Jaime Lowe
Jaime Lowe is the author of Breathing Fire, A dramatic, revelatory account of the female inmate firefighters who battle California wildfires, Mental, a memoir about lithium and bipolar disorder, and Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of ODB, a biography of Ol' Dirty Bastard, a founding member of the Wu-Tang Clan. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times magazine and other national and international publications. Lowe has contributed to This American Life and Radiolab, and has been featured on NPR and WNYC numerous times.
"Riveting from the first page, Jaime Lowe’s Breathing Fire is an unsentimental and vividly human portrait of a group of women in an inmate firefighting program that every Californian relies on―a program that the state presents as transformative and redemptive even as these women risk their lives for dollars a day and emerge into abandonment. Lowe’s writing is kinetic, her focus is resolutely intimate even as her frame remains far-reaching, and her reporting is essential. This book is a lasting entry in the pantheon of California nonfiction, that literature of desperation and promise and emergency."
―JIA TOLENTINO, author of Trick Mirror
"A book as humane, generous and brave as its heroines, Breathing Fire is the journalism we need now, an urgent story from our carceral front lines given to us by a writer brilliantly alert to vulnerability and strength. A very good book about fire; a profound book about courage and care."
―JEFF SHARLETT, New York Times bestselling author of The Family
"There is no bleaker glimpse of the superheated future we're all hurtling toward than the fact that female inmates, many of them women of color, are earning roughly $1 an hour protecting the rest of wealthy California from its growing wildfires. Jaime Lowe's powerful, immersive book makes it impossible to ignore the reality of their lives―and the reality that we can do better."
―MCKENZIE FUNK, author of Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming
"From the salt flats of Bolivia to a boxing gym in Brooklyn, the baths of Bad Kissingen, and the harrowing corridors of an adolescent psych ward, Jaime Lowe's Mental is an odyssey in every sense—across the terrain of her own manic episodes and the surprising, varied geographies of possible solutions. With clear-eyed candor, wicked wit, and edgy tenderness, Lowe's story defies the streamlined trajectory of an easy recovery narrative—offering proof that the story of getting better is always more ragged than we imagine." —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams
“Jaime Lowe's honesty and insight run deep. This book brims with her humanity--you'll root for her on every page--and also with the quality of her thinking and writing. Like Mary Karr and Kay Redfield Jamison, she has taken her own darkest experiences and turned them into art that has the power to heal.” —Emily Bazelon, author of Sticks and Stones
"Mental is fascinating, shocking, heartbreaking and fun to read." —Katy Hershberger, Shelf Awareness
"[Jaime Lowe's] often chaotic chronicle operates as an earnest memoir of personal triumph and an illuminating exposé of a type of medication that continues to be a source of great debate. A moving exploration of mental health and the efficacy of available treatment." —Kirkus Reviews
"Lowe writes with verve and rhythm and willed forthrightness about her endless search for stability and sanity, and about wondering which self—stable or unstable—is the real one, worthy of love." —Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
A fan's exploration of the man behind the myth
Ol' Dirty Bastard (aka Russell Jones) rose to fame with the Wu-Tang Clan in the early '90s, his unorthodox rap style and reputation for erratic behavior putting him in a media spotlight. As a solo artist, he released two albums that went gold and achieved crossover fame through a duet with Mariah Carey that debuted at number one on the Billboard charts. But for the next decade, his life would be fueled by chaos and excess until it derailed completely, resulting in a fatal drug overdose in 2004 and leaving behind an enigmatic legacy and a remarkably diverse group of fans.
In a compelling combination of personal narrative, biography, and cultural criticism, Digging for Dirt explores ODB's life, career, mythology, death, and the troubled trajectory of his public and private worlds. Jaime Lowe met with the people ODB affected and was most affected by―surviving members of the Wu-Tang Clan, his hip-hop contemporaries, his parents, his followers, his managers, his neighbors, and his friends―in an attempt to figure out the man behind the clown-prince persona, and the issues of race, celebrity, mental illness, and exploitation that surrounded his rise and fall.