From the Publisher
After the Dance: My Life With Marvin Gaye is billed as a new tell-all memoir. And it lives up to the hype.” — LA Weekly
“With sensitivity and insight, Gaye examines their explosive four-year marriage, ultimately making peace with the dark side of one of America’s most influential partners.” — O, The Oprah Magazine
“Jan’s writing … is engaging, steamy, harrowing, and insightful.” — Library Journal
“...a story told honestly and directly, with real passion and plenty of behind-the-scenes insight. — Booklist
“If your heart is not affected greatly after reading, it’s time for a checkup... What a fabulous book of poems.” — Washington Independent Review of Books
“Jan and Marvin’s love affair is hot-and at times amazingly cold. We see how love can bring people together as well as tear them apart. This fascinating and entertaining memoir is an unforgettable education on the power of love.” — Zane, New York Times bestselling author
“With raw and penetrating honesty, this memoir reveals everything audiences ever wanted to know about Marvin Gaye’s life. Most important, this is also a story of a woman courageously sharing her voice, her story.” — bell hooks, author of Ain't I a Woman
“The story made me emotional, confused, and sympathetic, all at the same time. Love, drugs, power, and demons-with a hint of other celebrity lives intertwined-make up Jan’s story with the legendary crooner. The raw storytelling, full of secrets kept until now, makes this book a treasure.” — LisaRaye McCoy, actress
“This stunning memoir is hot! It’s also unforgettable in its pain and vulnerability, which Jan Gaye presents with raw honesty. It will make all women love differently, but probably no less passionately.” — Grace Octavia, author of Something She Can Feel
bell hooks
With raw and penetrating honesty, this memoir reveals everything audiences ever wanted to know about Marvin Gaye’s life. Most important, this is also a story of a woman courageously sharing her voice, her story.
Grace Octavia
This stunning memoir is hot! It’s also unforgettable in its pain and vulnerability, which Jan Gaye presents with raw honesty. It will make all women love differently, but probably no less passionately.
Booklist
...a story told honestly and directly, with real passion and plenty of behind-the-scenes insight.
LisaRaye McCoy
The story made me emotional, confused, and sympathetic, all at the same time. Love, drugs, power, and demons-with a hint of other celebrity lives intertwined-make up Jan’s story with the legendary crooner. The raw storytelling, full of secrets kept until now, makes this book a treasure.
The Oprah Magazine O
With sensitivity and insight, Gaye examines their explosive four-year marriage, ultimately making peace with the dark side of one of America’s most influential partners.
LA Weekly
After the Dance: My Life With Marvin Gaye is billed as a new tell-all memoir. And it lives up to the hype.
New York Times bestselling author Zane
Jan and Marvin’s love affair is hot-and at times amazingly cold. We see how love can bring people together as well as tear them apart. This fascinating and entertaining memoir is an unforgettable education on the power of love.
Washington Independent Review of Books
If your heart is not affected greatly after reading, it’s time for a checkup... What a fabulous book of poems.
Booklist
...a story told honestly and directly, with real passion and plenty of behind-the-scenes insight.
O Magazine
With sensitivity and insight, Gaye examines their explosive four-year marriage, ultimately making peace with the dark side of one of America’s most influential partners.
Library Journal
04/15/2015
Gaye's tell-all about her decadelong relationship with legendary R&B musician Marvin Gaye (1939–84) is a tragic story about an illicit romance that burned bright but flamed out in a tangled web of abuse. Her account begins with a tortured upbringing as one of bebop singer Slim Gaillard's neglected 17 children, raised in foster care until she was returned to her drug-addicted mother at 14. Jan's relationship with Marvin began shortly after her 17th birthday, and she became a mother to two children with the singer while still a teenager. The narrative gets darker as Jan describes her and Marvin's addiction to freebase cocaine, his bouts of violence, his declining career fortunes, and their subsequent divorce. The author is an astute and generous critic of Marvin's music, despite the tumultuous nature of their relationship, providing insightful commentary on Gaye's most cherished recordings. The book is at its most powerful, though, when it describes a woman's attempts to escape from a sexually, physically, and psychologically abusive relationship. VERDICT This title will surely interest and disturb fans of Marvin Gaye. Jan's writing, with help from Ritz (Divided Soul), is engaging, steamy, harrowing, and insightful. [See Prepub Alert, 11/10/14.]—Brian Flota, James Madison Univ., Harrisonburg, VA
Kirkus Reviews
2015-03-11
The long-suffering wife of Marvin Gaye (1939-1984) tells the story of her turbulent relationship with the legendary soul singer. Gaye's debut memoir, a faithful recollection of life with a difficult superstar, is as frustrating as it is compulsively readable. On one level, it's yet another tell-all confessional from someone who fell into the trap of loving an artist primarily through the idealized image his work publicly projected. But what separates this memoir from so many other cookie-cutter memoirs about celebrity romances gone wrong is that the author is so deeply in touch with her own flaws and vulnerabilities. A girlhood crush on budding superstar Marvin quickly expanded into something more when she met the soft-spoken musician through a friend of her mother's, who was Marvin's producer at the time. Besides the initial offbeat love triangle that the teenage Jan found herself in—Marvin was 33 years old and married to a 51-year-old at the time—she was getting involved with someone who had been the product of a profoundly warped household. After a torrid initial romance with her musical hero, the author found herself in the throes of marriage and motherhood, desperate to keep Marvin's increasingly flagging attention away from other women. As their relationship progressed to rockier, more adult stages—always accompanied by copious amounts of marijuana and cocaine—her psychological dependence on Marvin only grew, while Marvin's drug-crazed behavior became increasingly unhinged and unpredictable, right up until he was tragically shot dead in an argument with his father. Gaye's explicitly confessional account of her doomed uphill struggle to stay with Marvin is a prime example of how obsessive celebrity worship can so easily (and dangerously) masquerade as enduring love. A fascinating, unsentimental account of a be-careful-what-you-wish-for romance.
