I Walked the Line, Vivian Cash, and From the Heart, June Carter Cash
Don’t judge a girl by the books she bought more than a decade ago….that’s how the saying goes, right? I jest, but the truth is, I did buy these books when I was around 20/23 years old (can’t remember exactly when) after watching the movie “Walk the Line” with Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix. I do find it funny (interesting) that, even before I started reading books only by women – that wouldn’t start for another few years) the books I bought “about” Johnny Cash were not his autobiography nor any biography, but rather, the books his first and second wives wrote. I knew what I was interested in before I knew what I was interested I guess 😉 Anyways, I decided it was finally time to knock these two out. The first, by his first wife, Vivian Cash, is mainly a collection of his letters to her during the first 2-3 years of their relationship when he was deployed in Germany, followed by about 50 pages of her recollection of events once he returned. She said she was in love with him until the day he died, and frankly it shows – she never changed her name, even though she remarried, and places most of the blame for what happened on June Carter. Even when she blames the drugs for Johnny’s behavior, the drugs seem somehow to be June’s fault, too. It doesn’t seem like Vivian was ever able to move on, something which it seemed like she was all too aware of. She wrote that eventually she was able to realize that the bitterness she was holding on to was only hurting herself, and so she let it go, but I think those words were more for herself than anyone else. One thing she said she stick with me though: she accused June Carter of being an avid pill popper. At first I thought this was just a byproduct of all that bitterness she supposedly let go of, but then I read June Carter’s second memoir, which is supposedly about her life with Johnny. I could not make any sense of it at all: the book is divided into short chapters (2-3 pages at most) and each one is preceded with a photograph. One would think that the photographs would have to do with what she talks about in the following chapter, but no dice. In addition, it is impossible to draw any connections between the chapters: there is no coherency, no sense of time or chronology, nothing to give you any context. I was about 150 pages in when I could not stand it anymore and had to do some basic research to determine whether Vivian’s accusation was correct – was June a drug user, and more importantly (to me), was she popping pills while she wrote the memoir? The short answer is, yes. Which explains a lot – at least about the memoir.