Share My Life: A Journey of Love, Faith, and Redemption. Kem, with David Ritz. 2023. Simon & Schuster. 272 pages. [Source: ARC provided by the publisher courtesy of Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.]
Before reading Share My Life, I wouldn’t have called myself a die-hard Kem fan. I was certainly familiar with some of his larger hits, but I had little familiarity with his overall career or his persona as an artist. That unfamiliarity allowed me to come into this book with no expectations or assumptions about Kem or his life experiences.
Taking its title from one of Kem’s chart-topping hit singles, Share My Life is the story of Kem’s life. Central to his retelling are themes of family, relationships, work, and faith. The timeline is robust, and actually begins significantly with his mother’s upbringing and the circumstances of his birth. The structure then follows chronologically, following as he moves from Tennessee to Detroit, his discovery of family secrets, and eventual spiral into substance abuse. Share My Life clocks in with 59 chapters, but Kem’s conversational style and thematic chapters make the book very engaging and difficult to put down.
What I found especially appealing about this book is the candidness with which Kem recounts the events of his life. There’s not a lot of fluff to keep the reader from understanding the importance of the events he shares. He readily makes connections to what he was thinking and doing while offering his later reflections and critiques. It’s this willingness to call himself out that I appreciated, because I often read memoirs in which the author attempts to sugarcoat their misdeeds or otherwise minimize the ways in which they’ve been the villain in someone else’s story. Kem is painfully transparent in how his decisions led him to derail his life and what it took to get him out of that.
Kem speaks of his own addiction as well as that of his mother, and the factors that led to both. This forthright exploration of the devastation born out of their mutual addiction is compelling – it’s not so much a situation of blaming one or the other for exacerbating the challenges the other faces, so much as it is a recognition that these could never be anything but intertwined.
As the title suggests, Kem readily credits his faith as being central to his overcoming addiction and turning his life around. He speaks very openly throughout the book about how his faith community created relationships and furthered his career, while simultaneously giving him the language, tools, and philosophy to move forward in a way that felt authentic. It demonstrates a depth of growth that the general public doesn’t always get to see about their favorite artists.
I’m so glad I was able to read Share My Life. Kem has truly had an interesting life journey, and the way he shares it is inspirational. The result is a reflection on a very full life, for all its ups and downs, and the lessons Kem learned along the way. Despite coming into Share My Life with no expectations, I was surprised at how raw this story is, but also appreciated that it was uplifting overall. I definitely recommend Share My Life.
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