Rat Girl
A Memoir
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
"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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this rambling and unremarkable journal of the year 1985 1986 in the life of an 18-year-old musician in Providence, R.I., Hersh tells of her coping with the sensory-overload of manic-depression and pregnancy. The daughter of divorced hippie intellectuals, raised in Georgia, Hersh crashed in a messy, rat-infested house of painters, attended classes at a Catholic college where her philosophy professor father (called Dude) taught, and fronted the rock band Throwing Muses. Young Hersh was shy and a little too squeaky clean for some of the grungy venues the band played; her unlikely best friend at school was the older movie star Betty Hutton, "a warm heart in a cold world," who had returned to school for a master's degree, and often drew on her famous life story for cautionary lessons. Hersh began having perception difficulties on stage, first because she refused to wear her glasses; she then started having visions that involved snakes and colorful sounds. These manic episodes were finally diagnosed by mental health professionals as evidence of bipolar disorder. On lithium, Hersh grew shaky and bloated; her band pushed to move to Boston, with hopes of recording. Hersh unexpectedly became pregnant and had to face grownup concerns way before she was ready, which she chronicles in flat, sophomoric prose.
