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The Sleater-Kinney guitarist, writer, AS WELL AS Portlandia ALONG WITH Transparent actress features always been curiously eloquent. This quality has been obvious throughout the course involving 8 albums with bandmates Corin Tucker IN ADDITION TO Janet Weiss (including this year’s pulverizing comeback effort, absolutely no Cities to be able to Love), and then later towards the inquisitive AND conversant music zine keep track of Mix (R.I.P.), AND ALSO currently within her refreshingly forthright new memoir, Hunger Makes Me a good Modern Girl, out in October 27 by Riverhead Books.
Brownstein’s book — that will follows her early several years throughout Redmond, Washington, moves in the course of Sleater-Kinney’s primary run, ALONG WITH ends When she, Tucker, ALONG WITH Weiss parted actions throughout 2006 — feel actually partially inspired through her blog entries, in which ran by 2007 throughout 2010 in NPR.com. throughout her early writing, Brownstein frequently springboarded Particular anecdotes (childhood camp songs, missing Portland, IN ADDITION TO her primary concert — Madonna) into larger discussions. “I found that this writing The item really engaged readers had MY OWN story with the core associated with it,” she says. “It’s what achieved it unique coming from kind of any further outsider objective music writing. we incorporated MY experience in your narrative.”
Below, Brownstein takes SPIN additional into the experience associated with writing her first book, how she regards her newfound cultural ubiquity, AND ALSO what she said to help fellow memoirist Grace Jones Whenever they met really on Barnes & Noble.
You’ve had an immense year: a Sleater-Kinney reunion, album, and tour, the fifth season of Portlandia, a reoccurring role on Transparent, and now the release of your memoir. Is a musical next?
[Laughs.] I don’t think so… I do have some new things on the horizon that I can’t talk about yet. But you know, I feel like it’s important to take a moment to enjoy what I’m doing and to also spend time alone and with my loved ones. I’m looking forward to a slight cessation of work, but I feel very fortunate for the year I’ve had. And you know, there’s still — as you said — some exciting things coming up. I’m really looking forward to getting out on the road with the book tour and talking to some really wonderful people. And then Sleater-Kinney are playing a slew of shows at the end of the year. I think that will be a really wonderful way of finishing off 2015.
Had you intended for these projects to overlap, or do you feel it was coincidental?
I think, timing wise, a lot of it was coincidental — it kind of coalesced at the same time. I don’t know if I necessarily would have planned these last couple of months starting with spring and right up till recently. I was shooting Transparent and Portlandia at the same time, and then starting to get into the press roll out of the book.
So there was just this flurry of events and trying to dedicate myself to one task at a time. I guess it wasn’t pre-planned, but it just kind of happened, that everything cohered simultaneously. And now it feels like the threads are starting to separate out, and I’m happy for that because I feel like I can focus my attention on one thing at a time, which is what I prefer. I think it allows me to be more grateful and appreciative of [every project] individually.
What made you feel that this was the right time to release a memoir?
Well, it really started with me writing for NPR a couple years ago after Sleater-Kinney ended. So, at that time I started thinking about writing a book, but it wasn’t until a couple years ago that I really decided to focus on something more of a memoir.
Did you prepare by reading any celebrity or musician memoirs?
I was inspired by Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up. He’s such a great writer. And in that book in particular, he focuses on the events and experiences of his childhood that led him up to Saturday Night Live. I liked that it was succinct narrative — through vignettes he [talks about] the moments that led him to that doorstep. For instance, with his family, with performance, and clowning in Disneyland, and stand-up.
So, using that as a structural model, I wanted to draw from different moments in my youth and childhood that took me from feeling like an outsider and on the periphery to a sense of belonging, and I knew that Sleater-Kinney was a better container for that story than, say, Portlandia. So that’s why the book doesn’t go all the way up through present tense, except for the epilogue, but that was kind of fortuitous. I didn’t know that Sleater-Kinney was going to get back together when I started the book.
You also spoke to Kim Gordon this year when you interviewed her for her book tour. What did you think of Girl in a Band?
I loved her book. I especially loved the part about California and how that landscape really informed her ideas about visual art and her family up in Oregon and her early experience in New York. She actually interviewed me recently for my book, and we talked a lot about the process. We’re friends, and before her book came out we talked a lot about the difficulties of writing. I mean, I think it’s always more arduous than one thinks.
My favorite part of Hunger was the way that you described music journalists’ “internalized sexism” when writing about Sleater-Kinney in the late ’90s and early ’00s. Do you feel that the media has progressed beyond these “common traps and assumptions” — as you worded it — today?
I think there’s an awareness of those kind of linguistic feelings and the ways that language is sexist or the ways that we will unfairly put a modifier or index or in front of somebody. At the same time, I think on occasion there’s actually much more amphibious ways of tearing somebody down or focusing too much on what somebody looks like. That occasionally happens more with women, whether it’s politicians or actors or CEOs. I think that fundamentally, we still live in a patriarchal and sexist society, so I think that that is still going to exist and it seems like it still does. I don’t feel like there’s been a huge shift. I think the awareness is there, and there are a lot of conversations, but I think it’s still relevant.
There’s also a great scene in the book where you’re 18 and auditioning to be the guitarist for Seattle punk band 7 Year Bitch. You describe yourself as so self-conscious and nervous while it was happening. Now, you’re, arguably, the music figure people approach nervously. How do you contend with that?
There are two illustrative examples: One is to remind myself that I view and sell myself first and foremost as a fan, and I continue to be a fan because I feel like fandom is what helps stave off cynicism. There’s an inherent openness and optimism and hopefulness and curiosity, and I think curiosity is such an important part of existing in the world.
When people flock to me, I try to recall how important it is to feel recognized and listened to, just even for a moment. I met Cindy Wilson from the B-52s for our Sleater-Kinney tour in Atlanta, and I posted a picture on my Instagram with kind of a long little paragraph about this very thing of. It’s the dorkiest photo of me — I mean my smile is almost, like, slipping off my face, it’s so big. I’m like, “Oh, my smile needed another face.” I think those are the things that keep me connected to what it means to be gracious and grateful for interactions.
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