Unplugged: Synopsis

Cover - Unplugged
Published 10/2002
John Daniel & Company
Trade paperback
6" x 9"
270 pp.
Retail: $14.95 (On sale through this website)
ISBN: 9781880284605

Unplugged is a tale of depression, recovery and self-reinvention. It’s also the story of how a young woman is taught and healed by nature — by the very land beneath her feet.

★ ★ ★

Jimi Hendrix. Janis Joplin. Jim Morrison. Each rocketed to the top of the rock ’n’ roll pantheon — then died at age 27, a casualty of drugs, despair or both. More recently, when Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain took his own life at the same age, his mother lamented, “I told him not to join that stupid club.”

Unplugged imagines someone whose membership in that club is denied — barely.

Dayna Clay struggles through the final concert of a wildly successful tour. Tormented by an ever-deepening depression, the 27-year-old rocker hands her guitar to a fan and beats a retreat. Forfeiting her career, she sets out incognito for parts unknown and winds up in the Badlands of South Dakota, where her growing connection to the land and to the people she meets there begins to heal the wounds of an abusive childhood.

Meanwhile, Dayna’s disappearance only serves to boost public interest in her — and to fuel her skyrocketing record sales. Laboring to choose between her musical ambitions and the new life she has made, she finds herself stranded in a far-flung corner of the wilderness she has come to love. Saved from a suicide attempt earlier by nature, she now may perish by the very same hand. . .