Listen to this book!
by Lucy S
Length 7 hrs and 4 mins
Author: Carrie Brownstein
Narrator:Carrie Brownstein
Carrie Brownstein, musician (Sleater-Kinney), actress (Portlandia, Transparent) and author, does an excellent job of narrating her new book, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl. What could be read as flat on the page, in Brownstein’s singular voice becomes anecdotic and reflective. Though her telling, we get a sense of Brownstein’s self-deprecating humor and sharp wit. I found myself laughing at stories of her early performances for family and friends. Her nuanced narrative voice well conveys the angst and misdirection she felt in her early 20s starting out on the music scene in Olympia, Washington and the Pacific Northwest. She provides an unflinchingly honest look at herself both as a child and an adult. Brownstein speaks with candor about her mother’s eating disorder and hospitalization for such and her father’s coming out as a gay man. In later chapters she doesn’t shy away from the not-so-glamorous facets of life on the road as part of her band, Sleater-Kinney. She speaks of the intensity of her relationship with bandmate Corin Tucker, the pain of their break-up, of being publicly outed in a magazine article, and of the difficulty of navigating a break-up while remaining in a band with her ex. Her accomplished writing is filled with anecdotes that run the full gamut of her emotional landscape, yet she stays away from sentimentality.
Her focus on music and her role in it are the meat of most of this book. This means that we get a dissection of many of Sleater-Kinney’s songs and albums, from their creation to performance. For Sleater-Kinney fans, this book is a must. A review in The Guardian says of Brownstein’s book that “...it delivers its goods in what I can only describe as a compellingly depressive register, which sounds like an insult but isn’t. By keeping her affect flat, Brownstein is able to avoid melodrama, a good thing because there are elements of her life story she could have frothed up into soap...Brownstein’s way of telling those stories is from a rather intellectualized, even aestheticized, distance.” I agree, as listening to a recording of this book, as read by Brownstein, furnished me with an entirely different experience than reading it on the page. I highly recommend checking out the audio version of this book.
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