Girl In a Band by Kim Gordon
Memoir
Ah, the pragmati-learning journey of a novelist who consumes books while telling myself I’m helping my writing . . .
Reading is one of the best things any writer can do to upskill their craft. Like any other professional endeavor, becoming a good writer means understanding what good writing looks like from those who are doing it. And if you, like me, are becoming more and more conscious of the books we choose to fill our time, reading can become both craft research and novel research. A good ole two-fer. And as long as we use the inspiration gathered through hand-selected books to inform our work, we’ve done something right. I firmly believe that.
For approaching this week’s book talk from a new perspective, one of a novelist using books as inspiration, rather than a reader reflecting on the work.
I hadn’t even heard of Sonic Youth until the band came up in conversation several years ago. The group was formed in 1981, before I was born, and while my parents were rock-and-roll lovers, they didn’t get into the more new-wavey spheres of the rock space. So Kim Gordon, as a musician and an artist, wasn’t even on my radar. But in early July when I went to my local library looking for memoirs and biographies by or about rock-and-roll musicians, Girl In A Band was there on the shelf staring at me.
Sometimes, the right book finds us, and Kim’s memoir found me at just the right moment. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t a Sonic Youth superfan. Didn’t matter that I didn’t know Gordon or Thurston, had no idea they were seen as a rocker power couple, had no idea, really, what I’d find in these 300-odd pages. What I found, though, was inspiration, raw and emotional and honest inspiration.
Here are selected quotes from the memoir and notes on how the selections inform my writing and coming story.
Pg. 15: In my family, history showed up in casual remarks. I was in my senior year of high school when my aunt told me that my mother’s family, the Swalls, was one of California’s original families. Pioneers. Settlers. The story went that along with some Japanese business partners, my great-great-grandparents ran a chili pepper farm in Garden Grove, in Orange County. The Swalls even had a ranch in West Hollywood, at Doheny Drive and Santa Monica Boulevard, on land that’s today all car washes and strip malls and bad stucco. At some point the railroad laid down tracks, slicing the street into Big and Little Santa Monica Boulevards. The ranches are all gone today, of course, but Swall Drive is still there, swishing north and south, a fossil of ancestral DNA.
Kim discusses her family legacy, one involving the westward journey of pioneers who settled in California, and this passage struck me particularly because of the passage of time, condensed and qualified. Kim’s family is California, settlers with a road named after them still, despite the fact that the family itself has moved on.
In my novel, Evelyn’s family hails from the same small town in Vermont in which she finds herself after some rather soul-crushing professional circumstances. Her ancestry runs deep, her blood is mountain green. Kim’s writing got me thinking about what Evelyn might notice, effluvia of a past that only she would recognize, like the pub in town, a place her dad frequented, that smells like him after a long and tiring week on the farm. Or, the farmhouse in which she grew up, the one lost when her dad passed away, a now-abandoned place where her childhood memories are left to crumble like the old porch steps.
For Evelyn to really discuss her feelings about her home town and the passage of time, she’ll need to speak in the first person, be able to reflect fully and honestly, on the events that drive her life today.
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Pg. 127: When you listen to old R&B records, the women on them sang in a really fierce, kick-ass way. In general, though, women aren’t really allowed to be kick-ass. It’s like the famous distinction between art and craft: Art, and wildness, and pushing against the edges, is a male thing. Craft, and control, and polish, is for women. Culturally we don’t allow women to be as free as they would like, because that is frightening. We either shun those women or deem them crazy.
The thoughts I have on this passage could become unhinged, so bear with me, but I am struck by the idea that women aren’t allowed to be kick-ass. Kim’s right, of course, about this, as she’s right about so many other things she commented on in her memoir, but after reading Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janis, and The Last Asylum (not to mention the socio-political-cultural goings of the current age) I understand differently how desperately needed feminism still is.
When a man enters a place of creative madness, he’s seen as a genius. When a woman does the same, she’s seen as unstable. The Last Asylum touches on this idea that unapologetically independent and creative women who know what the fuck they want and go out and get it become social pariahs. Barbara Taylor writes, “[T]he noisy, disinhibited, disruptive madwoman is a perversion of nature, an anti-woman, especially when she is a mother.” Kim and Barbara seem to be speaking the same language, though decades apart.
In my novel, Evelyn lives under the shadow of her partner, a lead guitarist in a band, someone she’s known for most of her life, and someone who’s life is intimately entangled in hers. At first, Evelyn plays the good-wife role, being the supportive partner and backdrop to a budding rock star. But as he dives further and further into the madness of art, she finds herself pulling back, uninterested in being the support pillars that hold his shit together because she is trying to lose herself to her own creativity.
Through the course of the novel, Evelyn finds her path to artistic freedom, but she has to lose everything else she’s worked hard for to do it.
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Pg. 132: Every woman knows what I’m talking about when I saw girls grow up with a desire to please, to cede their power to other people. At the same time everyone knows about the sometimes aggressive and manipulative ways men often exert power in the world, and how by using the word empowered to describe women, men are simply maintaining their own power and control.
I love this thought: By using the word empowered to describe women, men are simply maintaining their own power and control.
At the root of empowerment is the understanding that you have power over something, even if it’s just yourself. Currently, men define that which must be controlled with power, and an empowered woman is (still) seen as an anomaly, though culturally folks are looking for something different. I mean, it’s 2024.
Yet, we cannot create a different outcome by playing the same old game. And as long as women are playing games using rules set by men, we cannot win. Not really.
Evelyn learns this lesson the hard way when her definition of success wildly diverges from her partner’s definition. She doesn’t want to be famous, doesn’t want to go viral. She wants to create, authentically, and on her terms, while still making a living. But she allows herself, at first, to be passed around the professional playing field by the men making the rules, namely her partner, who control more of her life than she even realizes.
For Evelyn, money isn’t the goal. The goal is to create art, and the money is secondary. Part of her growth as a character is in finding her voice, standing firmly on her feet, and radically pursuing her own path. She will spend some time getting clear and comfortable with that simple truth of her existence.
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Pg. 136: Sometimes in a band it can feel as though you’re together because you collectively suffer from a psychological disease none of you can name or acknowledge. Logic proceeds from a kind of group psychosis, but the force of the collective makes everything work.
I read this passage aloud to my partner who is a musician currently playing with two bands. His reaction: Yes, to all of that.
Maybe it’s because I work in books where much of the work is done in isolation with client interactions here and there, but I’m not sure I really considered the group dynamic that must be at play in my novel. Sure, there are four people in the band, but what does that mean? How do they affect each other? How do they piss each other off? Support each other? Love? Hate?
In a band, it’s the collective force of the common goal — the song, the album, the performance, the tour — that keeps spirits and momentum up. But that doesn’t mean the pursuit of said goal is all sunshine and rainbows. Evelyn’s partner is a jerk, especially after he starts getting recognized. The bass player recedes into himself to avoid uncomfortable discussions. The drummer is flaky and mostly oblivious. The guitarist can be calculated and cold, taking a utilitarian approach to decision-making where everything done comes down to what the band will get out of it.
Evelyn watches the relationships of her four best friends transform after the band sets out and taps into the dream they each so desired. When each of them change, necessarily, as they grow into their new skins, they fit each other less and less, which leads to tensions, hurt feelings, and blowout arguments with dire consequences.
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Pg. 156: Today we have someone like Lana Del Rey, who doesn’t even know what feminism is, who believes it means women can do whatever they want, which, in her world, tilts toward self-destruction, whether it’s sleeping with gross older men or being a transient biker queen. Equal pay and equal rights would be nice. Naturally, it’s just a persona. Does she truly believe it’s beautiful when young musicians go out on a hot flame of drugs and depression, or is it just her persona?
My novel doesn’t include Lana Del Rey, and while I like her music, I know very little of it, apart from Gods and Monsters. But Kim’s writing here caught my eye, and maybe — again — it’s because I just finished Janis, who was part of the 27 Club, the ongoing string of celebrities who die at age 27, mostly because of overdose.
Evelyn will watch as her partner slides into alcoholism and the band’s guitarist gets involved with coke as a way to maintain his own persona and push forward. Evelyn herself partakes in more and more cannabis to cope with the changes she sees in others, and the changes she feels within herself. And she will need to pull back on recreation to sink into her professional future.
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Pg. 244: Toward the end, though, he stopped doing even that. He seemed lost in his own weather pattern, his own season. After a couple of days back from New York, the lack of distraction would get to him. He’d be on his phone, fingers racing, chasing after the things he felt he was missing out on. When he came into a room, he spoke in a big captain’s voice, commanding attention. If was as if he were talking over his own mood, pressing it down, distancing other people from what was really going on. He’d lost that youthful glow. He wasn’t happy, I knew, which made me feel lonely, and somehow at fault.
In Kim’s memoir, Thurston is unhappy with his relationship. In my novel, Evelyn’s partner is unhappy with life, broadly. Janis Joplin’s father referred to the feeling as the Saturday Night Swindle, which is the idea that though everyone says if you work hard, you get to enjoy the weekend, this thought is nice but not true. Folks often work hard all through the weekend and never realize that down time they felt promised during their working years.
Evelyn’s partner becomes lost along the path to fame, forgets the music is the way forward, and recklessly focuses on fame to his detriment. Singing what he thinks will sell loses him listeners who’d previously tuned in for his authenticity. For her partner, the lesson comes to late. But Evelyn gets to learn the lesson and carry it forward on her own path.
Girl In a Band was my second selection in my pursuit for pragmati-learning. Saving these quotes, revisiting them today as I share them with you, has reinvigorated the connection I have for my own story, and it’s reinvigorated my quest to write the damned thing.
I mean, it’s been more than a decade already. Not that the novel I’m writing today is anything like that initial version from a decade ago, but it’s not not similar, either. It’s just that I’ve grown, I’ve learned, I’ve changed.
Even if you don’t know Sonic Youth, Kim Gordon’s memoir is a gift for any woman attempting to forge her own path, stand on her feet, and make it on her terms. This is the kind of book that turns regular people into role models, and Kim Gordon is a role model to little girls everywhere.
How are you using books to enrich your professional pursuits? And has another book given you insights into your own writing and story? Share below.
Your book pal,
Fal ♥