Title: Coloring Outside the Lines Author: Aimee Cooper Publisher: Rowdy's Press How's this for a great punk rock tale? Teenage girl is stood up by dweeb so wanders around NYC until a poster advertising Johnny Thunders catches her eye. Though thoroughly out of place in club where leather and spiked hair rules the day, she survives enough to be electrified by Johnny's three-note junky twang, and follows a path that leads her to working for Slash, LA's eminent punk mag, at a time when X, Black Flag and The Germs were tearing up the town. Innocent girl befriends motley gang of fellow punks who end up turning her share house into a sea of sleeping bag-clad bodies, and eventually ends up with the honours of watching over Johnny Thunders as he passes out in her living room, and preparing a dinner party for the members of Black Flag, including new vocalist, the enigmatic Henry Rollins. "He came, he ate, he left - and never said one word." La plus c'est change... Coloring Outside the Lines is a rollicking tale, not only of America's early hard-core punk scene, but of one woman's journey from shy and lonely to confident and wise, if not a little embittered. It's a story of how our music finds us, beating us over the head and dragging us on a soundtracked journey into life. Of how we find our place to belong until others - media, fashion, younger kids - take that away and we have to some how pick ourselves up from the scrappy moshpit, dust each other off, and wander on until we find a new place, a new people, to call ours. As you'd expect, Cooper's personal struggles to understand her own life are framed by punk - what happens after isn't explained, perhaps leaving room for another volume to explain how she ended up on a ranch in Texas, as her biog explains. Cooper's writing style is quick and punchy, anecdotal yet reflective enough to cut through any hype or the sickening stench of nostalgia that sometimes ruins a good memoir. It's personal histories like this that give us a sense of what it was like, and Coloring Outside the Lines is a welcome addition to the chronicling of those seminal musical outsider times.