Scan barcode
jellybird25's review against another edition
4.25
A life lived like a story. You have to love a memoir by a poet/song writer because life becomes so purposeful and lyrical through their eyes. Such an interesting perspective on a really tough year in a person’s life, told with compassion and hope and love!
christopherc's review against another edition
4.0
Kristin Hersh is the frontwoman of Throwing Muses, the first American act signed to 4AD Records and a formidable sonic assault that presaged American alternative rock but did it with much more strangeness and integrity. Hersh has had a long and storied career, but in writing Rat Girl (released as Paradoxical Undressing outside North America), her memoirs, she choose to focus on one crucial year: the spring of 1985 to the spring of 1986. It was during that period that Throwing Muses were going from local Rhode Island clubs to international renown and recorded their first album, and when Hersh was first diagnosed with mental illness and when she gave birth to her first child. Since Hersh kept a diary during this time, she was able to reconstruct the era in considerable detail.
I count myself a Throwing Muses fan and own all their records (even if I find it hard to take them in doses larger than a song or two at a time). I found the book a satisfying and informative account of how they started out. All this time I had the impression that Kristin Hersh had a white trash background due to the country inflection and Appalachia references of some early songs, and the generally angry tone of her vocals. In fact, Hersh was born to two aging hippies, and her father was a university philosophy lecturer. Visitors to her home in her childhood included Alan Ginsberg and Joseph Campbell. She was accepted into university at an early age, and that’s where we meet her as the book opens. Even Hersh’s year as a student was unusual: she struck up a close friendship with Betty Hutton, a starlet of the golden age of Hollywood who left acting behind in her sixties to pursue a degree.
Early on Hersh’s description of music and performing is intense: she describes songs as malevolent forces that burst out of her mouth, that cover her body like a tattoo. She sees chords as different colours in an especially disturbing synaesthesia. Hersh ascribes this all to getting hit by a car some time before the book opens, but that traumatic experience seems to have only awakened latent mental problems. By the summer of 1986 she had hit bottom, and the middle of Rat Girl is an erratic account of this, the gaps in the text reflecting her turbulent frame of mind first through the extremes of mania and then the zombie feeling of medication. Hersh seems to have gotten all better by the book’s publication in 2010, and Rat Girl manages to both describe her state as she really felt it back then, while at the same time dissecting these feelings from a later, clearer frame of mind.
The last quarter of the book intertwines Hersh’s experiences of pregnancy with the band’s encounter with 4AD Records and recording sessions under producer Gil Norton. Throwing Muses’ first, self-titled LP turns out to have been a struggle to record as Hersh couldn’t summon up the same rage in the sterile environment of a studio, and she paints a sympathetic account of producer Gil Norton and 4AD label founder Ivo Watts-Russell trying to capture their magic. Her months of pregnancy are depicted as a trawl through health stores and books for expectant mothers, as she’s keen to give her baby the best but, only 18 years old, doesn’t quite know how. Hersh doesn’t mention dating or romance at all, not even the name of the baby’s father, which may strike many readers as odd, though as the child was later the subject of a very acrimonious andpublic custody battle, it’s not surprising.
Indeed, this is a consistently sweet account without any sense of regret or anger about her decisions of the time, and no quarrels with bandmates as in so many other rock memoirs. Hersh chooses to channel the wonder and innocence of one’s teenage years – no easy task from twenty-five years later – than any heartbreak. Hersh’s prose is surprisingly good for a first-time writer, interweaving moments reconstructed from her diary, brief memories of her childhood, and snippets of Throwing Muses lyrics that tell us when these songs were penned. It is not an absolutely perfect book, and I found myself skimming through e.g. Hersh’s descriptions of old ladies on Rhode Island buses (peoplewatching being a hobby of hers), but for the most part Rat Girl was an enjoyable and downright heartwarming experience.
I count myself a Throwing Muses fan and own all their records (even if I find it hard to take them in doses larger than a song or two at a time). I found the book a satisfying and informative account of how they started out. All this time I had the impression that Kristin Hersh had a white trash background due to the country inflection and Appalachia references of some early songs, and the generally angry tone of her vocals. In fact, Hersh was born to two aging hippies, and her father was a university philosophy lecturer. Visitors to her home in her childhood included Alan Ginsberg and Joseph Campbell. She was accepted into university at an early age, and that’s where we meet her as the book opens. Even Hersh’s year as a student was unusual: she struck up a close friendship with Betty Hutton, a starlet of the golden age of Hollywood who left acting behind in her sixties to pursue a degree.
Early on Hersh’s description of music and performing is intense: she describes songs as malevolent forces that burst out of her mouth, that cover her body like a tattoo. She sees chords as different colours in an especially disturbing synaesthesia. Hersh ascribes this all to getting hit by a car some time before the book opens, but that traumatic experience seems to have only awakened latent mental problems. By the summer of 1986 she had hit bottom, and the middle of Rat Girl is an erratic account of this, the gaps in the text reflecting her turbulent frame of mind first through the extremes of mania and then the zombie feeling of medication. Hersh seems to have gotten all better by the book’s publication in 2010, and Rat Girl manages to both describe her state as she really felt it back then, while at the same time dissecting these feelings from a later, clearer frame of mind.
The last quarter of the book intertwines Hersh’s experiences of pregnancy with the band’s encounter with 4AD Records and recording sessions under producer Gil Norton. Throwing Muses’ first, self-titled LP turns out to have been a struggle to record as Hersh couldn’t summon up the same rage in the sterile environment of a studio, and she paints a sympathetic account of producer Gil Norton and 4AD label founder Ivo Watts-Russell trying to capture their magic. Her months of pregnancy are depicted as a trawl through health stores and books for expectant mothers, as she’s keen to give her baby the best but, only 18 years old, doesn’t quite know how. Hersh doesn’t mention dating or romance at all, not even the name of the baby’s father, which may strike many readers as odd, though as the child was later the subject of a very acrimonious andpublic custody battle, it’s not surprising.
Indeed, this is a consistently sweet account without any sense of regret or anger about her decisions of the time, and no quarrels with bandmates as in so many other rock memoirs. Hersh chooses to channel the wonder and innocence of one’s teenage years – no easy task from twenty-five years later – than any heartbreak. Hersh’s prose is surprisingly good for a first-time writer, interweaving moments reconstructed from her diary, brief memories of her childhood, and snippets of Throwing Muses lyrics that tell us when these songs were penned. It is not an absolutely perfect book, and I found myself skimming through e.g. Hersh’s descriptions of old ladies on Rhode Island buses (peoplewatching being a hobby of hers), but for the most part Rat Girl was an enjoyable and downright heartwarming experience.
jsalowe's review against another edition
4.0
Wildly uneven (of course! appropriately so) and much to be said about this, but probably over the weekend...so this is just a placeholder review....
amris's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Mental illness and Pregnancy
rodneywilhite's review against another edition
4.0
Beautiful portrait of youth and artistic self-discovery.
rleibrock's review
5.0
Kristin Hersh's "Rat Girl" deconstructs the notion of memoir. The book takes place during only one tumultuous year during the singer's life but it manages to cover so much: Bi-polar disorder, her band Throwing Muse's record deal and recording of their first album and the pregnancy and birth of her first child.
If someone wasn't familiar with Hersh or Throwing Muses and picked up this book he or she would probably be confused. Hersh is vague about a lot of the details on things that exist around her so I could see someone feeling slighted--as if she were only telling the smallest slice of the story.
And yet her voice on paper (just as on record) is so vibrant--alternately dark and grim, caustic, sad, happy and very very funny--that I think it's enough to carry any reader along.
I've been a Throwing Muses/Hersh fan since I was 19 and I loved this book for its insight, honesty and, most of all, ability to make me laugh out loud.
If someone wasn't familiar with Hersh or Throwing Muses and picked up this book he or she would probably be confused. Hersh is vague about a lot of the details on things that exist around her so I could see someone feeling slighted--as if she were only telling the smallest slice of the story.
And yet her voice on paper (just as on record) is so vibrant--alternately dark and grim, caustic, sad, happy and very very funny--that I think it's enough to carry any reader along.
I've been a Throwing Muses/Hersh fan since I was 19 and I loved this book for its insight, honesty and, most of all, ability to make me laugh out loud.
sidewriter's review against another edition
3.0
This book is fascinating. It’s also disjointed and occasionally boring, but it’s worth it because it feels like an authentic glimpse into an artist’s mind and a true representation of the simultaneity of mental illness and mental brilliance. The rules don’t apply here; Hersh plays with narrative form, genre, memoir, fiction, and everything your writing teacher ever told you to do or not to do. The prose is interspersed with song lyrics and has a raw, stream-of-consciousness feel to it that might be off-putting, but is probably the only way to represent the untidiness of art and mental health. Added feminist bonus: you also get to see an untidy pregnancy story that demonstrates why we can and must trust pregnant women to make their own decisions.