Rosanne Cash.

• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview

Rosanne Cash's new memoir, Composed , is an absorbing expression by an artist who skillfully straddles the line between revelation and restraint. Her intention, she writes, is "not to set any record straight, but to extend the poetry, and to find the more subtle melodies and themes" of her life.

Cash draws us into her life while allowing us to examine the circumstances of our own lives. With this as the book's pulse, its spirit is best captured by the title, less a clever allusion to Cash's chosen profession as a songwriter than a statement on how Cash has moved through this world with the courage of her convictions.

She approaches life and work as her life's work , open to the influence of varied artists and appreciating different ways of relating to the world. Her curiosity, so much on display in this book, is a humanist endeavor dependent on connecting, no matter how daunting that is to achieve. As I read Composed , the words of Willem de Kooning seemed a fitting description of what Cash continues to strive for: "Then there is a time in your life when you just take a walk and walk in your own landscape."

Such an outlook allows Cash to clear out a distinct path through a tangled, dense thicket of a profound family history, which can be both freeing and suffocating. At one point in the book, Cash envisions the surrealist painter Rend Magritte rendering what her early family life would have looked like: "chaos" on canvas. I, too, look to Magritte's work for an apt description of Cash's life, this time in the artist's painting "The Art of Living." For me, it depicts Cash's sensibility--countering pain and loss with celebration and creativity--so eloquently articulated in this book and in her songs and performances.

Many may have been led to Rosanne Cash's music after listening to her iconic musician father, Johnny Cash, or her famous stepfamily, the Carter Family.

Not me. I stumbled across Cash in the most unusual way. Sometime during the spring of 1988, I found a discarded box left outside a loading dock. It was full of shredded books and broken cassette tapes. I rooted around for anything salvageable, pulling out one book and one tape. The book was Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five . The cassette tape was Rosanne Cash's King's Record Shop . I instantly connected with it because her pose on the album's cover seemed defiant. After spending time with Cash, I've come to realize that her defiance is a matter of principle, and it helps her survive in the harsh worlds of the arts and pop culture.

"We all need art and music like we need blood and oxygen," Cash writes in Composed . "The more exploitative, numbing, and assaulting popular culture becomes, the more we need the truth of a beautifully phrased song, dredged from a real person's depth of experience in an...