What Is a Musical Memoir? A New Kind of Life Story

A musical memoir is a life story told through songs. In most, the writer is a musician, and the songs either give the book its shape or come with it as recordings. Linda Ronstadt, Carly Simon and Bono have each published one.

Upstairs Downstairs: A Musical Memoir by Karina Marais comes at the form from the other side. Karina is not a musician. She wrote the lyrics for songs made for the book, placed each one in a chapter, and then took the story further, into lyric readings, videos, a QR code on the back cover and a dinner. This guide explains the form through three well-known examples, shows how a memoir by a non-musician stretches it, and suggests how to read one.

The musical memoir, defined

There is no fixed definition, but in practice the name covers three kinds of work, and each of the examples below shows one of them.

1. A musician’s memoir about a life in music. Linda Ronstadt’s Simple Dreams carries “A Musical Memoir” as its subtitle.
2. Music released as a companion to a memoir. Carly Simon’s Songs from the Trees is subtitled “A Musical Memoir Collection”.
3. A memoir built around songs. Bono’s Surrender names each chapter after a U2 song.

What they share is that the songs carry part of the story, so reading and listening belong together. Upstairs Downstairs adds a fourth kind: songs written for the book by an author who is not a musician, placed chapter by chapter, then carried into readings, videos and a dinner.

Three well-known examples

Linda Ronstadt, Simple Dreams (2013)

Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir (Simon & Schuster, 17 September 2013, 208 pages) follows the singer’s musical path more than her private life: from country rock to the pre-rock Great American Songbook, from The Pirates of Penzance to traditional Mexican mariachi music. Kirkus Reviews found it warm and well written but guarded about her personal life. It is the form at its most familiar: a life in music, told by the voice that sang it.

Carly Simon, Songs from the Trees (2015)

Songs from the Trees (A Musical Memoir Collection) is an album rather than a book: a two-disc set released on 20 November 2015 as a tie-in to Carly Simon’s memoir, Boys in the Trees. It gathers newly remastered songs from 23 years of her career, from 1964 to 1987, and adds two previously unreleased songs, one of them a new song written and performed with her son, Ben Taylor. Here the memoir and the music are separate objects, made to be taken together.

Bono, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story (2022)

Bono’s memoir was published by Alfred A. Knopf on 1 November 2022 and runs to 576 pages. As its title says, it explores the origins of 40 key U2 songs. Each chapter is named for the song it covers, with his life story woven through them, NME reported when the book was announced. The songs become the table of contents.

When the writer is not a musician

Every one of those examples was written by someone who made music for a living. Karina Marais did not. On her music site she describes herself as “a South African educator, dreamer, entrepreneur, and now storyteller and songwriter”.

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While I don’t have a musical background, music has become a powerful medium for storytelling in my life in 2024.

She wrote every lyric and briefed a composer on each song’s mood: “an Epic Movie Theme Song” for the opening track, a “Popera” duet of a male pop voice and a female opera voice for Swan Cups of Love, “a fun, uplifting, feel-good, sensual jazz duet” for Our Culinary Love Affair, and “a Disney-style movie theme song” for the closing song. Every entry on her lyrics page credits “Lyricist: Karina Marais”; the performers are credited as “Anonymous” or “AI”, and “Upstairs Downstairs” to Fleur, Rene & Aimee Marais. Her culinary guide credits the songs to her lyrics “with global artists and her AI-generated melodies & voices”.

The day her first song arrived, from a producer in Bali, she celebrated with caviar and cava. “I’m no singer, yet I found a way to deliver my love through a song to my dream man,” she writes. How the songs were made, from choosing the moments to briefing the composers, is its own story: how Karina turned chapters into songs.

Upstairs Downstairs: a memoir with its own soundtrack

Karina’s own description of the book, in her bio, is careful with its claim.

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Upstairs Downstairs – A Living Apart Together Musical Memoir may be the first of its kind—told through words, lyric readings, music, and video, transforming personal storytelling into a multisensory experience.

The story is a love story of more than 20 years of Living Apart Together, one staircase apart, and of the dreams she chased along the way. The Sunday Times ran its closing chapter as an extract on 3 March 2026 under the headline “Read, listen and watch: A multi-sensory experience of what a memoir can be”, listed on the press page.

Three albums: 32 tracks, including a medley

Songs placed chapter by chapter

Unlike a companion album, these songs each belong to a chapter. The contents list Karina published in July 2025 places every song under its chapter, so the songs can be followed in the order of the book as well as the order of the albums.

• Chapter 1.3, “Caviar, Cava, and a Love Song”: Upstairs Downstairs
• Chapter 7.6, “Love’s Logistics”: Fairy-tale Breakfast for One and Dinner Starts as a Honeymoon
• Chapter 11.3, “A Love Story Wrapped in Waves”: Content, Complete in Every Way and A Medley of Upstairs Downstairs

On this site the song list can be sorted in album order, book order or dinner order.

Lyric readings and a QR code

Before the book came out, Karina recorded her lyrics as spoken readings. Her podcast has 12 episodes, all published on 17 March 2025: an introduction and eleven readings, one for each original song on the first album. “This podcast features an introduction to my story, followed by eleven lyric readings from my songs on Spotify under the artist name Karina Marais,” she writes. The episodes are on the music page.

The book itself points outwards. Its back cover, shown at the top of this page, tells readers to scan a QR code for the author’s popera song; the code opens a short video of Swan Cups of Love, the song about two cups that share one saucer.

The videos

Karina’s YouTube channel had about 21,700 subscribers on 28 September 2026. Her song videos are numbered to follow the book’s order for the most part, and every one is filmed in portrait format, many of them in the places the story describes. The most watched, “Fairy-tale Breakfast for One”, had 76,769 views that day. One goes behind the scenes of the cover shoots: the front cover in Cappadocia, on her birthday in 2024, and the back cover, shown at the top of this page, at Forum Homini in front of the sculpture The Sum of Us. The full collection is on the videos page. Below, she introduces the book chapter by chapter.

The final “Purple Cow”: a restaurant built for the book

The last step left the page altogether. In Purple Cow (2003), Seth Godin argued that companies should make remarkable products that people talk about. Karina borrowed the idea for her ending.

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While writing my book, I wondered what would be my ‘final purple cow’? What could be the final element to make my musical memoir stand out beyond lyric readings, music, and videos?

Her answer was a restaurant. The Dare2Dream Dome at Forum Homini in the Cradle of Humankind serves an 11-course dinner and a 3-course breakfast in which each dish is presented as an act: a tale, a song and a taste. In her culinary guide she calls it “not a restaurant with a story, it is a story with a restaurant”. The memoir’s media pre-launch was held there on 20 November 2025, when a beta version of the book was signed, and the closing chapter of the book describes how the restaurant came to be. The blog sets out what an evening there involves, act by act, and the dinner page has the courses and booking details.

How to read a musical memoir: chapter, song, video, dish

A musical memoir can be read straight through like any other book. It rewards a slower route.

1. Read a chapter. Start with the book, or with the audiobook, narrated by Karina, 11 hours 26 minutes long.
2. Play its song. The contents, and every song page on this site, show which song belongs where.
3. Watch its video. Most songs have one, many filmed in the places the chapter describes.
4. Taste it, where you can. Twelve of the songs belong to a course or an act at the Dare2Dream dinner and breakfast.

Here is one route through, from chapter 1.3. Read how Karina and her partner celebrated with caviar and cava on the day her first song arrived. Play the chapter’s song, Upstairs Downstairs, the love song that played that day, 3 minutes 31 seconds long and her most popular track on Spotify in September 2026. Watch its video, filmed on that day in March 2024. Then taste it: Caviar & Cava is the fourth course of the dinner, where the same song plays.

On this site, songs, chapters and courses carry Read, Play and Taste links wherever a match exists, so any starting point leads to the others. For more books about the life at the centre of this one, see the reading list about Living Apart Together.