Rat Girl: A Memoir

by Kristin Hersh

Overview

"One of the 25 Greatest Rock Memoirs of All Time” —Rolling Stone Magazine (#8)

“Sensitive and emotionally raw… it’s also wildly funny”—The New York Times Book Review

A powerfully original memoir of pregnancy and mental illness by the legendary founder of the seminal rock band Throwing Muses, 'a magnificently charged union of Sylvia Plath and Patti Smith'  - The Guardian

Kristin Hersh was a preternaturally bright teenager, starting college at fifteen and with her band, Throwing Muses, playing rock clubs she was too young to frequent. By the age of seventeen she was living in her car, unable to sleep for the torment of strange songs swimming around her head - the songs for which she is now known. But just as her band was taking off, Hersh was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia.

Rat Girl chronicles the unraveling of a young woman's personality, culminating in a suicide attempt; and then her arduous yet inspiring recovery, her unplanned pregnancy at the age of 19, and the birth of her first son. Playful, vivid, and wonderfully warm, this is a visceral and brave memoir by a truly original performer, told in a truly original voice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143117391
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/31/2010
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Kristin Hersh: Influential songwriter, mulit-instrumentalist, and author she is the leader of the indie rock band Throwing Muses and 50 Foot Wave. She records solo as well.  Over the last three decades, Hersh has released more than 20 records which have sold more than one million copies worldwide. Her books include Rat Girl, Don't Suck, Don't Die and Seeing Sideways.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Ultra-vivid writing and intense honesty is what you'd expect from Kristin Hersh, one of America's finest songwriters. But Rat Girl is also a startlingly funny and touching memoir of her mid-Eighties moment as the bi- polar, pregnant, intermittently homeless frontwoman of a rising indie-rock band. It's a gripping journey into mental chaos and out the other side.” – Simon Reynolds, author of Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84

Editorial Reviews

One of the 25 Greatest Rock Memoirs of All Time — Rolling Stone(#8)


“Sensitive and emotionally raw… it is also wildly funny.” – Rob Sheffield, New York Times Book Review

"Compelling...Hersh describes eloquently, beautifully and with no small amount of poetry the pain and alienation of losing one's mind." — The Times (London)

“Funny, freaky, fidgety, Hersh's memoir is the book a fan didn't dare hope for: a beacon in a dark field, illuminating the mysterious and the mundane. Beautifully, honestly, written and as close as you will ever get to being in a Throwing Muses song.” – Wesley Stace, author of Misfortune and By George


“Her narrative voice is warm, friendly and surprisingly funny. Deep down it's a story about messed-up kids finding one other, starting a band, and accidentally scrounging up an audience of similarly messed-up kids. It belongs on the shelf next to Michael Azerrad's classic Our Band Could Be Your Life.” – Rolling Stone

 

“Ultra-vivid writing and intense honesty is what you'd expect from Kristin Hersh, one of America's finest songwriters. But Rat Girl is also a startlingly funny and touching memoir of her mid-Eighties moment as the bi- polar, pregnant, intermittently homeless frontwoman of a rising indie-rock band. It's a gripping journey into mental chaos and out the other side.” – Simon Reynolds, author of Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84

“Rat Girl is the story of a wide-eyed soul coming to maturity in the ridiculous cacophony of modern life. Although it is supposedly about what we call, for lack of a better term, 'manic depression,' it has nearly no interest in such grim diagnostic thinking. It is instead awestruck - by music, feeling, perception, wild animals, mystery, dreams, 'the gorgeous and terrible things that live in your house.' It is an original beauty.” – Mary Gaitskill, author of Veronica and Don't Cry

From the Publisher

Funny, quirky coming-of-age story from a unique musical artist.

For her first work of nonfiction, Hersh (Toby Snax, 2007), best known as founder and principal songwriter of art-rock band Throwing Muses, revisited the journal she kept from the winter of 1985 through the spring of 1986, when her band made the critical decision to leave provincial Rhode Island and join Boston's thriving music scene. It was a monumental year for Hersh personally, as well. At 18, she was a bit of an oddball. Hit by a car some years before, she started hearing—and seeing—music that she felt compelled to get out of her head and into the world. Other eccentricities may have preceded the accident: her dislike of being indoors, her refusal to wear glasses or lenses during shows so as not to make eye contact with her audiences, her need to swim in any available pool, with or without the permission of the owner. In the summer of 1985, Hersh suffered a frightening breakdown and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Refreshingly, though the book is not the kind of memoir that lingers in angst, perhaps because Hersh prefers to keep her delightfully childlike focus outward. Drawn to other outsiders, she had become close friends with one of her college-professor father's favorite students, the former movie star Betty Hutton, who, then in her 60s, had become a devout Catholic and had nominally renounced her Hollywood past. One of the narrative's many charms is Hersh's apparently effortless, razor-sharp portraiture of the diverse characters in her life: Hutton; her former-hippie parents; her bandmates; a parade of music journalists, an Indian psychiatrist (Dr. Seven Syllables, she names him) who helped her navigate her illness without medication upon learning she was pregnant by an unnamed lover; the British record-label owner and his producer who took great pains to get her genius on tape.

A thoroughly engrossing work by an original voice—hopefully the first of many.

Kirkus Reviews

…fascinating…[Hersh] is a fine writer with an eye for the detail, and her memoir combines a child's spontaneity with a mature artist's understanding.
—The Washington Post

Juliet Wittman

Rat Girl is sensitive and emotionally raw, which figures; it's also wildly funny, which didn't figure at all, since the Muses were never big on humor…Hersh's memories of her long-suffering bandmates help make Rat Girl an uncommonly touching punk memoir…Like Michael Azerrad's classic Our Band Could Be Your Life, Rat Girl reveals the inspiring camaraderie at the heart of '80s indie rock.
—The New York Times

Rob Sheffield