During the years she dealt with a stalker, former 89.3 The Current DJ Mary Lucia stopped talking about her dogs on the air. A man she now calls “S— Bag” used Lucia’s love of pets as a way to attempt to worm his way into her life, totally against her will. The famously outgoing media personality clammed up, on air and off, thanks to a terrifying stranger.

In her new memoir “What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Weirder and Harder to Relate To,” Lucia opens the floodgates and tells all, revealing often jaw-dropping and intimate details about her career, her addictions and her life in general.

(Courtesy of the University of Minnesota Press)

Lucia began her time in radio at the much-loved but short-lived alt rock station REV 105 and spent 17 years serving as essentially the face of The Current. She dramatically left that job in 2022 and is now the program adviser at the University of Minnesota’s Radio K, where she hosts her own show from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Mondays.

In her book, Lucia shares the horrifying tale of not only what it’s like to have a stalker, but the struggles she faced from friends, co-workers and even her own mother who sought to downplay her dire situation. She weaves in other tales, both funny and sad, from her life and proves, time and again, why she is one of the highest-profile DJs in the Twin Cities.

Here are seven takeaways from the book, which she’s promoting with upcoming events in Minneapolis and St. Paul:

She had an unconventional childhood

Lucia writes that she grew up in a household that cherished nothing and had no Christmas traditions. She called her parents by the first name and said her mom threw away Lucia’s birth certificate during a move, which she didn’t learn until she attempted to find it as an adult to get a passport.

There were a pair of photo albums in the house, which Lucia said stopped getting updated around 1969, so there are few shots of her childhood.

“There is so little physical documentation of my growing up, perhaps it’s allowed me to create my own version of history and take some creative license,” she writes.

Lucia remembers a show-and-tell day where students were asked to bring in a treasured item from an older family member. Others brought their grandparents’ Ellis Island entry papers or old photos. Her contribution was a vinyl copy of Mott the Hoople’s album “All the Young Dudes.”

She abused all the substances

Lucia goes into great detail about her history of using drugs, prescription and otherwise, and alcohol. And as she does throughout the book, she recalls the old days with self-deprecating humor.

“My drug buddy and dear friend at the time, who is now a substance abuse counselor, hopped on the sad bastard train with me that summer to consume pills like Keith Moon and Judy Garland’s love child. We had a dealer, we had code language, we had deep conversations, laughs, we threw up in people’s yards,” she writes.

She acknowledged hitting the lowest of lows when she dipped into the meds of a “distant friend” who was dying of cancer.

But after her stalker intensified his pursuit, she quit everything but tobacco.

“It would be safe to assume that for most people a traumatic time in one’s life might also be the moment the self-medicating goes into action. Me? No. I stopped everything cold turkey and I didn’t tell anyone. It sounds almost masochistic as if I wanted to feel the pain more deeply with no interference.”

She has a great Liam Gallagher story

In late 2008, hopped up on Ativan and “whatever booze was handed to me,” she attended an Oasis concert at Target Center. After hearing the band was headed to First Avenue after the show, she hit the nightclub and made her way to the VIP booth where Gallagher was holding court. She drunkenly asked him if he thought his opening act Ryan Adams was a fraud.

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His response: “A frog?”

“Next thing I knew we were smashing faces. I am dying of embarrassment in present time as I recount that.”

In an attempt to make a quick, post-makeout departure, she fell down the venue’s steps. She has no idea how she got home that evening.

“Funnily enough it was the only time I ever had to call in sick to work with a hangover,” she writes.

The next day, she received an email from a photographer friend with the subject: “I have some photos you might like to see.” It wasn’t blackmail or anything, she writes, “just a reality check that you are not invisible at your most boorish.”

One of the pics hangs on her fridge to this day.

She has a great Prince story, too

Lucia devotes the fifth chapter of her book to Prince, opening with: “Am I the only person alive who has adored Prince my entire life but wants him to remain a mystery?”

She goes on to bemoan people’s “quest to get to the bottom of Prince’s accidental overdose … I feel very strongly that there needs to be a deeper level of understanding and mercy regarding addiction.”

Lucia writes that she’s never toured Paisley Park and prefers to keep her memories of the Purple One focused on his music, not on the personal details of his life. Like a lot of people in the Twin Cities, she knows people who worked directly with Prince and said she enjoys hearing their stories, but not retelling them.

“They feel sacred. I even have my own Prince story, which I will never tell.”

She drops some names

After she escorted comedian and actor Michael Ian Black through The Current’s office, he asked: “Is this a rock radio station? All I see is spreadsheets and sadness.” (“Believe me, we got a lot of mileage out of that, muttering under our breath that it should be the new station slogan,” Lucia writes.)

In one of the station’s recording studios, singer/songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello once rolled joints on a Steinway gifted to MPR by a wealthy donor.

Trent Reznor and Studs Terkel were both great interviews, she writes. Charles Bradley didn’t know the names of the members of his band. Lou Barlow requested vegan sausage and tofu dogs for a morning session. She recoils discussing a live interview with Alt-J, a British band she writes “seemed to me to be only taking up unnecessary space.”

One interview with an obnoxious, unnamed duo from Los Angeles — most likely the long-forgotten group She Wants Revenge — ended abruptly when one of the guys refused to answer a fairly innocuous question and stormed out of the studio.

Lucia also had difficulty playing certain artists. “I will admit that, on rare occasions, I have done the unthinkable and pulled the fader down midsong on a tune that was doing me great bodily harm. I’m sorry, Joanna Newsom. It was nothing business — it’s strictly personal.”

Her famous brother is there for her, in his own way

Lucia has never used her older brother — Replacements leader Paul Westerberg — to further her own career. In a recent interview with Mpls. St. Paul magazine, she said half-jokingly that there are still people out there who don’t know they’re related.

So it’s not too surprising that she refers to Westerberg only as “my older brother Paulie” in the book. She describes him as “a one-of-a-kind thinker, somewhat unreliable and a loose cannon in the best way, and has a knack for knowing when to rally and come out of his rabbit hole for me.”

When she first opened up to him about her stalker, he sat back and listened. When he did speak up, he said: “Do you know what you need? You need a better TV, the one you have is s—.”

Then, after learning Lucia had the stalker’s phone number, he called and left a voicemail. He never told Lucia further details, “It’s not what I said, but how I said it.”

Later, when she needed help cleaning up her backyard trees, she called Westerberg, who showed up with no tools.

“He impulsively began shimmying up the tree like a monkey. His well thought-out idea was to simply hang from the dead branches until they broke off. Immediately my internal Google map was trying to figure out which hospital emergency room was closest.”

She doesn’t know what happened at The Current, either

In April 2022, Lucia surprised both her co-workers and listeners when she announced she was leaving The Current. In the book, she details her many issues with the station’s management, former program director Jim McGuinn in particular, that led to her decision. (She calls McGuinn “Potsy” in the book and writes: “He had managed to convince upper management he was Bono by attending company meetings with a predictable rock T-shirt under a suit coat.” McGuinn did not respond to a request for comment.)

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During her memorable final broadcast, she played a series of hand-chosen songs — they’re listed in full in her book — and wrapped up by saying she knew she made a difference and “it doesn’t matter if the company or management doesn’t feel the same way. Thank you for everything, I love you.” She then played the Rolling Stones’ “It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll (But I Like It)” and followed it with an uncomfortable stretch of dead air.

Moments later, MPR president Duchesne Drew sent an email to staff announcing that McGuinn, who was Lucia’s boss, was no longer with the company.

Just like her listeners at the time, Lucia writes that she didn’t see that coming, didn’t understand why they let her quit and that she was confused by the timing of it all.

“I can honestly say corporate decisions are not for me to understand.”

Mary Lucia discusses her new book

In conversation with Lizz Winstead: 7 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 9, at the Granada Theater, 3022 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis; granadampls.com.
In conversation with Andrea Swensson: 6 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 10, at the Ramsey County Historical Society in Landmark Center, 75 West Fifth St., St. Paul; rchs.com.