In this, Rickie resembles Cissy, the heroine of Tom Robbins classic novel, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, the story of a young girl trying to find the world through the kindness of strangers offering her a ride to anywhere but here.

The Women, his first book, an extended essay about women and self-invention, was published in November by Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

Think of what you are about to read as a documentary film of sorts, replete with close-ups and fade-outs, starring the premiere song-stylist and songwriter of her generation, Rickie Lee Jones.

In this film we see: Rickie Lee Jones face, her distinctive mouth, and her thick, beyond shoulder length blonde hair as she walks down a road in a bucolic section of Tacoma, Washington, where she currently resides.

As Jones searches for a place to sit and play in the sun, we see various aspects of her contemporary life come into frame, engaging Jones attention as she smiles, and listens, and reflects.

We see her daughter, Charlotte Rose; Jones mother and siblings; various friends.

All of these people come and go, passing in front of, and behind, our primary focus: Rickie Lee Jones playing her guitar and singing any number of her award winning songs: Chuck E.s in Love, or her interpretation of the classic, Making Whoopee, for which she won a Grammy in 1990.

As Rickie Lee Jones sings, we hear, in voice over: Rickie Lee Jones is the second of three daughters and one son who are of Welsh and Irish ancestry.

Her parents, Richard Loris Jones and Bettye Jane Jones, both had peripatetic childhoods: her father lived from hand to mouth in a number of transient hotels, and rode the rails, wandering the country.

She has described her family as lower-middle-class-hillbilly-hipster.

The late Mr. Jones was a performer who supplemented his income as a waiter, furniture mover, and gardener.

Richard Jonesown father was a one-legged vaudeville and carny dancer named Peg Leg Jones.

Jones says of her paternal grandfather: I have one clipping of him, advertising his act, where his name is bigger than Milton Berles.) Bettye Jones worked as a waitress; later, she became a nurse.

Between jobs, Richard Jones taught his musically inclined daughter how to sing.

And to honor that, Jones used to perform, in her early concerts, The Moon is Made of Gold, a lullaby her father wrote for her.

By all accounts, Rickie Lee Jones was an extremely solitary child who was especially close to her older brother, Danny.

Nevertheless, she preferred the secret world of her imaginary friends and playmates.

In an interview, Bettye Jones said that her daughters imaginary playmates had strange names like Bashla and SlowBeeSlow.

Her mother recalls that she would sing in the hospitals elevator shaft.

You could hear it all around the hospital, Bettye Jones has said.

When Rickie was fourteen, she was living in Arizona with her father.

Jones has said in an interview that her mother was always afraid she would run away--a heartbreak she couldnt take--and so sent her to live with her father; her parents were separated by then.

Jones recalls that she once ran away from her father as a result of his need to control his wildly imaginative young daughter, her burgeoning sexuality and charisma, and powerful talent.

In an interview for a Rolling Stone cover story published in 1979, Jones said: I never knew when I was gong to leave.

I might be walking over to a kids house, then of all a sudden I would just stick out my thumb and hitchhike across three states.

Rickie Lee Jones Allmusic