Queens native and street-level rock troubadour Jesse Malin has a story that demands to be told in full. ‘Almost Grown: A New York Memoir,’ co-written with Debra Devi and out April 7 from Akashic Books, traces Malin’s life from a scrappy kid in a broken home to CBGB at thirteen, Madison Square Garden in his twenties, and collaborations with Bruce Springsteen, Billie Joe Armstrong, and Lucinda Williams. It reads less like a rock memoir and more like ‘The Basketball Diaries’ with a guitar slung over its shoulder.
The book doesn’t sidestep the hard parts. In 2023, Malin suffered a rare spinal stroke that paralyzed him from the waist down. His recovery, including stem-cell therapy in Buenos Aires, became a widely covered story picked up by Rolling Stone, the New York Times, CNN, and beyond. The outpouring of support produced ‘Silver Patron Saints: The Songs of Jesse Malin,’ a tribute record featuring twenty-eight artists. By December 2024, he was back on stage for two sold-out nights at New York’s Beacon Theatre. That’s the kind of resilience this book is built around.