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.

callow;

Everyone who plays music needs to have a moment that ignites and inspires them, calls them into the world of sound and urges them to make it.

epistolary

maudlin.

banal!—I

extemporized

accoutrements.

convivial

circuitous

enervated,

blitheness

jocose.

taciturn—it

reticence

trysts

It’s hard to express how profound it is to have your experience broadcast back to you for the first time, how shocking it feels to be acknowledged, as if your own sense of realness had only existed before as a concept. I felt like I could step inside something; it was a revelation.

desultory

ersatz

flummoxed

you witness the playing or the singing and you know that just being up there, engaged in a momentary artifice, a heightening of self, is sometimes enough to get by, to feel less worn down by, less withered by life. Sometimes it’s everything.

gumption

languid,

treacly

anathema.

pedagogy

polemical

tantamount

insularity.

matrifocal

dour

insouciant.

largesse

It was an extreme way to start, but I learned later on how hard it can become to unsettle yourself, to trip yourself up, and I think that’s a good place to write from. It’s important to undermine yourself and create a level of difficulty so the work doesn’t come too easily. The more comfortable you get, the more money you earn, the more successful you are, the harder it is to create situations where you have to prove yourself and make yourself not just want it, but need it. The stakes should always feel high.

gumption

tantamount,

bawdy.

guileless

Mostly, I didn’t want to be a girl with a guitar. “Girl” felt like an identifier that viewers, especially male ones, saw as a territory upon which an electric guitar was a tourist, an interloper. I wanted the guitar to be an appendage—an extension even—of a body that was made more powerful by my yielding of it.

aggrandizing—it

It was more of a document than an album. A time stamp.

diffidence.

fastidious

fomented

obsequious

frivolous.

tendentious

capricious,

mercurial,

galvanic