“You wanna talk to me,” I told Suge, “we talk right here. I'm not going around no corner where you got 50 niggas with baseball bats. I've been around the system too long, dog. I'm not dumb. And I'm not going down like that.”

How in the fuck did I get here? How did I, Bruce Williams from Palm Springs by way of rural Louisiana - former 4-H Club winner, former Jehovah's Witness, former army sergeant - get inside this crazy space. I couldn't say at the time. Prolly just chocked my situation up to the toll that hip-hop just seems to take. As much hip-hop can give it might take. Exactin' tolls like a motherfucker. In the record industry, at least, everyone get fucked.

I wasn't the first or five hundredth young cat to come out to L.A. looking for something my family couldn't ever give me and end up staring at a special brand of trouble... Pre-order from Amazon.

“Ghetto Celebrity: Searching for My Father in Me” 2003

There's a lot of good, snappy nonfiction out there right now. Smart young writers reared on magazine polish and sitcom one-liners just keep churning out charming little memoirs, and that's all well and good. But once in a great while a writer comes along whose story--and sound--is so unique and wonderful that they change everything, from the way you read to the way you look at the world. Donnell Alexander is one of those writers.

Ostensibly, Ghetto Celebrity is about Alexander's search for self by way of his up-to-no-good father, Delbert, who he never really knew. It's a story that begins in an “extra-ghetto” ghetto--the kind of hidden place that can only exist in a small town in the middle of nowhere--and could very easily have stayed there, if not for Alexander's ability to ”write himself a life,“ as he says in the book. Because what this book is really about is learning what it means to be a writer. The story remains pretty linear: We follow Alexander the prodigy as he's raised by his mother and her sisters, embarks on bumpy love affairs and ultimately gets outta there and finds career success. But all roads lead back to his search for the "Delbert in him." More interesting, though, are the unexpected turns the book takes along the way, like a drug- addled comic sequence and an unorthodox introduction entitled ”WARNING!“

”My book was, from the outset, about form,“ says Alexander, via email. ”If my memoir can be opened up this way, I thought, various hierarchies might be minimized. Young knowledge might be treated evenly with the knowledge of adults. Midwestern sensibilities could measure up to big-city coastal ones, and maybe the voyeuristic takes on different ends of the class spectrum could be shaken up somewhat.“ That's not to say this book isn't a lot of fun.

”When I was on tour, high school kids were constantly coming up to me," Alexander says, referring to his Wet Daddy Literary Festival. "Kids can tell that it's for them. In Oakland, one girl's mother, who appeared to be 30, proudly announced, 'This is my daughter's first book!' And I was like, 'Wow, I'm not sure I can sign off on that.'“

Katie Haegele, Philadelphia Weekly