“Here’s the thing about being an artist,” Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins writes in her 2017 memoir A Sick Life, “most people don’t care if you’re sad.”

Watkins has had her share of reasons to be sad over the course of her three-decade career. The best-known reason, the one she’s writing about in that passage, is the 2002 death of her TLC bandmate Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes. In her memoir, though, T-Boz opens up about some other sources of sadness and pain - including one very literal source of pain, the sickle cell blood disorder she’s had since birth.

“When you have sickle cell,” she explained, “your red blood cells get stuck on their way around your veins, causing blockages and stopping the oxygen from getting to your vital organs. Where there’s a lack of oxygen, you can go into a crisis, an attack of severe pain, sometimes located only in a certain spot and sometimes all over your body. Often, it’s hard to breathe or walk or even do something as basic as holding a pen. A crisis can happen without any warning. Just, bam! You’re in the hospital again.”

The disease has frequently incapacitated Watkins - including, poignantly, when Lopes and the band’s third member Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas went into the studio to record TLC’s first demo. T-Boz (the nickname is shorthand for “Tionne is boss”) has bounced back again and again, though; today, as she writes with justifiable pride, she’s “a singer, dancer, philanthropist, creator, writer, daughter, mother, sister, and friend.” You could add “entrepreneur” to that list: in 2004 she founded Chase’s Closet, a store and children’s clothing line inspired by her young daughter.

Although Watkins persisted through her disease to become a core singer and songwriter in (as she also notes with justifiable pride) “the world’s biggest-selling American girl group of all time,” the effects of sickle cell are a bigger part of the TLC story than you might realize. Lopes got her visual signature after getting socked in the left eye by one of Bobby Brown’s dancers in a fight that started when the dancer rudely bumped into the rapper while Lopes was leading Watkins out of a party: it’s not safe for Lopes to drink alcohol, and she’d made the mistake of drinking a flaming Dr. Pepper shot.

“That incident was how Lisa started drawing under her left eye,” writes T-Boz. “It started as a Band-Aid to cover up a burst blood vessel and later she turned it into a black mark.”

TLC’s story is not without its share of Behind the Music drama. How could it be? Founded in Atlanta in 1990 under the auspices of the artist and producer Pebbles, TLC rose to rapid fame when their debut single “Ain’t 2 Proud 2 Beg” hit the top ten. Their LP Ooooooohhh... On the TLC Tip was soon selling millions, though Pebbles reminded the artists that they needed to aim even higher if they wanted to reach Whitney Houston territory.

Lopes and Watkins were the core members of the new group, uneasily ousting original member Crystal Jones to make way for the more talented Thomas. (“Do you fight?” Watkins remembers asking Lopes. “Because we’re about to throw her out of her own group, and if she gets rowdy, we’re going to have to fight.”) Lopes was a rapper and singer, Watkins a singer and choreographer; both wrote. Originally from Des Moines, Watkins and her mother landed in Atlanta after moving back and forth across the country in search of a happy home. (“I have never been trying to live our a real-life Jerry Springer episode,” Watkins writes of her musician father, “but my dad has made that difficult.”)

Their rapid success meant that TLC were already national stars before they’d finished their first tour - a gig opening for the even bigger MC Hammer. They essentially went straight from living-room rehearsals to facing screaming arenas: not an un-stressful situation, but Watkins remembers life in TLC being mostly a blast until it wasn’t. The group benefited from a boom era in the record industry, but their exploitative contract meant that the members themselves were making so little money, they had to borrow tens of thousands of dollars just to afford the legal fees to file for bankruptcy.

TLC famously confronted Arista Records head Clive Davis at gunpoint over their paltry earnings; here, Watkins only sets the record straight insofar as to note that “we never touched any of the guns” - they were wielded by a group of women Lopes had met in rehab. While the TLC trio faced Davis in his office, the other women went through the rest of the building liberating every plaque with TLC’s name on it. The bandits handed the plaques to anyone in the Atlanta projects who wanted one: “to this day,” writes Watkins, “you can find those plaques on eBay.” Arista renegotiated.

Lopes was sent to alcohol treatment after another infamous incident, the one in which she more or less accidentally torched the house of her football-player boyfriend. (The fire was deliberate, the ignition of the fiberglass bathtub and ultimately the entire house went a little further than Left Eye had intended.)

When the band bounced back with their landmark album CrazySexyCool, their firestarter reputation became the subject of frequent approving references, to the point that Lopes even thanked the Atlanta Fire Department at an awards podium. “I hope he didn’t lose anything sentimental,” Watkins dryly writes about Left Eye’s ex. He didn’t hold a grudge: it was that man, Andre Rison, who lent the group they money they needed to go bankrupt.

In her concise memoir, Watkins doesn’t write a lot about the process of writing and recording TLC’s music. She does note that she led much of the group’s choreography, including the iconic “Waterfalls” dance - which she had to make up the morning of the video shoot, since the group had been so busy convincing Arista to put up the money for the expensive video that they hadn’t had a chance to create any moves for it. T-Boz does write proudly about advocating for safe sex and AIDS awareness in the group’s lyrics; about “Unpretty,” a classic song that began as a poem Watkins wrote; and about how producer Jimmy Jam showed her into a Minneapolis studio and encouraged her to simply improvise song fragments that could later be assembled into a finished number, “I’m Good at Being Bad.”

T-Boz also has a hilarious story about Jimmy Jam’s erstwhile boss Prince, although it’s mostly a story about Aretha Franklin. At a 1995 Rhythm & Blues Foundation event “meant to highlight the past and future of the music industry,” TLC were set to stand alongside the Queen of Soul, who apparently didn’t particularly appreciate being designated as ambassador of “the past.” Franklin asked that her podium be moved aside to create more space between herself and the up-and-comers; later, when T-Boz appeared in a sexy dress, Aretha asked rhetorically, “You think she looks good? I used to look like that, but, uh, way better.”

Watkins seethed, but decided to let it pass in deference to the Queen. Later, though, Prince came up to T-Boz: he’d seen the whole thing. “You’re so funny,” he said. “You wanted to whoop her ass.”

“Yeah,” agreed Watkins. “You think?”

T-Boz and Chilli couldn’t even mourn their dear departed bandmate without being swept up in music-world drama, as the author recounts with resignation. Watkins was actively weeping over Left Eye’s coffin when Whitney Houston came up with her young daughter Bobbi Kristina, fangirling. Later, the surviving members of TLC found themselves packed into a little room at the funeral home with Babyface, Usher, Pebbles, Bobby Brown, Whitney, and T-Boz’s partner D’mon. It got awkward…and that was before Suge Knight, who’d been dating Left Eye, fell asleep and started snoring at the funeral.

Since Left Eye’s death, T-Boz and Chilli have reunited as TLC and released new music with various collaborators, but they make plain there will be no “replacing” Lopes. Watkins has been through a lot of ups and a lot of downs with her mercurial collaborator, who was a great artist and could be a great friend but wasn’t always the best coworker. “I will admit,” T-Boz writes, “she kept things interesting.”

One final reassurance: while TLC may tour again, “we’re not emotionally ready for a hologram.” Same.