Debbie Harry has made a career of throwing expectations out the window, subverting her own image in the process.

The Blondie frontwoman grew up in New Jersey, where she was supposed to live out a suburban existence as a wife and mother. Instead, she became a New York icon.

Hawthorne’s Harry blazed onto the scene in the 1970s as the platinum blond punk bombshell with the chiseled cheekbones and the beguiling voice that could party simultaneously with rock, disco, rap and rocksteady. The atomic downtown goddess ate cars and guitars, and was gonna get you, one way or another.

“I was playing up the idea of being a very feminine woman while fronting a male rock band in a highly macho game," Harry says in a new memoir, “Face It," published by Dey St. and due in stores on Tuesday. “I was saying things in the songs that female singers really didn’t say back then. I wasn’t submissive or begging him to come back, I was kicking his ass, kicking him out, kicking my own ass, too.”

With their punk ethos and reverence for the dance floor, Harry and Blondie emerged as pioneers in early New Wave. But all too often, the singer, songwriter and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer has been reduced to her appearance.

"For a lot of my life I’ve sort of kept more private and talked mostly about my music life," Harry says. Dennis McGuire

“So much of what has been written about me has been about how I look," Harry, now 74, says in the book. “It’s sometimes made me wonder if I’ve ever accomplished anything beyond my image.”

Even The Washington Post piled on last week, headlining a review of her book: “In her memoir, Debbie Harry proves she’s more than just a pretty blonde in tight pants.” The Post was forced to change the headline after receiving criticism on Twitter, though the “pretty blonde” phrasing is in the actual review.

The voice of Blondie does consider her face, which Andy Warhol turned into pop art in 1980, an asset. She’s open about having plastic surgery, which she likens to getting a flu shot — a form of maintenance.

Harry spoke to NJ Advance Media by phone on Thursday from midtown Manhattan, “in the heart of the mayhem at the United Nations" (during a session of the General Assembly). Her likeness is interspersed throughout her memoir, both in photographs and fan art collected over the years, from children’s drawings that innocently distort her features to detailed, photorealistic portraits.

The Washington Post changed this headline after receiving criticism.Twitter screenshot

“It’s quite wonderful to have this exchange," she says. “It sort of happened long before the internet was available, a lot of it. When you have a piece of paper or some object of art and you hold it in your hands, it’s very tactile, it’s very meaningful, very visceral and it certainly had an effect on me. Interactive art is what music is all about."

Harry’s Blondie persona was inspired by Marilyn Monroe, the Blondie comic strip (“the dumb blonde who turns out to be smarter than the rest of them") and construction workers shouting “hey, Blondie!” when she dyed her hair. In the book, Harry calls the character “one of the longest-running roles in rock."

She tells NJ Advance Media she was “sort of joking” when she said that, but considering Harry’s reign of 45 years, it’s a pretty credible claim.

Harry performing in 2018. Blondie's most recent album, "Pollinator," was released in 2017.Mike Coppola | Getty Images

After Blondie broke up in 1982, Harry continued working as a solo artist. Since the band reunited in the ’90s, Harry has released several albums with Blondie, including “Pollinator” in 2017. On tour, Harry wore bee headpieces and a cape that said “stop f---ing the planet."

For the last 15 years, Harry, who was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame last year, has owned a home in Middletown, near the Navesink River, where she spends time with her dogs when not in New York or on tour.

“That’s my sort of sanctuary," she tells NJ Advance Media. "That’s my getaway, hideaway. If I’m writing, sometimes it’s better out there.”

Dreaming is free

At first, the idea of a memoir wasn’t an easy sell for Harry, who always preferred to focus on her music. The book, based on interviews with Harry from music journalist Sylvie Simmons, tracks Harry’s journey from a child who came of age in the shadow of New York to an enduring voice who stands as a witness to the artists, musicians and designers behind the creative ferment of the ’70s and ’80s.

Harry was born Angela Trimble in Miami in 1945, the result of a short-lived union between old flames from New Jersey (according to the adoption agency, her mother was not aware her father was married with children). She was adopted when she was 3 months old by Hawthorne’s Richard and Cathy Harry. Harry had a happy enough childhood, but remembers the day she left her first home.

Harry grew up in Hawthorne, dreaming of being an artist. Courtesy of the Harry family

“I don’t think I was ever truly comfortable," Harry says in the book. “I felt different; I was always trying to fit in."

Later in life, Harry tried to make contact with her birth mother, but was told the woman didn’t want to meet her daughter.

The future rockstar’s first home was on Cedar Avenue by Goffle Brook Park. She would play in her very own “enchanted” forest (inhabited by migrants) and leave the window open so she could hear the drum and bugle of the Hawthorne Caballeros. Harry’s baseball fan mother would kick her out of the house during games. Her father worked for a silk label manufacturer that had a mill in Paterson.

“Hawthorne was the center of my universe then," Harry writes, a town where “reputations were made and lost in seconds." The brunette, who sang in the church choir, started dyeing her hair at 14. She really wanted to be a platinum blonde like Marilyn Monroe.

Debbie Harry and Joan Jett (holding a photo of Harry), as photographed by Blondie's Chris Stein.Chris Stein

Harry, a majorette who would ditch school, was named “best looking” girl in the Hawthorne High School yearbook. She wanted to go to art school and become a painter, but in 1963 her parents sent her to Centenary College in Hackettstown, what she considered to be a finishing school — marriage prep. The suburban life “terrified” Harry.

“I felt like I had a split personality with half of the split missing, submerged, unexpressed, unreachable and hidden," she writes.

She’d go into the city when bus fare was less than a dollar and walk around Greenwich Village when the beatniks were sleeping. She knew she’d get there, someday.

Women of rock. From top left: Siouxsie Sioux, Viv Albertine, Debbie Harry, Pauline Black, Poly Styrene and Chrissie Hynde.Chris Stein

New York punks

Harry’s New York beginnings in the late ’60s and ’70s are electric with potential and celebrity. She adored the early punk of the New York Dolls — wanted to be them, and gave them rides in her car.

Moving to the city after college in 1965, Harry lived on St. Mark’s Place on the Lower East Side, where her rent was $67 a month. She worked as a secretary for the BBC, then as a waitress at Max’s Kansas City (and later, as a Playboy Bunny serving cocktails). Just before Woodstock, she waited on Jefferson Airplane.

Harry takes readers inside the fire trap lofts and grimy dives of the ’70s that gave rise to bands like Blondie, the Ramones, Talking Heads and Television. The biggest star of Harry’s book is New York itself: the sights, smells and textures of a sometimes romantic, sometimes heartbreaking, but always transient New York that, like the famous club CBGB — one of Harry’s haunts — has come and gone.

“It was a time of felt experience," Harry writes. “No special effects, just raw, visceral, uncut living. No voyeuristic secondhand selfies being beamed out on the internet.”

In Harry’s hands, details that have the potential to become sensational are rendered matter-of-fact.

“One night, I did Eric Emerson, upstairs at Max’s, in the phone booth," she says. "My one-hour stand with a master of the game.”

(Emerson, one of Warhol’s superstars, played in the glitter band the Magic Tramps. Blondie co-founder Chris Stein was their occasional bass player and Emerson’s onetime roommate.)

After a stint as a background player with the National Uniphrenic Church and Bank, headed by Newark native and saxophonist Charlie “Nothing” Simon, and a 1968 recording debut as a backup singer for baroque folk music group The Wind in the Willows, Harry moved back to New Jersey.

She started a relationship with a painting contractor she calls “Mr. C." He turned out to be a violent, possessive stalker with a gun. The 1979 Blondie hit “One Way or Another" is partially inspired by his incessant harassment. When she broke up with him and moved back to the city, he would badger her with phone calls.

That is, until Chris Stein picked up the line.

Harry “met” Stein, her significant other of 13 years — who is still her creative partner in Blondie today — when he was a faceless silhouette in the audience at a show for her R&B and glitter rock group the Stillettoes, with Elda Gentile and Amanda Jones.

“I was drawn to him as if by a magnet, a real psychic connection," Harry says in the book.

Stein became Blondie’s guitarist, Fred Smith joined them on bass and Billy O’Connor was on drums. Bayonne’s Gary “Valentine" Lachman (bass) and Clem Burke (drums) would replace them. Tish and Snooky Bellomo, the creators of punk hair color line Manic Panic, provided backing vocals, and Jimmy Destri joined on keyboard.

‘Heart of Glass’ and a breakthrough

With Blondie’s mix of glitter-glam and punk, Harry says her idea was “to bring dancing back to rock." The band’s first single was “Sex Offender” (sold as “X Offender”), released in 1976. Blondie’s self-titled debut album followed, and by 1977, the band was on its first tour.

While touring with Iggy Pop, David Bowie flashed his penis at Harry after she delivered them some cocaine. While that could make headlines in the #MeToo era, Harry says that it didn’t bother her.

“I was very flattered that he did that,” Harry tells NJ Advance Media. “I think any girl or woman in that situation would feel the same way. He was a megastar, very handsome guy. He wasn’t abusive or rude in any way."

In the book, Harry says she knew it was a man’s world, but didn’t spend her time voicing inequities because she wanted to focus on her work.

"I think there’s good people and there’s bad people, male or female, and the idea of taking advantage of power and using a person and taking advantage of them is sickening,” Harry tells NJ Advance Media, reflecting on the #MeToo movement. “It’s good that people talk about bad situations and that men take some responsibility. But I don’t think all men are bad and I don’t think all women are good, so gotta get it straight.”

Blondie’s 1978 album “Parallel Lines" produced several hits, including the 1979 single “Heart of Glass," written by Harry and Stein, which became one of the band’s four No. 1 songs on the Billboard Hot 100, in addition to “Call Me” in 1980, “The Tide is High” (a cover of Jamaican rocksteady group the Paragons) and “Rapture,” both in 1981.

The music video for “Rapture,” which featured Fab 5 Freddy — who took Harry to her first rap gig in 1977 — became the first on MTV to feature rap during a time when black artists were kept out of the lineup.

Ted Bundy: the ‘nastiest close call’

Harry recalls having to constantly watch her back in ’70s New York. One night, she and Stein were heading back to their apartment after a show when a man she calls “Jimi,” for his resemblance to Jimi Hendrix, held them up and raped her.

“I can’t say that I felt a lot of fear," Harry writes. "I’m very glad this happened pre-AIDS or I might have freaked. In the end, the stolen guitars hurt me more than the rape.”

Debbie Harry in Havana in 2019.Nick Wiesner

Harry says her closest call was in the early ’70s, when she was trying to get to a party for the New York Dolls. A small white car circled and the driver offered her a ride. Once inside, she saw the car lacked a window crank and inside door handle.

“The hair on the back of my neck stood up,” she says. Harry squeezed her arm through a crack in the window, opened the door from the outside and made a break for it.

Only 15 years later did Harry become convinced the driver was serial killer Ted Bundy, after reading an article about his methods. Later, her claim would be debunked. (Bundy was supposed to have been in Florida.) But Harry persists.

Debbie Harry in London in 1977, the year of Blondie's first tours.Graham Morris | Getty Images

Breakup and a second wave

In 1982, Blondie broke up.

Stein was sick, eventually diagnosed with the autoimmune disorder pemphigus vulgaris. After an accountant failed to pay their taxes for two years, Stein and Harry lost everything (except the Warhol portrait of her, which she stashed away). When Stein was in the hospital, they used heroin to soothe themselves.

“For those times when I wanted to blank out parts of my life or when I was dealing with some depression, there was nothing better than heroin," Harry says in the book. In 1987, Stein and Harry broke up, too.

In the ’90s, Stein, now 69, floated a Blondie reunion. A warm reception greeted the band for its 1999 album “No Exit," including the winning track “Maria.” But former Blondie guitarist Frank Infante and bass player Nigel Harrison sued for “potential future” income (the lawsuit was not successful). When the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, Infante and other ex-Blondie players made a public appeal to Harry to perform with the band. She declined.

Chris Stein and Debbie Harry of Blondie were in a relationship for 13 years, but stayed close and continued to work together after their split in 1987.Guy Furrow

“I have had one f--k of an interesting life and I plan to go on having one," Harry says in the book. So far, retirement isn’t in the cards.

“I think there’s a lot of clubs that I would like to play in Williamsburg and in Brooklyn and in Manhattan," she tells NJ Advance Media. “So I have not given up.” Harry says she’d like to write more in general, write more songs and make more albums.

“As far as anything else, maybe jumping out of an airplane would be good.”

Debbie Harry will be at Town Hall in New York (123 W. 43rd St.) with Chris Stein to introduce “Face It” at 8 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 30. Tickets start at $44 and include signed copies of “Face It”; thetownhall.org.

Have a tip? Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup or on Facebook.

Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.com’s newsletters.