Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl: The Confessions of Carrie Brownstein
Carrie Brownstein may be the most badass chick on the block, but her new book reveals that she’s also one of us
For Gen Xers like me, Carrie Brownstein is first and foremost the high-kicking, larger-than-life guitarist and co-vocalist of Sleater-Kinney, an overtly feminist band that roared out of the Pacific Northwest in the late 90s like a sonic tidal wave, leaving a ruined swath of mainstream stereotypes about “women in music” in their wake. But Brownstein wasn’t just a member of what critic Greil Marcus dubbed “America’s greatest rock band;” the smashing success of Brownstein’s award-winning sketch comedy show Portlandia has revealed her to be a fantastic comic, actor, writer, and satirist as well. Is there anything this woman can’t do and do brilliantly?
In the name of privacy, Brownstein could have written her memoir in a way that sustained that supergirl image. She could have cast herself as an Athena-like, SG-wielding goddess who sprang fully formed from the head of Riot Grrl. Instead, she gifts us with something far more exposing, naked, and vulnerable. Carrie Brownstein may be the most badass chick on the block, but Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl reveals that she’s also one of us: awkward, insecure, left out, secretly sad, scarred from childhood, starved for affirmation from the in-crowd, searching for that elusive Golden Ticket that will open the door to acceptance and make her whole.
We can add prose writing to Brownstein’s already lengthy list of accomplishments: she writes like a punk rock Brontë sister, with the gloomy mists of Washington and Oregon her tragi-romantic backdrop instead of the bleak Yorkshire moors. “My story starts with me as a fan,” she says in Chapter One, “And to be a fan is to know that loving trumps being beloved.” She describes experiencing the music of Riot Grrl queens Heavens to Betsy: “The beautiful parts were edged in disgrace and disgust… Any sadness was also defiance: it was not the wail of mourning but of murder. And there was so much I wanted to destroy.” Her writing is rich with poetic turns of phrase, and she offers keen observations about everything from performing and identity to intensely defended subcultures and the sacrifices an artistic life demands.
Brownstein is also hilarious, which will come as no surprise to Portlandia fans: she describes the first band she ever played live with as “the musical version of a stick figure,” and (because four of the five members were couples) “like Fleetwood Mac without the sex or drugs or hair or songs.” On band photo shoots: “Sometimes I think the best you can ever feel in a photo shoot is like a sexy clown.” On her teenage fantasy of Olympia, Washington: “It was mythical. It was Paris or Berlin in the 20s, it was the Bloomsbury group, it was the cradle of civilization.” On groupies: “We never had groupies. Writing that sad little sentence, I wish we had…” On Heavens to Betsy: “They were like really loud librarians.”
Like so many artists, much of Brownstein’s creative seeking was fueled by a painful childhood: in her case, a mother crippled by severe anorexia who left when Brownstein was 14, and a shut-down father who remained closeted into his mid-50s. She’s quick to acknowledge the positives and privileges of her upbringing: “Like a lot of middle-class kids, I needed my punk rock and rebellion underwritten by my parents,” she notes wryly. But the desolation and abandonment she experienced as her family disintegrated will wrench the reader’s heart as it did hers, and helps explain why she was so driven to find belonging in a musical movement and in a band.
At 18, Brownstein moves from the Seattle suburbs to Olympia, Washington, the epicenter of Riot Grrl, the town she’s certain will offer her salvation, and prowls the gloomy streets, immersing herself in indie punk culture. She auditions for 7 Year Bitch and is heartbroken when they reject her. She sees Mary Lou Lord, Elliott Smith, Huggy Bear, and Nirvana perform in dirty basements. She has clumsy proto-sexual experiences (including one that involves covering friend Miranda July’s neck in hickeys). She starts her first touring band (Excuse 17) and plays New York’s CBGB before she’s old enough to legally drink.
Sleater-Kinney fans will salivate over the fascinating details of how the band coalesced: how she and Corin Tucker met, how they adjusted their guitar playing to fill the space where a bass player would be, how they tuned their guitars down to C# to create a darker, heavier sound, how they recorded Call The Doctor in five days flat (Brownstein calls the record “a junkyard come to life.”) We get to see “the endless, slovenly slumber party” otherwise known as touring with a rock band (“We were just as much movers as we were musicians”) as Sleater-Kinney goes on the road with the Gossip, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the White Stripes, and the Black Keys. Amazing anecdotes abound, and as the stakes grow higher and the adventures get wilder, the tensions between Brownstein and her bandmates build as well.
Kim Gordon wrote that “So many times while reading this book I screamed ‘Yes!’ inside,” and readers will find themselves doing the same. At one point while touring with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Sleater-Kinney gets mistaken by security for groupies and are temporarily barred from their own dressing room. When they take the stage that night, lead singer/guitarist Corin Tucker screams “We’re not here to fuck the band, we are the band!” (Cue fist-pumping and yelling from me as I read alone in my living room.) This book is rife with moments of triumph like that. Brownstein dedicates Hunger to her bandmates, but it feels silently dedicated to musicians, women, queers, outsiders, artists, idealists, and subversives of all stripes. Writing this riveting memoir had to be cathartic for Brownstein, but her readers will close the book feeling purged and cleansed as well.
Jennifer Boeder is a writer, editor, yoga teacher, and musician living in Chicago.
