Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir

by Carrie Brownstein

These songs and albums were the best ones because of how huge adolescence felt then, and how nostalgia recasts it now.

Nostalgia is so certain: the sense of familiarity it instills makes us feel like we know ourselves, like we’ve lived. To get a sense that we have already journeyed through something—survived it, experienced it—is often so much easier and less messy than the task of currently living through something.

There was light everywhere I looked.

I had very little desire to be present, only to be presentational, or to pretend.

The old songs, the old movies, the black-and-white pictures created a visual and aural time machine.

It wasn’t that I imagined I had another life—it was that I didn’t have to exist in the here and now.

An audience doesn’t want female distance, they want female openness and accessibility, familiarity that validates femaleness.

Persona for a man is equated with power; persona for a woman makes her less of a woman, more distant and unknowable, and thus threatening. When men sing personal songs, they seem sensitive and evolved; when women sing personal songs, they are inviting and vulnerable, or worse, catty and tiresome.

One of my favorite songs that Corin has ever written, “Was It a Lie?”, sounds so prescient now in the age of social media and the voracious news and gossip cycles. The song is about a woman whose videotaped death is replayed for the amusement of others.