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

Joe Andoe

Books