle down and start a family with a man. However, the idyll spiraled into tragedy: Her husband became psychotic, financial malfeasance by her bookkeeper left her penniless - owing $1.3 million to the IRS - and two emergency surgeries sapped her of her health.

Ian's writing about this later bottoming out period is particularly compelling, as she helps us understand her abusive relationship with her Valium-addled husband, whom she left only after he hit her and held a gun to her head for hours. Even then, she mourned the end of their relationship.

Knowing many readers would be incredulous, she writes, "I thought I was exempt, too. I wasn't like "those women." Those women, battered women, were stupid. Uneducated. Ignorant. Poor. I was just the opposite. I had everything going for me - success, brains, money. And still, I was seduced, and reduced, until after seven years with him, part of me honestly thought I was stupid, uneducated, and useless."

Ian's story chronicles her eventual renaissance through the love of her female partner of the past 20 years. Ian returns to recording and performing in the '90s, and branches out to write columns for The Advocate, Performing Songwriter, science fiction, and now this book.

Her introspective autobiographical journey concludes, joyous and hopeful: "How much wonder there is to treasure in this life! Even winter, with its long nights and frigid days, would be welcome now. I would take joy in every gust of wind, every snowflake that might fall. Because I was alive, and that was the greatest gift of all."

Coinciding with her autobiography, Ian released a sumptuous 30-song two-CD retrospective from her 40-year career entitled, Best of Janis Ian: The Autobiography Collection. Those unfamiliar will be surprised with her range of musical styles, while those familiar will be thrilled with her classic hits referenced in the book, as well as work tapes, never before released songs, and ones long out of print. Of course, in St. Louis, viewers of KETC's Janis Ian: Live From Grand Center were able to hear many of these songs featured in the television special.