The Only Girl

Penderyn Music Book Prize, 2018

Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780349010229

Price: £14.99

ON SALE: 4th July 2019

Genre: Biography & True Stories / Memoirs

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A raucous and vividly dishy memoir by the only woman on the masthead of Rolling Stone Magazine in the Sixties. A female Almost Famous.

In 1971, Robin Green had an interview with Jann Wenner at the offices Rolling Stone Magazine. She had just moved to Berkley, California, a city that promised “Good Vibes All-a Time.” Those days, job applications asked just one question, “What are your sun, moon and rising signs?” Green thought she was interviewing for clerical job like the other girls in the office, a “real job.” Instead, Green was hired as a journalist.

A brutally honest, intimate memoir of the first girl on the masthead of Rolling Stone magazine, The Only Girl chronicles the beginnings of Robin Green’s career. In this voice-driven humorous careening adventure, Green spills stories of stalking the Grateful Dead with Annie Liebowitz, sparring with Dennis Hopper on a film set in the desert, scandalizing fans of David Cassidy and spending a legendary evening on a water bed in the dorm room of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In the seventies, Green was there as Hunter S. Thompson crafted Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Now, she presents that tumultuous time in America, written with a distinctly gonzo female voice.

Reviews

A sharp exposé of life as the lone female journalist at Rolling Stone in the early seventies, complete with sex, drugs and wild discrimination
Telegraph
Only girl on the masthead? And in the room! And still standing! And with cojones! Green has written a straight-talking, utterly indiscreet, deliciously shocking story about being in the right place at the right time pretty much all the time. What a hoot!
Bill Buford, journalist and author of Among the Thugs and Heat
Compulsively readable, laugh out loud funny and beautifully crafted. I ate up every word. If you thought they had more fun back then, this book will prove that you were right
Ruth Reichl, bestselling author of My Kitchen Year
The Only Girl is a gripping read for all sorts of reasons, one of which is its candidness. Green likes to tell it as it is
Independent
A funny, candid memoir . . . Green vividly portrays being at the epicentre of the new rock'n'roll bohemian culture with the Rolling Stone crowd
Barbara Ellen, Observer
A riveting read
Sunday Post
Robin has written a frank, witty and loving memoir about growing up in the milieu of the seventies at Rolling Stone. Her honesty and insight brought all those times back, some of RS's wildest and wackiest early days
Jann Wenner, Co-Founder and Publisher of Rolling Stone
[An] entertaining, no-holds-barred memoir . . . She vividly recalls life at the heart of American counterculture, complete with tons of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll
Clair Woodward, Mirror
An eyes-wide-open account of a particular time in America, a time in which Rolling Stones journalists could be found roaring down California highways stoned on mescaline in the company of Annie Leibovitz and Hunter S Thompson
Herald
This isn't a memoir recollected in tranquility. It doesn't 'capture' an experience. It animates a specific time and place - making it jump off the page so it smacks you in the face. If you didn't live it, you do now. If you did, it's déjà vu all over again. Robin Green stares down her life in the clarifying light of truth. Her fearlessness and reckless honesty give her story an aching power, poignancy, and immediacy you won't soon forget
Joshua Brand, writer and producer of St. Elsewhere, Northern Exposure and The Americans
A funny, frank, powerful and ultimately moving memoir by an extraordinary writer who didn't merely roll with the Zeitgeist but remade it in her own image
T. C. Boyle, author of The Harder They Come and The Terranauts