Iggy Pop, Danny Fields, Dee Dee and Joey Ramone, Malcom McLaren, Jim Carroll, and scores of other famous and infamous punk figures lend their voices to this definitive account of that outrageous, explosive era. “I’ve covered two wars and I was senior editor of Spin.Please Kill Me is the first oral history of the most nihilist of all pop movements. “I’ve done a lot more than punk,” he says. Nevertheless, McNeil pushes on amid the tragedy and rejection he’s been through, continuing his mission of telling good stories. Unfortunately, publishers weren’t feeling it. (Along with Please Kill Me, he also co-wrote the adult-movie chronicle The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry in 2005.) McNeil has had other oral-history ideas, like doing a book on the crisis that took place in Little Rock when nine African-American students enrolled in a racially segregated high school in 1957. Writing a memoir was certainly a change of pace from the oral histories he usually does. “I was really shocked when I went out to the Midwest and did readings out there last fall, and people really seemed to like it and were excited by it,” he says. He appreciates the reaction he’s been getting from audiences about the new material. However, he is currently reading selections at events around the country, as well as reading from Please Kill Me with co-author Gillian McCain.

McNeil hasn’t quite finished it, so it won’t be available on bookshelves or tablets anytime soon. The new book is Live Through This, a memoir that chronicles his tragic relationship with his former love and its harrowing aftermath. And you write, so why don’t you sit down and write it.’ So I did, and that’s the new book.” “What my therapist said is, ‘Therapy is basically putting your life into some sort of narrative. In November 2011, McNeil went into a trauma program at the Sierra Tucson Treatment Center in Arizona, where his therapist gave him advice that he needed to hear.

“For the last 10 years, I’ve been on pills,” he says. It spread to her leg, which had to be amputated. “But what I didn’t know was that she was still using heroin.”īlack tar heroin, to be exact, infected with a flesh-eating bacteria called necrotizing fasciitis. “About 12 years ago, I met a girl on a book tour and I fell madly in love with her, and we were gonna get married and all that stuff,” says McNeil, calling from his home in Schwenksville, Pa.

Legs mcneil and gillian mccain