Mark Oliver Everett, aka E, writes and performs fine left-field songs with his band, Eels. You may know some of them, if not through the albums, then at least via the many soundtracks on which Eels songs appear. Things Your Grandchildren Should Know, then, must be a rock autobiography. The heart sinks a little with that, except Things Your Grandchildren Should Know turns out to be pretty much the best book I have ever read about creative expression and what makes an artist tick. Who knew?

Pop books are easily segmented. Most are lurid tales of sordid excess, such as Hammer of the Gods, The True Adventures of The Rolling Stones or, the lurid zenith/nadir, The Dirt. Some are self-aggrandising, score-settling accounts of what happened to whom, some merge the life story with an appreciation of the work (the second of Peter Guralnick’s two volumes on Elvis Presley springs to mind), while others focus solely on the work itself, the best of which is surely Revolution In The Head.

While there may be an surfeit of music books titles there remains a dearth of real insight into the make-up of a creative mind and the hidden process of being an artist and performer. For sure there are books that lay bare the recording process, but these are mostly pretty arid. Of these attempts to draw back the curtains, Things Your Grandchildren Should Know is the only one I can think of that lets daylight in without destroying any magic.

The structure of Things Your Grandchildren Should Know is conventional enough: childhood, awkward adolescence, unsuccessful early career, success, decline, happy(ish) medium. But that isn’t the half of it. The Everetts live a seemingly standard Wonder Years life in a small Virginia town, just outside Washington DC, but E’s father was Hugh Everett III, quantum physicist and creator of the Many World’s Theory, one of the most important in modern science.* E grew up not knowing this, partly because his father’s work went unappreciated for 20 years, but mainly because Hugh Everett only spoke about 20 words to E throughout his childhood.

Along with an uncommunicative father, E’s mother, while loving, is unable to cope with being an adult or a parent. His cool, much-loved sister becomes depressive and then suicidal. Her attempts to die during a headlong descent punctuate E’s life as it falls to him to clean up the mess, literally and figuratively. This is David Lynch’s world of the sad strangeness and quiet desperation that exists just behind the suburban white picket fence. What lifts the story is how young E learns to make an accommodation with his lot through his discovery of music.

Things don’t at first get better for E. He bonds with his father in time to watch him die. He deals with the aftermath of his sister’s suicide attempts. He watches his mother rapidly eaten away by cancer. We haven’t even got to his cousin and 9/11. You could be forgiven for thinking there are not a lot of laughs to be had and you would be right. However this is no voyeuristic journey into suffering, firstly because E is a modest and amusing host, but mostly because the details of his life – big and small – are what become the subject matter of his art. They are the means by which he makes sense of his life and makes peace with his place in the world. What we are left with is quietly uplifting.

This story of how E manages to make something universal out of something specific, of how he makes songs about death become songs about  life, is wonderful. Also enjoyable, but more predictable, is the story of his interaction with the music business itself. As a host E is wry, direct, askance, semi-detached, never romantic, never sentimental, never self-mythologising and Things Your Grandchildren Should Know must be the least macho, least egotistical rock book there is. For once the blurb gets it about right, E’s style is akin to Kurt Vonnegut’s, at once simple and childlike but also warm and deeply human. More than the bad luck and loss, more than the sadness, more than the suburban madness, what comes across is wit, humour, charm and in the end a sort of fragile optimism for all life’s quirks and idiosyncrasies.

You don’t need to be aware of E’s music to enjoy Things Your Grandchildren Should Know because this book deserves a life outside the music book ghetto. Read to an Eels soundtrack and Things Your Grandchildren Should Know is confirmed as the unexpected joy of the year.

* Hugh Everett’s story is told brilliantly by E in a BBC4 documentary Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, which is really worth seeking out.

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