Joe Andoe is an internationally exhibited painter. His work, hailed by The New Yorker as cowboy noir with a fashionista twist, is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, and countless other locations. He is a father. He is a writer. He is sober. That's now.

Once upon a time, though, way back in the '70s, Joe Andoe was a delinquent bad boy growing up wild in Tulsa, Oklahoma — drinking, drugging, and driving too fast down a dead-end road. He was one car crash, one overdose away from head-on disaster. His art saved him.

A life story told in discrete, arresting snapshots of despair, resilience, creativity, and hope, Joe Andoe's raw, vivid, and utterly original memoir is as striking as his painting. With echoes of Jim Carroll poetic insight and Charles Bukowski grit, yet still uniquely the artist's own, Andoe's literary portrait of his time to date on earth is as powerful as a heavyweight's hook and as spellbinding as a major crack-up on the opposite side of the highway. It is an important work of curiosity and grandiosity; a testament to a young man's resilience and genius and luck that enabled him to survive a life lived wildly out of control; an unparalleled adventure, a rocket ride from the sordid depths of self-destruction to the glorious pinnacles of...Jubilee City.

"In this charming memoir, Andoe narrates his journey from his Tulsa childhood through redneck, hard-partying teen years to a highly successful career as a (hard-partying redneck) painter in New York City. While Andoe may not be a professional writer, his humor and offbeat artistic sensibility make up for any lack of prose-writing chops. Through discrete anecdotes that seldom run longer than two pages, Andoe assembles vivid portraits of his family and friends and of the various environments he inhabited — the working-class Tulsa neighborhoods of the 1960s, the high school and college drug culture at the end of the hippie era, and the New York art scene of the 1980s. Andoe rarely said 'No' to drugs, and the marginal characters and dangerous encounters of the lowlife provide the book with a great deal of energy and pathos; at times his memoir reads like a more amateur version of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. Yet whenever the gonzo stories verge on tedium, Andoe modulates his tone and shows himself as the stay-at-home dad, the outdoorsman, the artist. While Andoe has an occasional tendency to settle scores (his ex-wife receives particularly brutal treatment) or trumpet his status as an outsider, for the most part his wide-eyed sense of wonder and keen observations make the everyday strange and fresh." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"'In this charming memoir, Andoe narrates his journey from his Tulsa childhood through redneck, hard-partying teen years to a highly successful career as a (hard-partying redneck) painter in New York City. While Andoe may not be a professional writer, his humor and offbeat artistic sensibility make up for any lack of prose-writing chops. Through discrete anecdotes that seldom run longer than two pages, Andoe assembles vivid portraits of his family and friends and of the various environments he inhabited — the working-class Tulsa neighborhoods of the 1960s, the high school and college drug culture at the end of the hippie era, and the New York art scene of the 1980s. Andoe rarely said 'No' to drugs, and the marginal characters and dangerous encounters of the lowlife provide the book with a great deal of energy and pathos; at times his memoir reads like a more amateur version of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. Yet whenever the gonzo stories verge on tedium, Andoe modulates his tone and shows himself as the stay-at-home dad, the outdoorsman, the artist. While Andoe has an occasional tendency to settle scores (his ex-wife receives particularly brutal treatment) or trumpet his status as an outsider, for the most part his wide-eyed sense of wonder and keen observations make the everyday strange and fresh.' Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Andoes edgy self-portrait connects to the mythology of the outlaw painter as exemplified by Jackson Pollock, yet it is also a blunt confession of the all-too-common artists battle with self-destructiveness on the way to embracing art as a life-sustaining discipline." Booklist

"Not every painter of lonely landscapes and stark, haunting creatures has a readable story to tell. But Mr. Andoe makes this book a natural offshoot of his art, combining cool understatement with brass-tacks candor." Janet Maslin, New York Times

From an internationally exhibited painter whose work has been hailed as cowboy noir with a fashionista twist ("The New Yorker") comes a raw, vivid, and unique memoir, told in discrete snapshots that unfold into a remarkable story of despair, resilience, creativity, and hope.

Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Joe Andoe is an internationally renowned artist. His short fiction has appeared in the literary journals Open City, Bomb, and Bald Ego. He is a father of two and lives in New York City.