At one point in her memoir, Ingrid Lucia confesses that she’s been dissed in New Orleans for writing “novels” on social media. If you’ve followed her on Facebook—or even read her interviews in these pages—you know what they’re talking about: her unfiltered posts regularly reveal exactly what’s been going on in her personal and creative life at any given time. That’s who she is as a writer and performer: she gives you all she’s got, take it or leave it.

Yet the singer’s first book isn’t a compilation of those posts; the writing here is more compact and polished. Nor is it strictly a sobriety memoir, though she’s brutally honest about the comeback from alcoholism and what that took out of her (her liver for starters; she had a transplant in 2020). Instead, the book is an episodic story of a life that’s been lived rather remarkably, from her youth in a performing family who lived proudly outside the mainstream, to her current status as a veteran artist and unsinkable spirit.

Not many people could write about building showboats in Nebraska as a child, or performing on New York street corners as a pre-teen, or getting their first kiss behind a circus stage, or teaching the Cure’s Robert Smith to swing dance (she kept getting distracted by his orange lip-liner). But there are also quite a few heartbreaking stories here, including the dissolution of her first marriage and the breakup of her first major band—The Flying Neutrinos were apparently hit by a perfect storm of bad advice and music-biz mishandling (plus some terrible luck: they signed contracts just next to the World Trade Center on September 10, 2001). One major theme of this book is the challenge of surviving as an artist in New Orleans, and the horror stories she tells—of evictions, random arrests and perpetually empty bank accounts—will be familiar to too many. The “big time” of the title is the dream of financial success as an artist, perpetually out of reach.

Yet she’s also an unshakeable optimist even during the worst of times. Lucia’s voice remains sharp and engaging throughout, and the stories are punctuated by song lyrics and emotive letters to her daughter Ava. And a few juicy details are spilled along the way: I still want to know which of the New Orleans Nightingales cleaned the toilet with her ex-husband’s toothbrush before returning it to its spot.

This isn’t a book to plough through in one or two sittings: Taken a few chapters at a time it feels more like one side of a good late-night conversation. To which you can respond: “I couldn’t possibly top that story, so go ahead and tell me another one.”