Given she’s enchanted by fairy tales, it’s only fitting that Neko Case’s memoir The Harder I Fight the More I Love You leaves its readers following breadcrumbs tossed in a dark forest. Sure, many of the typical milestones of the rock ’n’ roll book get visited—childhood record purchases (Best of Blondie, “We’ve Got the Beat” 45), the agony and ecstasy of the road (on bad sound systems: “Your voice sounds like it’s being piped through a thrift store whale’s carcass into a pirate’s wet diaper. Ahoy, bitch!”), the tease and sleaze of a failed major label signing. But don’t come to the book expecting an album blow-by-blow or much dirt or gossip. This is really a book about art—how and why we make it and need it. That involves digging, a care to ever reconsider the past, a drive to outrun whatever hunts and haunts us, from the Green River Killer to familial trauma. And a hope to be fiercely feminist—at one point she rightfully laments, “How do women have any space left inside us with all the shit we swallow?”
Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.
Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on February 5, 2025.
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