Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir

by Carrie Brownstein

Now I can’t listen to some of these records alone, in my house that I have cleaned and organized, books arranged just so, sheets washed. The sounds don’t hold up. In these cases, fandom is contextual and experiential: it’s not that it happened, it’s that you were there. It’s site-specific, age-specific. Being a fan has to do with the surroundings, and to divorce the sounds from that context often feels distancing, disorienting, but mostly disappointing. I think of all the times I’ve had a friend over and pulled out records from high school or college, ready for the album to change someone’s life the way it changed mine. I watch my friend’s face, waiting eagerly for the “aha!” moment to arrive, only to realize that my affection for this intentionally off-key singing, saggy bass sound, and lyrics about bunnies isn’t quite the revelation it was fifteen years ago. “You had to be there” is not always a gloat or admonishment—often it’s an explanation for why something sounds utterly terrible. Yet there is much music that survives de- and recontextualization and that needs no experiential reference point. In this case, the role of the fan is still to be a participant, and to participate is to grant yourself permission to immerse, to willingly, gladly, efface and subsume yourself for the sake of the larger meaning but also to provide meaning. It’s symbiotic. My favorite kind of musical experience is to feel afterward that your heart is filled up and transformed, like it is pumping...

Opening the show was a group of young smart alecks who no one in the Pacific Northwest had ever heard of—they were called the Beastie Boys. We collectively booed them in anticipation of our idol. Then Madonna came out and I remember only two things: she did multiple outfit changes and I screamed the entire time. When my father and I got home, I couldn’t sleep. I kept going in my parents’ room to regale my mother with details about what songs Madonna played and how she looked. “She’s high,” my dad said to my mother, laughing. And I was. It was a moment I’ll never forget, a total elation that momentarily erased any outline of darkness. There was light everywhere I looked.

In the middle of the show, my fourteen-year-old friend turned to me and said, “I want to give George Michael a blow job.” I was confused. Wasn’t I there simply for the songs, to clap my hands and scream, “I want your sex,” without actually wanting your sex? But when my friend inserted desire, an actual longing and physical response, into what I thought had been an abstract idea, I had to think about the ways music really made me feel. In that moment, among thousands of people, I was light-headed and sweaty. I could not contain a smile; my body was moving in somewhat innocent shimmies but also in shudders, an act that certainly connotes a deeper, reflexive, ecstatic response. I turned away from my friend, nodding in agreement that, yes, the reaction to this music was embodied, was intense. But I also knew in that moment that I would much rather be the object of desire than dole it out from the sidelines, or perched on my knees.

Haha. The first of many cringes. 😖

Buying your first guitar in the suburbs does not entail anything that resembles the folklore. There is not an old bluesman who gifts you a worn-out, worn-in instrument, with a sweat-and-blood-stained fretboard, neck dusty from the rails, possessing magic but also a curse. Rather, you go with your mom or dad to a carpeted store that smells of antiseptic, where everything is shiny and glistening with newness, where other parents are renting saxophones or clarinets for their kids to play in the school jazz band, where some other kid is being publicly denied a drum kit on account of his parent’s sanity. The cheapness, the vagueness of brands, the generic aspect of it all screams “WAREHOUSE FOR THE NONCOMMITTAL.” I left with a Canadian-made solid state amp and a cherry red Epiphone copy of a Stratocaster. It was the first big purchase I made with my own money. I was fifteen.

I started making my way out of the suburbs and into Seattle on the weekends. Some of the shows we saw were at big venues, like the Moore or the Paramount Theatre: the Church, the Ramones, Sonic Youth, the Jesus and Mary Chain. But most of the time, we’d go to smaller places like the Party Hall or the OK Hotel, and we’d see Northwest-based bands like Treepeople, Kill Sybil, Hammerbox, Engine Kid, Aspirin Feast, Galleons Lap, Christ on a Crutch, and Positive Greed. Here I could get close to the players themselves. I could see how the drums worked with the guitars and bass, I could watch fingers move along the frets and feet stomp down on effects pedals, I saw the set lists taped to the floor, and sometimes I was close enough to see the amp or pickup settings. I observed the nature of the bands, their internal interactions, their relationships to one another, as much as I listened. It seems obvious, but it was the first time I realized that music was playable, not just performable—that it had a process and a seed, a beginning, middle, and end.

I suppose this form of witness could happen aurally; perhaps it’s as easy as hearing an Andy Gill riff or a Kim Gordon cadence and knowing intuitively how that all works. Then you form those sounds yourself, with your own hands and your own voice. Or maybe you see it on a video, in footage of a musician who finally translates and unlocks what you thought was a mystery. For me, however, I needed to be there—to see guitarists like Kim Warnick and Kurt Bloch of the Fastbacks or Doug Martsch of Treepeople play chords and leads, or Calvin Johnson and Heather Lewis from Beat Happening, in the wholly relatable attire of threadbare T-shirts and jean shorts, enact a weird nerd sexiness, strangely minimal, maximally perverse. I could watch them play songs that weren’t coming out of thin air or from behind a curtain. I needed to press myself up against small stages, risking crushed toes, bruised sides, and the unpredictable undulation of the pit, just so I could get a glimpse of who I wanted to be.

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

I was enamored with the past, the anachronistic. I didn’t feel like I was misplaced and in the wrong era, it’s just that my obsessions often tilted backward in time.

I didn’t believe the past world was better than my present-day life, but I connected to—aspired to—the glamour, the iconic images, which seemed unimpeachable and monolithic. There was a stillness about the past, a clarity, the way it had been somewhat defined and dissected, in the rearview mirror; it was there for the taking, for the mining. The old songs, the old movies, the black-and-white pictures created a visual and aural time machine.

In the back of the teen magazines I was reading, like Bop or 16, were addresses for all the film and TV stars I loved—not home addresses, of course, more like Ralph Macchio, c/o some studio or agency, or a PO box where you could ostensibly reach Ricky Schroder. So I started writing letters to them. But the plan bombed. I wasn’t getting letters back, not even a stamped signature on an 8 by 10. The venture soon became less about competing with my peers and more about my own sense of invisibility and need for validation. I was so desperate to be noticed that I gave up on Hollywood’s Brat Pack, as they were known, and started in on those I imagined to be less fatigued by fame: the stars of daytime soap operas. And those people wrote back. Genie Francis from General Hospital, Drake Hogestyn from Days of Our Lives, Doug Davidson from The Young and the Restless. Handwritten notes on postcards! Smiley faces! Autographs! The niceties were even more notable because what I had written to these actors were inappropriately long letters explaining how I didn’t get along with my mother, or about her illness, three or four pages, all of it maudlin.

Haha! 😖

One week I decided to perform a dance to the McCoys song “Hang On Sloopy.” Children, even less so than adults, often have little concept of genre or even of a song’s actual meaning; all songs are kids’ songs once they hear them. I liked “Hang On Sloopy” because it sounded like it was a tune about the dog “Snoopy.” And so I wanted to do a dance for Snoopy, and thus for everyone else in my fifth-grade music class. The dance I choreographed—and I use the term “choreography” loosely, the way you’d call adding milk to cereal “cooking”—was a combination of marching and punching, and probably resembled aerobics being done by a penguin. I was not graceful. I was coordinated, athletic, and fit, but very gawky. I wore an oversized raspberry-colored T-shirt, the sleeves too long to be called short and too short to be called long, more like flaps. My gangly arms, spiky-haired on account of a misunderstanding I had had about shaving and what body parts to apply a razor to, poked through the sleeves/tubes/flaps like prickly noodles. I tucked the shirt into cream-colored shorts with an elastic band. If not for a fresh knee scab, one might not have been able to tell where my pale legs began and the shorts ended. I can still recall Mrs. Pappas going up to a boy named Braden—whose mouth was only capable of one expression, a smirk—and saying, “Try not to laugh.” But I danced anyway. I hung on, like Sloopy.

This is amazing.

HTHAM was a series of role-playing mystery games with near-legitimate sounding names like “The Chicago Caper” and “Grapes of Frath.” I’ve played almost all of them. The game requires eight guests—there are four male roles and four female roles—all of whom are assigned characters, each a suspect in a classic tale of mystery and suspense. One of them—gasp!—is the murderer. As a surprise to absolutely no one, not a single male friend of mine ever wanted to participate, so four of my girlfriends always had to come to the party dressed in drag. Also unsurprisingly, I took the game very seriously. I sent out the invitation weeks before. I asked that my friends dress up, and costume suggestions were included in the invite. After all, this wasn’t a low-rent, fly-by-night, wear-what-you-want-and-add-a-name-tag situation; no, we had to embody our characters. If that meant you had to go to a costume shop to rent a flapper dress or hit up a thrift store for a vintage military uniform, so be it. Bowler hats, swords, briefcases, golf clubs, garter belts, pearls: yes to all of it.

This is perfect.

I didn’t slack with my hosting duties, either. I got out the special-occasion candle holders and polished the silver, onto which I placed pizza bites, piping hot from the microwave. I rinsed off the crystal champagne flutes—to my knowledge this was the only time they were ever used—and filled them with sparkling cider. For “Powar and Greede,” which took place during the Golden Age of Hollywood, I replaced our framed family photos with magazine pictures of movie stars from the era. Good-bye to the Brownsteins posing in front of the fireplace, trying to keep our dog Buffy in frame; hello, Lana Turner! And Elizabeth Taylor and James Stewart looked far more sophisticated than any gap-toothed, mosaic-vest-clad school photo my sister or I had ever taken. I even went so far as to autograph the celebrity photos, making the signatures out to the host of this particular game, the towering head of Powar Studios, W. Anton Powar.

I banished my father and sister to the TV room. I pressed play on the mixtape I’d made containing the decade-appropriate music and dimmed the lights. The guests arrived and we mingled in character for a while. We gave toasts, ate sliced cheddar atop buttery crackers, and admired one another’s outfits and accoutrements. We slow-danced, girls with mustaches swaying back and forth with girls in dresses. Then we sat down on Ethan Allen upholstered chairs and solved a murder. I suppose I had reached my limits of mere participation and pretend. I wasn’t really creating anything; I was facilitating, implementing, setting up situations that could be both fantastical and fantasy. It was ultimately silly; it was a game. What I loved was the role-playing, the gender ambiguity, the hints of sexiness and bravado, the moments that deviated from the rules and structure.

I was active in music, sports, and school plays, and I was elected vice president. (My campaign speech included lines like “Girls just wanna have fun, but they want to be politicians, too.” And, “We built this city on rock ’n’ roll, but we should build this school upon leadership.” When I finished talking, I played recorded snippets of all the songs I’d mentioned, in case anyone had the nerve or cluelessness to miss my clever puns and pop culture references.)

Together we attended summer camp: me, so I could shoot bows and arrows, sing Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” in a round, and make lanyards; her, so she could meet boys from other schools and gargle with someone else’s tongue. Eventually, I decided that holding hands with a guy in a turtleneck and shorts in the middle of the woods and dancing to Depeche Mode in the mess hall was more fun than canoeing or collecting clams on the beach, though it was always in the back of my mind that I hadn’t showered or been able to go to the bathroom for over five days. After camp, on a springtime backyard tent sleepover, Tammy arranged for a group of boys to sneak in. She instructed each of us, paired us up, and told us how to use our tongues when we kissed, which as a preteen is an unrelenting technique that requires one’s mouth to be open longer and wider than during a dental exam. Tammy zipped herself into a sleeping bag with a boy. The rest of us were sitting upright, not sure what to do horizontally and thus not wanting to commit to one person. We traded kisses in a humid tent that smelled of Drakkar Noir, cigarettes, and mint liqueur. Almost immediately I cut the lips of a kid named Ricky with my braces. I retired for the night; I felt inept at this carefree, outdoorsy, group sexiness, but I made an eager, loyal follower. I liked being part of a gang.

Despite all the sleepovers, or the sneaking out to drape toilet paper over someone’s house, or the weeks at summer camp together, Tammy, Jennifer, and I drifted apart once we entered junior high. But they were my cohorts during my happiest childhood years, the ones during which my mom was healthy and present enough to help me with my homework, not to mention that ridiculous election speech, and when it didn’t seem odd that my dad bought a motorcycle and drove off to Canyonlands on a vacation with a male buddy.

Catch that? Something is being set up here.

In a photo from several years later, the last family vacation we would ever take, my mother is standing on the beach in Hawaii. Bikini-clad, burnt red like she’d been dipped in cherry Kool-Aid, bags of white pus forming on her sternum, bones for days. Thin, brittle hair—it had been falling out for a while now. Hollow eyes and cheeks. She is somewhere between rotting and a fossil. Maybe she hoped that the smaller she got, the easier it would be to disappear. After consulting a doctor and nutritionist, and probably not at all on account of my singing or tormenting, my mother finally did admit—to us, to her friends, to herself—that she was ill. And when I was fourteen, she checked herself into an eating disorder unit at a hospital in Ballard.

Things are taking a turn here.

Meanwhile, at junior high school and among my peers, I was mildly enjoying the attention that having a mother in the hospital granted me. An illness in the family felt like the currency I needed to make myself more interesting. In home economics class we watched health movies that addressed the concerns of body dysmorphia, a TV special called Little Miss Perfect, and one about bulimia, Kate’s Secret, starring Meredith Baxter Birney. I felt as knowledgeable as the teacher and acted accordingly. I broke down the difference between bingeing and purging. I explained what ipecac was. And, yes, I said, with a hint of disbelief, bulimics sometimes hide bags of vomit under their beds. My mom was 88 pounds and anorexic, but apparently I had the market cornered on all eating disorders. I wasn’t the prettiest or the smartest one in school, I was desperate for a clear role among my friends, and now I had one.

Oh boy.

I also had a newfound status on the carpool circuit. I rode shotgun everywhere. While my friends were in the backseat discussing bra sizes and boys, I sat in the front and listened while their mothers opened up about a recent MS diagnosis, spousal drinking, and kitchen remodels. Trash compactors! Skylights! My own mother’s condition was a floodgate; apparently now I could understand something that these women’s daughters could not. We traded diseases and misfortunes, swapped them like baseball cards. I stared at the car radio knobs or the fading “5” of the gear shift, empathically nodding my head with the certainty of a scrubs-wearing career nurse on a lunch break. “It will be a long struggle, yes.” “You’ll get through it.”

Haha. Aw man. Yep. This is a thing. 😔

I felt the confidence of my younger self slipping away. But that didn’t matter to their moms. And I imagine it was they who kept me on invite lists to birthday parties, weekend ski trips, and after-school mall excursions. After all, who else among their kids’ friends was mature enough to understand the nuanced joys of a recently procured coffee-table book on the Kennedys or the acquisition of a delicious chocolate fondue recipe? Plus, I was their number-one source for scene-by-scene summaries of films they were too harried to see. I stood next to them in the kitchen while they unloaded the dishwasher, sipping lemonade, casually leaning against the counter or sitting atop it, retelling the plots of Clue and Romancing the Stone from title sequence to end credits. Meanwhile, my friend worked on homework or chatted on the phone in the other room. That was child’s play. I felt adult, important. When a friend’s father died of Lou Gehrig’s disease, her mother counted me among the first to be notified. I was getting ready for school when I received the call; I took the news like a pro. No tears. When was the funeral? Did they need anything? Later, in the school bathroom during lunch, I delivered the story to our other friends with the gravity and stoicism of a nightly-news anchor. Here were the facts. They wept streams of turquoise mascara while I stood near the paper towel dispenser and let them know that this was just how things were. This was life. Tough it out. But the reality...

I dug through boxes in the garage, salvaging old books and photos. I found letters my father and mother had written back and forth when they were engaged. He was working for the Washington state D.A. and she was still in college. My mother’s notes were sweet and longing; she expressed a yearning to be reunited, to be out of Illinois, to start a life. My father wrote considerate but formal responses, largely about his job and the Pacific Northwest.

Huh.

We never settled that debate, nor did I ever learn any solid information about my relatives or my family’s past. These convivial but otherwise circuitous talks are likely why my dad’s brother, Uncle Mike, often stepped up as the family storyteller and entertainer. When I was younger, my uncle was a thrice-married plastic surgeon (he’s now with his fourth wife, my aunt Denise) who had become one of the first and foremost sexual reassignment surgeons in America, specializing in top surgery for female-to-male transgender people. He was also—and still is—a life member of the NRA as well as a benefactor member, and he has voted conservative in every major election. He was passionate about all of it despite how strange this combination of traits might have appeared to others.

Yep. Strange how folks settle into their ways. This guy seems awesome.

One Thanksgiving my sister and cousin and I played catch with a silicone breast implant my uncle had lying around, while the movie Scarface played on the TV in the background. Another Thanksgiving, my grandmother sat at the dining table with taut skin and visible staples in her head from a recent facelift courtesy of one son, while the other son carved into the turkey with an electric knife. Our family liked to focus on activities instead of communication, so when we weren’t tossing around fake breasts or staging photos of relatives snorting flour off the counter to look like cocaine, we got the guns out. When my grandfather retired from medicine, he and my grandmother moved to Tucson, Arizona, which is where he developed an interest in collecting firearms and going to the shooting range. The grandkids loved to pose for pictures on the backyard brick patio, the bright orange Tucson sun and cactus-covered landscape behind us, our unloaded weapons pointed at the camera or, more likely, right at each other.

Hahahaaa. There is a picture of the latter activity. Like an old-timey stick up with dopey kids. Ahhh. What are they doing?!

Though my family didn’t talk much to one another, we did talk about one another. My dad’s parents would refer to their daughter-in-law as “her” or “she,” talking as if my mother were invisible even though she sat right there at the table. “Does she ever eat?” they would say to my father. “Does she know how skinny she looks?” I suppose we were better observers than communicators; we were all subjects to be worried over, complained about, even adored, but never quite people to be held or loved. There was an intellectual, almost absurd distance.

This is a good observation of some inter-family business.

Buffy, who followed us around the cul-de-sacs while we engaged in dirt clod fights with the neighbor kids, and trotted after us while we rode Big Wheels and eventually bikes. Buffy, who suffered the sting of the archaic idea that you could punish a dog by smacking it on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper and whose tail was run over by my mother as she backed the car out of the driveway. And Buffy, turned back into a stray in her own home on account of the rest of us surrendering to emptiness, drifting away from anything we could call familiar, her skin itching and inflamed, covered with sores and bites, like tattoos, like skywriting, screaming with redness, as if to say Please, please pet me! But we didn’t. When we decided to put her down, not because she was sick but because she was old and neglected—a remnant of a family we no longer recognized—my father asked my sister to do it. My sister was sixteen. She drove the dog to the vet one day after school by herself. No one else said good-bye.

This says a lot. No judgement; I don't like this one bit. I can think of several dogs -- across all the households I've spent time in -- who have this kind of life. 😶

The distance and detachment created a loneliness. We couldn’t name the source of it, but there was a blankness around which we gathered, one that grew colder and darker, and seeped into everything we did. I think for my mother it was most pronounced. I would lie in bed at night and hear her on the phone with my father, who was away for weeks on business in Europe or Asia or Australia. She was crying, scared, frustrated, lonely. Her anxiety made her brittle, easy to anger. But I didn’t feel sympathetic. I felt fear, neglect. I felt resentment.

Yep. I know these folks. You can be friends with them -- and they'll never be your friend. Too caught up in their own bullshit. 😩

She was retreating from the world, a slow-motion magic trick. Meanwhile, I was getting louder, angrier, wilder. I experimented with early forms of my own amplification—of self, of voice, of fury—while my mother’s volume was turned down lower and lower, only ever audible when she broadcast searing feedback and static; broken, tuneless sounds.

Hm. I know these folks.

The first time we visited my mother in the eating disorder unit of the hospital, the thing she thought to warn us about was not her own condition but that some of the other patients shopped at thrift stores and that we shouldn’t judge. Her upwardly mobile sense of middle-class decorum was still intact, despite the fact that her clothing drooped, almost slithered, off her body as if it were seeking elsewhere to perch, looking hardly different on her than it would on a wire hanger.

Yep. That stupid shit. Those folks are the worst. Even if this is someone's mother, that condescending garbage is the fucking worst. Those thrift shop clothed folks have just as much struggle if they are in the ward; but it is a struggle compounded with fewer resources to help navigate it. It can be humanizing to see someone "well off" in a crisis like this, but that feeling goes away quickly when a few days creates a bankruptcy situation where-as that silly monster will be there for months if she needs to be.

Breanna was a goth, a cool city kid with black hair, blunt bangs, and a knack for liquid eyeliner. She might have been the exact kind of girl I’d be friends with, or who I’d want to actually be, but right now she was my mom’s friend and confidante. While I had discussed my mom’s illness with my friends’ parents, I had never thought to talk about it with my own mother. And now there was a surrogate me. Breanna could share and understand the one thing about my mother that I never could, her disease. Later, after they were both released, they’d hang out and watch movies together, grown-up movies, like the film adaptation of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, that I had no interest in. I felt sophomoric and callow, but I was only fourteen.

This is amazing. Also, shout out Marilynne Robinson's 'Housekeeping'!!

It was hard not to stare at the shapes that surrounded us: a girl whose body was so emaciated that she was covered in a layer of fine hair, walking near another woman whose skin had stretched and stretched to contain some bottomless need, a self-hugging device, a house. The bulimics scared me the least so I focused my attention on them; they looked relatively healthy on the outside, as long as you didn’t look too closely at their vomit-stained teeth. Puberty was a confusing time to be around so many women whose bodies had become a sort of battleground. My own relationship to food was healthy. I was lean and athletic with a high metabolism. I could eat half a pizza with a side of breadsticks and wash it down with soda. I never dieted or denied myself food. But there were ways in which I started to disconnect from my body during this time; that’s where the sadness was, not just mine but these other women’s as well. I lodged myself firmly in my head. It was the only way to process all that I witnessed at the EDU, those halls of hungry ghosts. In my vast experience of visiting hospitals, I’ve noticed that part of the job of being a visitor is to make a show of looking healthy and able: running around, skipping, laughing really loud, having a big appetite, illustrating athletic prowess. Otherwise it’s as if a doctor or nurse or psychiatrist might look at you and decide that you have to check in and stay.

This. 😶😷😟

Thus, my sister and I played very competitive Ping-Pong in the common room for everyone to see, and to hear. LOOK. AT. US. NOTHING. WRONG. AT ALL. It was almost like we had dropped in to play a pickup game, and there just happened to be a bunch of sick people in the hospital.

Oh boy. This is perfect. I totaly get this.

Everyone read something from their journal about my mother. As I listened I sensed that within this configuration of fellow patients my mother was a known entity, she felt cared for and safe, seen. But I was outside the circle. My mother was a stranger to me. My sister was eager to be a part of whatever form my mother was taking on; she melted, molded herself to the dynamic. I didn’t want to engage with the illness; the anorexia was what was taking my mother away. I was surprised to find that I was such a focus of the narrative in the room, my mother’s desire to be closer to me, my feistiness and anger and alienation a piece of some puzzle I couldn’t see the edges of. Everyone was sobbing, including my father. It was the first time I’d seen him cry. It was like an irrigation system, each person a sprinkler, all watering the room with their tears. I felt drenched, soggy. I wanted everyone to be stronger, to embrace the stoicism I was perfecting. I judged. These weak women and their diseases. Eat already, or stop eating. Get it together! The fragility was suffocating, the dysmorphia so pronounced it made my head hurt. The two-dimensional anorexics and the three-dimensional claymation overeaters—no matter the size of their own sense of insubstantiality, each had taken on the form of her disease. It made me hungry and empty, too, but not for food. I was hungry for family, for strength, for wholeness. On the day my mom was released from the hospital, we stopped at a grocery sto...

This might be the best passage in the book.

When we got back to the house there was a sign above the garage door, “Welcome Home.” I’m certain that when my mother saw it she wanted to turn right around and go back to the EDU.

Hahaha. Yep. Probably.

The welcome turned out to be temporary anyhow. Within a year she left for good.

I’d accompany my father to the men’s area. Once my clothes were tugged back over my arms and legs, sticky from inadequate toweling off, dampness seeping through in the creases but warm nonetheless, I’d wait for my father to shower and dress. As I sat there I wasn’t looking anywhere in particular: at the rubber mats on the floor, the slats in the bench, at pale toes like gnarled gingerroots, calves with hair worn off in patches from dress socks, and knees everywhere, those scrunched-up, featureless faces. “Stop staring,” my dad would insist over and over again, sounding admonishing and embarrassed. I kept my head down. Later I realized that this reminder, this reprimand, was likely something my father was saying to himself more than to me. The shame of looking, of wanting to look.

And then there was that time we were pulling the car into the garage and from the backseat I yelled the word “penis” for no reason other than that I was eight years old and at that age it’s fun to call out the words for genitalia in a loud voice. One day I’d come home from kindergarten and repeated a term I’d heard on the playground: “mother fucker two-ball bitch.” Whether it was at my ignorant daring or at the perplexity of the phrase itself, I’m not sure, but my parents laughed. Here I was now going for the encore. But saying “penis” in front of my father, while he was trapped in a car with me, and thus trapped with that word, and whatever he pictured in his mind when he heard that word, whatever feelings he felt about that word, that thing, resulted in me being dragged upstairs and getting my mouth washed out with soap. Oh, we also received the International Male catalog, a men’s underwear catalog that is essentially a showcase for big European cocks. Only in retrospect can I find clues to my father’s gayness. Sometimes the dull detritus of our pasts become glaring strands once you realize they form a pattern, a lighted path to the present. I have to turn over and reimagine certain moments from my childhood and make them conform to a different narrative, a different outcome.

My father came out to me in the summer of 1998. I was headed to Seattle from Olympia to pick up a friend at the airport.

So here was my father, in this white apartment with textured walls and thick carpeting, and the scant amount of furniture and paintings he’d brought from Redmond, looking like interlopers, like imposters, neither here nor there. And we’re sitting in this living room and I have no idea who he is and he says, “So I guess I’m coming out to you.” He said it like that, in a sort of meta way, as if he were along for a ride that his new self was taking him on. Which was typical, like he was just a sidekick in his own life, a shadow, though I’m assuming it was more of a linguistic fumbling, not knowing exactly how to come out or what words to use. I was used to this sort of presentational mode at this point. What I heard was “Your mother is going into the hospital,” or “Your mother is moving out,” or “I have cancer,” and then again a few years later, “I have cancer.” I was used to being sat down and presented with life-altering information and taking it with expected nonchalance. This was me asking my friends’ parents about MS all over again. My role was to be factual and professional, like a reporter. Emotions were not part of the equation. So, tell me, Dad, how did you know? What my father explained next was basically the history of the Internet, at least in terms of how we use it for social media and networking. In fact, if it weren’t for the Internet, I don’t know if my father would have realized, or been able to acknowledge, that he was gay. I thought of Microsoft taking over...

This is a really good section.

The truth was a satellite, the picture getting clearer, circling and homing in, and then he was close enough to touch it. He met a male nurse named Russ, a friend, someone he could confide in. And there was a Northwest men’s running group. He was allowing the truth to get closer: it was the galaxy at first, then global, then the continent, then local, and finally the shape of him, settling in. I don’t know what that must have felt like, to realize you have a body at the age of fifty-five.

Hm. This is well done.

I remembered that right before his surgery he had taken a business trip to Texas. It seemed strange that his company wouldn’t send someone else, that he would insist on traveling so close to the surgery. I passed it off as stoicism, not wanting cancer to interrupt his life or schedule, or just denial. But that night in Seattle he told me that on an earlier trip he had met a couple in Houston, both lawyers, gay. The trip he took right before his surgery was to come out to them. In case he didn’t make it. To strangers. In Texas. He put down a small “x” on a map, a little scrawl of visibility. Then he came home, the doctors removed the cancer, and he had to live. More important, he wanted to.

We want our parents to be the norm from which we deviate. So when my dad came out, my instinct was that I needed to husband-up and get married. As if my family wasn’t freaky enough. Me: adrift. My sister: unmarried. My mom: ? And now my dad. Who would fly the flag of normality? My sister bore this burden more heavily than I did. But I immediately felt like I should be popping out kids within a few years of my dad realizing he was gay. Let our parents be anorexic and gay! That shit is for teenagers. My sister and I would be the adults. We would be conventional, conservative even. Guns, God, country, and my contrarian, reactionary self. (This phase lasted about ten minutes.)

When my father came out to his mom, my grandmother said, “You waited for your father to die, why couldn’t you have waited for me to die?”

😟😷

Jeremy was, to quote from a Bikini Kill song, the “star-bellied boy” of my high school. With an angelic voice, bright eyes pooling with color and sadness, and a preternatural gift for melody, he was our genius. We gathered around him on the bus, at lunchtime, and at parties like he was a messiah. He was floppy-haired, cute, and mysterious, shy and funny. But mostly his appeal was that he could sing. He could take all the records we were listening to (Sinéad O’Connor, U2, R.E.M.), deliver an up-close version, and bring them into our world. Jeremy became our conduit, taking these formidable albums and making them feel like ours, as if he were a live Walkman we toted around with us, pressing play whenever we wanted to be reminded of our little friend group, how with enough music, with our eyes closed, we could feel like everything and nothing all at once. In Jeremy’s bedroom he’d show me chords by way of playing “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance” by Sinéad O’Connor. I’d play along to the two-chord song while Jeremy sang. Then he’d get bored and start into R.E.M.’s “The One I Love” or U2’s “New Year’s Day,” both of which required some arpeggiation, and I’d fumble my way through them, often still on the intro as he played the last note. He was patient with me, encouraging. I’d go home and practice, feeling that even with just a few chords, everything was now in my grasp.

Hm. This is nice.

I drove around the suburbs with a Misfits sticker on my 1979 Honda CVCC, one that referenced their song “Bullet” about the JFK assassination. The sticker depicted an image of Kennedy getting shot in Dallas, blood pouring from his head—a totally offensive and disrespectful image that I nonetheless hoped would let people know that I considered myself a rebel.

These symbols intimated a belief system, a way of thinking not just about music but about school and friends and politics and society. It was also a way to separate yourself, to feel bold or try on boldness without yet possessing it. A little inkling of the nonconformist person you could be—you wanted to be—but weren’t quite ready to commit to.

Born Naked was still in its fledgling stage—a stage from which it would, in fact, never quite fully emerge—when my friend Natalie Cox told me that I should check out what was going on down in Olympia. She thought, rightly, that I might feel a musical kinship with some of the bands coming out of there: Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, and others. So, though it felt slightly traitorous up in Seattle, I started seeking out K Records singles and sending away for the cassettes these Olympia bands were releasing. I bought the 7-inch compilation There’s a Dyke in the Pit, which featured the Bikini Kill song “Suck My Left One.” I also purchased the first eponymous Kill Rock Stars compilation that had the Bikini Kill song “Feels Blind.” I remember being deeply struck by the lyrics: “Look what you have taught me / Your world has taught me nothing,” and “As a woman I was taught to always be hungry . . . We could eat just about anything / We might even eat your hate up like love.” To me, that perfectly summed up being a young girl. It was the first time someone put into words my sense of alienation, the feeling that all these institutions and stories we’d been taught to hold as sacred often had very little to do with my own lived experiences. I had already been listening to punk and had related to storytellers like Joe Strummer and Paul Weller, but hearing Bikini Kill was like having someone illuminate my world for the first time. Here was a narrative that I could place myse...

By the time I was playing in Sleater-Kinney, a lot of those early battles—for space, for respect, for recognition within the context of punk and indie music—had already been fought. We were ultimately recognized as a band, not just as a female band, and that is a luxury that cannot be overstated. A certain kind of exhaustion sets in from having to constantly explain and justify one’s existence or participation in an artistic or creative realm. What a privilege it must be to never have had to answer the question “How does it feel to be a woman playing music?” or “Why did you choose to be in an all-female band?” The people who get there early have to work the hardest. Bikini Kill weren’t the first—they had predecessors and influences—but they carved, tore, and clawed out a space in music for which I am very grateful.

I had started running away from home in high school—nothing dramatic, simply leaving for a few days with no intention to return. Sometimes I told my father, other times I did not. Late at night, I’d put the car in neutral and push it out of the garage with the engine off. Halfway down the driveway, I’d start the motor. My moods and my whereabouts went undetected for the most part, and I think in part that is why I didn’t want to be around—I felt unseen and thus sought out visibility elsewhere. I took comfort in the families of various friends. I was appreciative of the attention they gave me, the kindness. I spent Easter with one friend by default, as I had spent Saturday night at her house and woke up to the Sunday holiday. For my best friend Katie’s mother I did chores, I vacuumed and dusted. I loved how normal these lives felt so much that I was willing to perform tasks I would only do for my own father after much resistance. I watched movies and sat around dinner tables discussing art and politics, inserting myself into conversations and dynamics so that I could sense what it might feel like to be held accountable, to be required to show up. I practiced being a daughter, a sister, someone who had a role and traditions. I existed half in my own family and half in others. I was such a frequent resident at Katie’s house that her mom asked my father if I would switch to a private school senior year; she feared Katie wouldn’t go otherwise.

I compensated by being spongelike, impressionable, and available to whatever and whoever provided the most comfort, the most sense of belonging. I was learning two sets of skills simultaneously: adaptation—linguistic and aesthetic—in order to fit in, but also, how to survive on my own.