Society is littered with the detritus of celebrity and the high life. We’re confronted with images at the grocery store of the latest scandal — cheating spouses, illicit babies, inappropriate touching, boozing, drugs, etc. It’s a constant disaster that isn’t worth paying much attention to.

So what if someone isn’t famous, but likes to hang out with celebrities? Does that make it any more interesting? Should we sympathize with them despite all their atrocious faults?

It’s hard not to be intrigued by Roxana Shirazi’s autobiography of life as a groupie; the title alone is hard to miss, let alone resist. It promises to be a raw, unedited look at life backstage, but after a short while, and the initial tales of Shirazi’s troubled life in Iran, it stops being interesting and starts being horrifying.

Shirazi is obviously intelligent, and has a master’s degree to back up that impression, so you spend much of this book shaking your head at her. Her childish exhortations of cute rock stars with gorgeous eyes, who essentially abuse her on a regular basis, is just gross. The fact that she always goes back to them and thinks of them as family is even more so. It’s psychology 101.

There are reasons for the way she thinks and behaves, of course, but after a while it’s hard to care. Even her writing, which captivates with an edge at the beginning of the book, seems to fade along with Shirazi’s glamour and self-respect as we follow her journey to the bowels of deprivation.

Around the middle of the book, the writing seems to fade into apologetic tones reminiscent of a teenage blog rather than a hard-edge rock ’n’ roll life story.

Shirazi set out to create a world of debauchery and pushed rock ’n’ rollers to push their own limits while she pushed hers. It’s a dirty tale of orgies, swapping, drugs, booze, music and abuse.

But more than anything, it’s a sad tale of a woman who puts everything on the line and just wants you to follow along with her. It’s somewhere I didn’t need to go.