Rat Girl: A Memoir

A great read from beginning to end. It's unlike any music memoir I've read, more like a modernist novel. As narrator, she creates a memorable character--one who sees the world "though a glass, darkly". What keeps it fascinating is trying to place what she is experiencing in context: dream, hallucination, memory or reality? Every time I thought I had it figured out, something would happened that puts it all in a new light. There are many layers---it's like peeling an onion. The format of the book is part of its charm: the narrative is interspersed with a few lines of lyrics (which comment on it, often obliquely), and flashbacks from her childhood. It works well, adding variety and giving the reader a break. Her total dedication to the music shines through. Her description of her phone calls with Ivo Watts-Russell (co-founder and head of 4AD Records and another eccentric totally dedicated to music) is priceless. It certainly gave me new insight into Throwing Muses and her solo work. But this book isn't just for fans or musicians, there are interesting vignettes of Rhode Island, Boston, Santa Cruz CA, and a backwards peek into the golden age of Hollywood. It's a rock memoir, but though the narrator's voice, it has undergone a "sea-change, into something rich and strange."

This memoir is magnificent. Thank God. When an artist you like branches out into a field that's new--an actor rapping, say, or a musician writing books, you kind of follow along with a bit of trepidation. It seems polite to be part of the audience, but quite often these divergences are more embarrassing than anything else. I love memoirs, and I have long loved Kristin Hersh. I wasn't sure they would mix. They do. This memoir covers Kristin's late adolescence. Throwing Muses is already a band, not yet successful, struggling to define its place just as Kristin is struggling to define her own, coming to grips with the mood disorder that shook her life. She leaves out many details, but none of the ones that matter. This is a memoir, after all (literally, mémoire, memory), and not an autobiography. This is not about the hardcore facts, but about what she perceives, remembers, prioritizes in her past. It leaves us less informed than an autobiography, but more involved. We feel a part of her daily life. There's a fine sense of pacing here. Most of the memoir is lineal, but interspersed are small snippets of song lyrics and short passages from other times, distinguished by a different typeface. Together, they give a more complete picture of the author--the song lyrics offer another view of how she filters her experience into her art; the "flashbacks" a hint into the earlier passages of the person she is becoming. But she does not allow them to derail the primary thread of her story. I found that story utterly engrossing. Kristin neither romanticizes nor catastrophizes her life and the challenges she faces. She delicately skirts some of the darker issues, but remains true to the emotional core. Kristin's authorial voice is as distinctive as her singing voice; her gifts as a lyricist could not guarantee her ability to sustain this form, but she does it ably. This book should appeals to fans of either art form--memoirs, music. It doesn't matter, I don't think, whether you are already familiar with Kristin's work as a solo artist or as singer for Throwing Muses or 50 Foot Wave. It is a deeply satisfying, emotionally resonant book that should appeal whether you know her or not. I recommend. Tip of the hat to the cover illustration by Gilbert Hernandez ( Love & Rockets and others), who has previously done cover art for Throwing Muses.

At first I was skeptical at reading a book about a teenager, but this book is turning out to be a really fun book to read. I'm a Throwing Muses fan and find the history of their beginnings as a band really interesting to read about. And I also enjoy the way she has laid the book out which is really different and cool from a lot of books. I love how the chapters are separated by short stories and not numbers and titles.

I'm astonished by how much I enjoyed this book. OK, yes, I was a big Throwing Muses fan back in the day. Their sui generis eponymous first album (released on 4AD in the UK in 1986, but for many years available only as an expensive import in the States) was the one of the strangest flowers in the magical overgrown garden of 80s "Indie" rock. Even today, no one knows how to classify the joyous, horrifying, fast-slow, loud-quiet, delirious sound they produced. Hersh's stream-of-consciousness lyrics may have puzzled some, but to a certain kind of teenager in the 80s they were eerily prescient--perfectly aimed darts to the mid-brain nexus of memory, fear and desire: "home is a rage / feels like a cage"; "all I can think about is choosing it / I'm losing it"; "they look in a mirror see themselves / look in the mirror, look at me." Whatever demons Kristin had, they were only more visceral manifestations of demons we, her non-bipolar fans and peers, all shared to some degree. Her dangerously explosive id--what she calls "Evil Kris" throughout this memoir--somehow defused our own, made sense of our confusion and rage. And, despite protestations to the contrary in this book, you could dance to it. But, truth be told, Kristin and I parted ways after 1998's Strange Angels, the last KH release to hit my sweet spot. Though I've continued to follow her--I have all her albums--most of her output over the last decade has left me at best lukewarm, particularly that of her latest band, 50 Foot Wave, which sounds for all the world like unreconstructed first generation hardcore SoCal punk (Social Distortion, Black Flag, X) and inspires the reflection "Who listens to this kind of stuff anymore? Why?" (As I've become middle-aged, probably the last thing I want to hear is a woman my own age scream hoarsely at me over an amelodic wall of noise. These days I'm more likely to crank Ella Fitzgerald.) Even her folky solo offerings somehow haven't quite clicked, though there have been bright spots here and there. This phenomenon is very familiar--a band / songwriter means a great deal to you, and then, one day, simply doesn't--but it still sets me apart from the Kristin Hersh superfans who've devoured the entire oeuvre, no questions asked. Therefore, although I bought the book when it was first released in a rush of nostalgia, I had second thoughts and let it gather dust on my bookshelf for more than a year before getting around to reading it. Mistake. Within 10 pages I was hooked...like I "had a hook in my head," as the song goes. Hersh makes several excellent decisions: a) She confines her narrative to a single year in her life and the life of the band. A jam-packed year: filled with frantic songwriting, a complete mental breakdown, a pregnancy, and an out-of-the-blue deal to cut a record. The dull recitation that so many musician bios descend to is thus nipped in the bud. b) She doesn't attempt to tell the story in a linear fashion. The text follows an emotional wave more than a temporal trajectory, with flashbacks to her childhood, interpolated bits of song lyrics, digressions, and numerous asides and random ruminations. Some readers will be frustrated both by this and by what she leaves out. We never learn, for instance, who the father of her child is, or the nature of her relationship with him. This is so out of step with the "confessional" nature of so much contemporary autobiography that it's jarring: shouldn't we be privy to the juiciest bits, supermarket tabloid-style? But I, for one, find Hersh's reticence refreshing. Those expecting some sort of straightforward public striptease couldn't possibly have been KH fans to begin with. Kristin, consciously or instinctively, has always heeded Emily Dickinson's admonition "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant," understanding that honesty is often better served by leaving some things out. c) She is amazingly true to her teenaged self--to the naive, giddy, girl-woman prodigy she once was--and unfailingly generous to her bandmates. This is no mean feat. In any band--or even group of friends--"things fall apart" and relationships become complicated, fraught, over time. Throwing Muses were no exception. Tired of playing second banana, Tanya Donelly left the group in 1991, and bassist Leslie Langston had departed several years before that. But whatever stresses, disappointments, fractures and reconciliations were destined for the future, Hersh successfully keeps them at bay, focusing on how her 18-year-old self saw and felt those relationships at the time. Very few memoirists are so successful at re-inhabiting a former version of themselves. The upshot is that rare memoir that I found a genuinely successful Proustian attempt to capture lost time. It took me back completely to when I was a pretentious but open-hearted teenager looking for my own niche in the world, and Throwing Muses were the soundtrack to my subconscious. Above and beyond this, Rat Girl is a treasure trove of insights into the labyrinthine lyrics of Hersh's songs. For instance, it's now clear what a "Gazebo Tree" is intended to signify, and what the inspiration for the invective of the seminal song "Hate My Way" was. There are dozens of such anecdotes, and, whether or not they are all strictly factual, they are unfailingly interesting. (A very minor gripe: Whoever at Penguin green-lighted the title "Rat Girl" and the cartoony cover design for the memoir needs his or her head examined. It both looks and sounds like an angst-ridden Young Adult novel. In Britain the book was given the much more appropriate title "Paradoxical Undressing" and far more appropriate cover art, so those that want a nice copy of the book to grace their shelves would do well to order the British edition instead.) Highly recommended, particularly to anyone who came of age in the 80s or early 90s.

A friend of mine once pointed out to me that famous people write autobiographies. The rest of us write novels. That has always seemed to me to be true, and singer-songwriter Kristin Hersh's astonishing "Rat Girl," the story of a year in her life taken from her diary, would seem to prove my friend's point. In her introduction, Ms. Hersh puts some distance between herself, the diary, and her readers by noting that she wrote "this _book_ based on _pages from my diary_ because copying down a year isn't a particularly creative thing to do. And it all happened twenty-five years ago, so it can't really count as a story about _me_--that girl isn't me any more. Now it's just a story." And quite a story it is. It begins in the spring of 1985 when her band, the Throwing Muses (if you don't know of them, I can't imagine why you're reading this review), were playing bars in Lovecraftland and Ms. Hersh was 18. We meet her first in a crashpad, and are soon introduced to the other members of that amazingly creative and intelligent band, along with her friend Betty Hutton (who was herself famous long ago), her hippie father (a professor at a Catholic College in Providence), and then her gay friend Mark. It continues on through the seasons, ending the following spring with the birth of her son (the child's father never appears in the memoir). It's funny at times (the head of the record company that signs the Muses is portrayed here as if he belongs in a Monty Python skit), suspenseful at others (a stalker appears sporadically), and parts may tug at your heart (Ms. Hersh's difficulty in keeping anything down during he first trimester; Betty Hutton's attempts to avoid being recognized, which is easier than she thinks because nobody has any idea who she is, or rather was). Throughout, Ms. Hersh sprinkles in lyrics from the Throwing Muses years, along with some from her equally brilliant solo albums (among them "Hips and Makers," "Strange Angels," "Sky Motel," and "Sunny Border Blue"). And she sprinkles in as chapter-enders flashbacks to her childhood. As a writer, she's quite the stylist: Her prose is in that same deadpan no-words-wasted style that imbues her song lyrics. (In my head, I imagined her reading the book aloud, in that raspy nails-on-a-blackboard voice.) It's dazzling.

This is a fine memoir. A solid piece of writing and a deeply funny and empathic story. Kristin reveals just the right amount of personal detail -- enough to lay out the difficulties of being a young musician passionately committed to her art and her own personal challenges -- but not too intrusive into her or others' lives. She has deep affection for and loyalty to her band members and her friends and she delivers her progression from fierce independence to a member of a team with gentle glides. There is nothing snarky here. In some ways, "Rat Girl" is a bit reminiscent of Patti Smith's "Just Kids." Like Patti, Kristin has a deep, warm heart; an amazing ear; and a keen eye. Both books have the chords of a good therapeutic session. Music -- or better, musician -- therapy. Cheaper, too.

I am a big fan of musicians who write (Neil Young, Nick Cave, etc). Usually their lyrical talents translate well to written prose and Kristin Hersh's Rat Girl is no exception. It is an excellent read that gives an introspective glimpse into the mind of an brilliant singer-songwriter.

Perhaps I'm a tad biased in my favorable-leaning review, as I've been a long-time fan of Kristin Hersh and her band, Throwing Muses. The alt-rock outfit spent their formative years in my hometown of Boston (formed in Newport, RI) and I've paid a great deal of attention to Kristin's career along the way, as well as her stepsister, Tanya Donelly (of Throwing Muses and later, the band Belly) who also plays a significant role in this memoir. If I were to dive blindly into this book with little to no knowledge of the subjects, I'd still find this memoir to be widely entertaining, humorous, provocative and informative. Stylistically, it's penned in an easily accessible manner, so it's a quick read. The author paints a vivid landscape of the period in time in which the band staggered through their humble beginnings and offers up the various "OMG, No Way, LOL and I can't believe it," moments as the story rolls along. One of the best---most unique music memoirs out there!