Tori Amos: Piece by Piece
by Tori Amos, Ann Powers
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ann Powers, Tori AmosEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2005-02-08
ISBN: 076791676X
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Broadway
Book Reviews of Tori Amos: Piece by Piece
Book Review: "The Story Of An Unfinished Evolution"
Summary: 4 Stars
Tori Amos Piece By Piece (2005), co-written with Ann Powers, is an examination of the manifold motivators that have allowed Amos, perhaps the hardest working woman in popular music, to successfully blaze a definitive and firmly etched trail across the face of Western culture.
As piercing, uncompromising, and deeply felt as the best of her musical compositions, the book is an outline of Amos' visionary philosophy as well as a testament of her personal and spiritual struggle. In no way a typical celebrity autobiography, Tori Amos Piece By Piece may very well become a standard popular text and survival guide for all those at odds with the dominant and increasingly narrow "consensus reality" of the West. Though the book, which acknowledges a debt to Carl Jung, lacks the harrowing originality and claustrophobic focus of the Swiss psychologist's Memories, Dreams, and Reflections (1961), it addresses some of the same ground in more brutally honest and plainly spoken language.
Like Jung and Scottish novelist Muriel Spark, Amos is unapologetic in her belief that the human race is profoundly rooted in, and a continuous reflection and manifestation of, the Divine. Like those writers, Amos is both a student of and vocal witness to the active presence of Grace in human experience.
Amos is a self-identified feminist, and the book consciously addresses women's spirituality and offers numerous practical examples of how Amos has applied her own female-centered belief system throughout her life.
However, in the broadest sense, Amos' application of the myths of Demeter, Persephone, and other female deities seems to imply that these apply exclusively to women, when, clearly, the opposite is true. The lesson of Icarus' flight is an archetypal fable that transcends gender, men as well as women experience both actual and symbolic invasions of their public, physical, spiritual, and private beings as Persephone did, and, as in the myth of Demeter, periods of spiritual sterility, inertia, and emptiness are common to both sexes.
Amos appears to believe that people are wholly defined, and hence limited to, their gender; proto-feminist Virginia Woolf and the other progressive Bloomsbury intellectuals calmly, confidently, and continuously argued against this for decades. As Amos is clearly well read in a variety of kinds of mysticism, it's unfortunate that she doesn't consider and address the transcendent individual in each person. Spirit, soul, personality, and character exist beyond mere biological gender assignment.
This is an important point, since the matter of gender, especially as it relates to aggression, continues to be one of Amos' blind spots. Like many of her musical compositions, from "Past the Mission," "The Waitress," and "Professional Widow" to "Little Amsterdam," Tori Amos Piece By Piece is charged throughout with aggression, a self-justifying defensive posture, and an open hostility of its own; as in the past, Amos doesn't seem to realize that most people, regardless of their gender or position within a specific hierarchy, feel equally self-justified when enacting overt or covert hostilities.
Thus, at least on the page, Amos frequently seems to lack a firm sense of the relativity of all things, and an understanding that all members of mankind rightly perceive themselves as vulnerable to the continuous waves of cause and effect that is human life. As the example of Amos' own puritanical grandmother should have taught her, any member of mankind, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, psychological mindset, or political ideology, is potentially capable of embodying and enacting tyrannical, fascistic, or oppressive attitudes.
A careful, inclusive study of the Greek and Roman myths clearly underscores this point (it was, after all, the female Athena who transformed Medusa from a "beautiful maiden" into a "terrible monster), which Ann Powers addresses when she writers, "Feminine power is not only a warm, nurturing thing. Furious goddesses have transformed the world since ancient times, laying waste to man's corruption, wreaking havoc until justice is served." But here Powers indulges in wishful thinking and makes the same mistake that Amos does by suggesting that women--and ancient goddesses and other female archetypes of all stripes and colors--are predominantly benign and nurturing in essence.
Jane Harrison, Carl Jung, Eric Neumann, and a host of others have written at length about negative aspect of the Female Imago or the terrifying Devouring Mother of biological fact, which eats or otherwise destroys some or all of its young when unable to care for them due to disease, famine, draught, or other natural catastrophe. It is simply incorrect to state that all or most female aggression is pure reactivity to oppressive male behavior and thus at least marginally justified; Freud's extensive work in infant and children psychology pointedly proves otherwise. Feminist scholars such as Margaret A. Murray and Camille Paglia have, to varying degrees, celebrated the fact that women have an intrinsic capacity for destruction and rapacity--just as men do. Paglia's interpretation of "Mother Nature" as indifferent at best to human life and suffering--a position underscored by the recent Tsunami disaster in Asia--is also instructive.
Even Kate Bush, who Amos has publically acknowledged as an early influence, released "Mother Stands For Comfort" on 1985's The Hounds Of Love, a song which depicts an archetypal "Smothering Mother" nurturing and protecting the human killing machine which has sprung from her womb.
Tori Amos Piece By Piece is occasionally marred when Powers objectifies Amos to too great a degree, which makes Amos sound as if she belongs alone on a very high pedestal; such language violates the otherwise genuinely human quality that dominates the text. Musicians may find Amos' advice about the music industry, which rounds out the last fourth of the book, refreshingly brisk, blunt, and helpful.
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