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Read the opening free
4,824 words · no email, no account
No. 001 · Music · Hip-Hop
The Honduran Crash
a biography of Lisa Nicole Lopes
What the book is
The opening notes of "Waterfalls" still summon a particular summer, a particular decade, but for Lisa Lopes the song she helped write was something closer to a confession. Inside its smooth chorus she had buried a warning to herself, and to anyone listening, about the cost of chasing what you cannot hold.
Before she became Left Eye, the kinetic third of TLC, she was a disciplined girl from Philadelphia whose father drilled gospel harmonies into her at the piano and whose mother taught her how to make a dollar last a week. Out of that household came a rapper, songwriter, and producer of unusual range: quick-witted on the mic, sharper still on the page, and stubbornly unwilling to be flattened into the role the industry had drafted for her.
Adaora Okafor follows Lopes from those early gospel trios through the platinum years, the bankruptcy filings, the burning house in Atlanta, the long retreat into Honduras, and the road in between. She listens carefully to the records she made, the verses she wrote for other women, and the journals she kept when no one was watching.
What emerges is a portrait of an artist who understood, before most of her peers, that fame and selfhood are not the same thing — and who spent her short life trying to keep one from devouring the other.
At a glance
- Subject
- Lisa Nicole Lopes
- Shelf
- Music · Hip-Hop
- Written by
- Adaora Okafor
- Chapters
- 18 across 193 pages
- Narrated by
- Zara Thompson
- Editions
- Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
- Content notes
- substance use · fatal car accident
Contents · 18 chapters
- 01Boot CampRead free
- 022nd Nature3,539 words
- 03Condoms on Her Glasses3,634 words
- 04The Fire4,043 words
- 05CrazySexyCool3,606 words
- 06Waterfalls2,787 words
- 07Chapter 113,182 words
- 08"I've Graduated from This Era"2,909 words
- 09The Other Lisa2,727 words
- 10Supernova3,113 words
- 11The Machine3,879 words
- 12Dr. Sebi3,461 words
- 13Bayron2,812 words
- 14April 252,675 words
- 153D2,896 words
- 16Energy Never Dies3,754 words
- 17N.I.N.A.3,241 words
- 18New Birth3,160 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 193 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
ISBN 979-8-90470-014-0 - Hardcover · $24.99
- 6 × 9 in · 193 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block
ISBN 979-8-90470-015-7 - EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90470-001-0 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Zara Thompson
ISBN 979-8-90470-000-3
Questions
01Who is The Honduran Crash about?
Lisa Nicole Lopes. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Honduran Crash — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,824 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 60,000 words, 18 chapters, 193 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
06Does this book carry content warnings?
Yes: substance use; fatal car accident. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle.
The writer
This book deals with
- substance use
- fatal car accident
Listed before you buy, not after.
