After the Dance audiobook

One of the best bios I've ever read. I have read Rick James' bio and he spoke well about Jan. I have read Marvin's bio and their take, but I haven't really heard her voice much until now. While it's refreshing,as well as candid and honest. Sadly, and to me, I found it sad that she ended it in 1984 when Marvin died and she tried to summarize the last 30 plus years of her and her children's lives to a little paragraph. Just my take on that. But let me get on the book itself. Jan didn't grow up in a conventional two parent home. Her mom was young, white and unmarried. She had Jan from a relationship with jazz musician Stu Gaillard. When she couldn't deal with raising a child, she gave her daughter to a lady who ran a shady rooming house for children and also molested her. she also went to a Catholic school where she was also molested by a nun. At home, alcohol and drugs were the norm. So by the time, she's a teen,she's really wanting something stable but not really getting it. As a kid, she was fixated to Marvin Gaye. She was a die hard fan of the man, and when she gets a chance to meet him, it's a instant attraction there, but the fact that she's barely legal here and he's not even divorced from his first wife(who ironically is seventeen years older than HE!)doesn't stop or slow things down although initially, I give Marvin his props for taking it slow with Jan. but things get heated in spite of it, and she moves in with him, gets pregnant by him, have two children with him, all the while, they both do drugs. Marvin hardly talks about his home life but as she meets his folks, she understands why. It was like two people who loved each other, but sadly because of their troubled past, their drug use, and unfinished business, they caused more pain than happiness.Let me put in my two cents here. If there was ever a cautionary tale as to how to raise your kids on the way they should go, well, this book is probably the very one you should check out.I was raised in a religious household, but how you raise them to do what is right and not right, there was some serious blurred lines and if your young and contemplating children, READ THIS BOOK(as well as others first.)Marvin was raised in an ultra religious family with a father who wouldn't work, but loved women's clothing, and sort of an embarassment to his family. Jan, on the other hand, was raised in a pretty liberal household where drugs and alcohol was readily available, and stuff went down that shouldn't have. It was like what one man said in the book. Some people want to be happy, but then they make up ways to screw it up because basically they feel that they are not entitled to be so.that is one eye opening statement. I loved it. Loved going back. Loved listening to Jan, and I hope you do a sequel as to what your doing now.

Life had never been easy for Jan but growing up listening to Marvin Gaye‘s sweet soulful voice on the record player came with daydreams of a promising future. So when the opportunity came to meet the man of her dreams there was no way Jan wasn’t going to seize the opportunity. She didn’t care that Marvin was still legally married or about their 17 year age difference and neither, it seems, did Marvin.Before long the pair were inseparable and with Jan as his muse, Marvin began making the sexiest music of his career. But as their relationship progressed Jan was quickly learning that not only was Marvin tormented with deep-seated insecurities, he was also a man who believed that to create great art one must suffer. Thus began a wild roller-coaster of great highs and horrific lows that Jan found inescapable. Plagued with her own insecurities, the main one being the thought of losing the man she had so longed to be with, Jan began putting her own feelings to the side in order to please his. “I wanted to give him the children that he asked for. I wanted to let him have his flings, even if I had to bite my lip later and cry when he was away. I gave in when I probably shouldn’t have. I danced along that dangerous line of being accommodating but not giving in too much, and I was often left alone and hurting.”Jan recounts the good times as well as the bad with honesty and without animosity. While the subject matter isn't always the easiest I still could not put the book down. The only thing I was disappointed in was the fact that Jan ends her story with Marvin's death. I'd love to read more about her life post-Gaye.I recently discussed Jan and her relationship with Marvin on my podcast Muses and Stuff. Check out our website or look us up on iTunes to listen!

I feel that this was a truly tragic ;ove affair between paranoia, drugs, sex, and childhood haunts.. It was a book I could not put down I was so captivated.. I wonder if the tragedy did not occur what would have come of Marvin Gaye?? Who knows..

cocaine is a helluva drug.

Whoa! This book was a page turner in every sense of the word. It was, however, exhausting towards the end. It doesn't take away from the totality of the book. It still remains an interesting read, but I guess that I am saying that Marvin Gaye, himself, in the later years of his life was a troubled man down to the core. I knew the general stuff about Marvin's life, how he died, the music that he made, but this book is different.It puts you right there in the midst of (most of) the songs that have come to define Marvin Gaye. You feel like you are right there, first hand, seeing some of his inspiration to his greatest work unraveled. Unfortunately, you also see the unraveling of Marvin Gaye, the man, away from the spotlight. If you have put Marvin Gaye upon a pedestal that you don't want to take him off of I can assure of this: "After the Dance" is not a book for you. Continue to listen to his music alone, and be happy with that. If, however, you are interested in what inspired him as well as all the other things that were happening in the midst building, tearing down and rebuilding this power house career, you will be quite engaged by what Jan Gaye has remembered and shared.

I could not put this book down for two days

This was a wild and peculiar memoir, that was surprisingly enjoyable to read. It feels very apparent that Jan Gaye is telling this story from a place of compassionate honesty. It's a tricky thing to balance knowing that all people are simply just people no matter how brilliant their art and to consume their art or even be shaped by it knowing that they have done awful things. Jan and Marvin met and immediately began a sexual relationship when Jan was 17 and Marvin was 34. I cannot see that as anything but inappropriate and weird. Yet, Marvin and Anna Gordy began their relationship when he was 20 and she was 37. He was grown, but there is a certain power dynamic that allows for a lot of manipulation when someone that much older (and more experienced, more glamorous) takes up with someone so young. Both of his relationships with their seventeen year age gaps made me uncomfortable and sad. So much of this memoir is about Jan making herself smaller for Marvin and trying her hardest to keep hold of him (in so many ways this reads like a cautionary tale with two morals: one, you cannot possess people; two, obsession/escapism and love are not the same thing). So much of it is about the internal tension between him as a shy, sensitive, artsy type and him as a manipulative man struggling with depression, addiction, and past traumas. I feel sad for Jan that the people who were supposed to be most supportive of her loved her in the most ass-backwards way. I feel sad for Marvin too for many reasons, while still holding him accountable for all of his misdoings. This was an exhausting and thrilling book to read. Exhausting because of the tumult, the trauma, the creepiness of some of the things that went down. Thrilling because so much of it took place in the '70's. Also sometimes funny because 1970's lingo is just innately silly-sounding (there is a whole paragraph in the book about the phrase freaky deaky). The morning after I finished this, I queued up my morning commute playlist for the drive to work. The first two songs that played were "What's Going On?" by Marvin Gaye, followed by "Do You ..." by Miguel. And in the grand scheme of Marvin and Jan's relationship, that's accurate.

** spoiler alert ** They say that you should never meet your heroes and after reading this book, perhaps you should never read about their lives either.It’s a story of ever increasing drug use to the point where the paranoia brought on by crack cocaine caused Marvin Gaye to entrust someone with a gun who never had Marvin’s best interests at heart.Drug use killed yet another star.

This was a very honest and detailed story about the legendary Marvin Gaye from the perspective of his widow, Jan Gaye. From the very beginning you can see how Jan was a naive teenager who fell in love with a superstar. The story reminded me a lot of Elvis & Me, and how Elvis had a thing for young girls too. Hence, a fourteen year old, Priscilla, whom he later married. Jan was only 17 when she met Marvin. It comes as no surprise that their age difference took on a father-figure relationship, and Jan succumbs to his every whim. Jan shares many things that I suspected about Marvin from what I'd read in the media after his death. He was not only a talented man who was kind and very generous, but was insecure, manipulative, and a "stubborn kind of fellow." Through the good and the bad, Jan rides the waves with Marvin. After all, what teenage girl during the 70's wouldn't flock to the brilliant soul singer? Unfortunately, in the big picture of things, poor Jan was a crutch for Marvin's ego. She was a fan who would do anything to win her prize. I'm not quite convinced that it was love like Jan insists, at least not from the start. I believe it was years of infatuation, and then perhaps love. Even though Jan eventually starts to learn who she really is and what she wanted out of life, it came a little too late. I think her viewpoint on what real love is still stuck in the past and lies within the stars. There are a few surprises in this book as far as celebrity things that happen, and it’s a small world where many stars know each other. Even though I could pretty much predict the storyline, it was very entertaining.#booksbyselena #bookreviewswww.booksbyselena.com

I purchased this book over a year ago and finally decided to read it and I'm glad that I did. Marvin was a talented guy but it seems he was battling a multitude of demons, depression & paranoia being a couple of them. I truly enjoyed this story, much of it I really didn't expect but with the age difference between he and Jan, I suppose I should have seen it coming. Marvin Gaye has always been one of my all time favorite old school singers, I never would've imagined his life being in so much turmoil. I hope that wherever Marvin is at now, he has the peace he never seemed to have on this planet.

I read After the Dance as an accident when really I was supposed to read After the Dance by Edwidge Dandicat. I was a little confused why this book was assigned to us, but the way it enveloped me within the first few pages kept me reading without question. The story starts out with a girl named Janice who is completely infatuated with the singer, Marvin Gaye. The first extremely interesting aspect of this book is that Marvin is significantly older than Janice, which made the book interesting to read. At times I was conflicted, finding it hard to empathize with a love story where the main character not only has a crush on a man much older but he returns feelings for her later on at the beginning of the story. It seemed to me a weird pedophilic element considering she is still in highschool. Outside of the Marvin Gaye fiasco that seems to be the main focus of the story, there is the aspect of Janice’s life that makes sense as to why she endures the life that she does and makes the choices that she makes. Janice first explains her life as a child of a drug addict mother who is constantly choosing between her drug use and her child. She lives with a woman named Ruth who monopolizes Janice’s experiences based on how good she is and once leaving the ‘care’ of Ruth, Janice is desperate for validation thus taking on a lot of her mother’s promiscuous habits. It is described that she is at a pool party where she strips down to her bare breasts in order to gain the attention of the male’s that are there. She then does and is hoping that the men don’t try to touch her, which is reasonable considering her age as well as her experience with men. Janice lost her virginity at 13 to a boy who also was just trying to get rid of the status of 'virgin.’ but she acredits her first real experience with sex to Marvin Gaye. Marvin Gaye meets her and they instantly hit it off but he seems conflicted about her age (as one should be). Janice is only 17 and her mother’s support of their relationship is quite interesting. Her mother takes a friendly liking to Marvin and often supports her daughter in their relationship. This was the most interesting aspect to me because Janice seems to have so much more wisdom than her own mother. Furthermore, I really loved how the story was based in Los Angeles. I grew up in the L.A. area so I had a lot of privileged imagery when they talked about the places that were named in the book. I felt like the author did a good job of not only making this book a memoir but also a sort of poetic prose that makes the story line easier to follow and more intriguing. Overall I’d say give this book a read! It’s very easily read.

This book was very intense. It started off in Jan's childhood where she watched Marvin on television and declared she will marry him one day, forwarding to their meeting and the start of their relationship when she was a seventeen year old high schooler and he was twice her age, separated, and financially insolvent. The unequal power dynamics of the relationship, due to their age difference and their various places in life, became amplified over the years as Marvin wrote some of his greatest work, and accumulated and spent, several fortunes. Jan meanwhile was seen only as an extension of Marvin where he saw her as a lover and muse and later the mother of his children, and she herself saw her role as being there to please him and make him happy. There's no doubt that there was a deep love between the couple, and Jan also had tremendous respect and admiration for him as an artist. Their passionate but deeply dysfunctional relationship dissolved over the years due to jealousy, manipulation, drug abuse and what appears to be mental illness.I admired Jan for her candid exploration of their relationship and her lack of self pity. She could have justifiably cast herself as the victim in this story, as Marvin did nothing to help her further her ambitions as a singer, selfishly demanded she leave school to be accessible to him at all times, and left her with nothing to support her or their two children after their relationship ended. Yet the deep respect and love she felt for Marvin as a person still shines through in her telling of their story, and she takes full responsibility for her part in the madness that was their relationship. Marvin was a sensitive artistic soul who was torn apart by his many conflicting desires. He wanted to be a good and godly man and yet he could not outrun his demons: the need for control, his addiction to drugs and later on his paranoia. Jan reveals little of her life after Marvin except to say that with the help of her friend singer Rick James, she eventually became sober.

Haunting and tragicThere was so much shared in the story but was consistent was the onslaught, series of tragedy that was supposed to manifest in love. I felt like Troubled Man should be the name of Marvin Gaye's biography because he was consumed, rather his obsessions made for a tragic life and tragic ending. Jan's story was heartbreaking because you can see the adolescent, her innocence that eventually was overshadowed with a need to love and belong. This story will probably haunt me for times to come as I will hear his music and begin to ponder where he was mentally while recording those songs.