BOOK 177: GIRL IN A BAND: A MEMOIR: KIM GORDON

Kim Gordon, founding member of Sonic Youth, fashion icon, and role model for a generation of women, now tells her story—a memoir of life as an artist, of music, marriage, motherhood, independence, and as one of the first women of rock and roll, written with the lyricism and haunting beauty of Patti Smith's Just Kids.

Often described as aloof, Kim Gordon opens up as never before in Girl in a Band. Telling the story of her family, growing up in California in the '60s and '70s, her life in visual art, her move to New York City, the men in her life, her marriage, her relationship with her daughter, her music, and her band, Girl in a Band is a rich and beautifully written memoir.

Gordon takes us back to the lost New York of the 1980s and '90s that gave rise to Sonic Youth, and the Alternative revolution in popular music. The band helped build a vocabulary of music—paving the way for Nirvana, Hole, Smashing Pumpkins and many other acts. But at its core, Girl in a Band examines the route from girl to woman in uncharted territory, music, art career, what partnership means—and what happens when that identity dissolves.

Evocative and edgy, filled with the sights and sounds of a changing world and a transformative life, Girl in a Band is the fascinating chronicle of a remarkable journey and an extraordinary artist.

MY VERDICT: I loved reading this book.  I was not reading as a fan of Sonic Youth (I don’t dislike them, I’ve just never really listened to their music), but rather as someone who was interested in what it was like to be a girl in a band and the scene in New York in the 1980s onwards.

I was not disappointed, there were so many people that Kim Gordon got to hang out with that I would love to meet, people from the art world and the world of the Punk Rock, No Wave and Grunge scenes. She got to tour with Nirvana and REM, she lived with Cindy Sherman, made a music video with Spike Jonze and a skateboarding Jason Lee and designed clothes with Sophia Coppola.

It’s safe to say, I envy her life.

Kim is very open and honest, she doesn’t hold back, but also this isn’t a sensationalist piece. She is clear on whom she likes and doesn’t like and gives us reasons rather than talking in gossipy tones. 

And this book’s greatest legacy, one that makes me hold certain texts in even higher esteem, it made me want to be more creative, a big bonus for any great book.

BOOK 170: UNABROW: MISADVENTURES OF A LATE BLOOMER: UNA LAMARCHE

As a girl, Una LaMarche was as smart as she was awkward. She was blessed with a precocious intellect, a love of all things pop culture, and eyebrows bushier than Frida Kahlo’s. Adversity made her stronger...and funnier. In Unabrow, Una shares the cringe-inducing lessons she’s learned from a life as a late bloomer, including the seven deadly sins of DIY bangs, how not to make your own jorts, and how to handle pregnancy, plucking, and the rites of passage during which your own body is your worst frenemy.

Una LaMarche is the author of two young adult novels, FIVE SUMMERS and LIKE NO OTHER, and UNABROW: MISADVENTURES OF A LATE BLOOMER, a collection of humor essays based on some of her more questionable life choices. She is also a contributing writer for The New York Observer and The Huffington Post, and blogs at The Sassy Curmudgeon. Una lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son. You can follow her on Twitter @sassycurmudgeon.

REVIEW: I have to say I was a little disappointed by this book, not because it was terrible, because it was not, but because I had such high expectations of it.

I was expecting a truly humiliating journey through the childhood and teen years of an awkward female, who I believed to be much like myself. What I wasn’t expecting, and quite frankly got bored of, were the many details of childbirth and parenting.  Although Una (I feel like we’re on first name terms now, as I know so much about her, like the size of her stretched vagina and drop crotch pants) tells these stories with humour and wit, I found myself turning off and feeling somewhat conned. 

If you read the marketing material above you can see where I got the impression that this was a coming of age memoir, I think if it mentioned that after a couple of chapters she would be chatting about squeezing a person about of herself, I might not have been so excited about reading it.

I didn’t buy this book but was gifted it after I put it on my Amazon wish list, I wanted to read it because, as a late bloomer myself, I wanted to compare and laugh at someone else’s bad fashion choices, questionable crushes and dread of psychical education. All these things were in there but in my opinion, not enough to fill a book.

It does give me a little hope that one day I could compile my Christmas lists and diaries into a ‘memoir’ but I know that if a somewhat talented writer like Una LaMarche couldn’t make it work, then I couldn’t either. So in a way it killed my dreams, but I’ve never done anything with my life worth writing about and in a way I feel like Una’s embarrassing stories are not quite humiliating enough and are a bit too everyday to be as entertaining as they could have been.

I think a reviewer on Goodreads summed it up best when they said that the best thing about the book was the cover. Although this isn’t strictly true, it is a fantastic cover that promises so much more than the book delivered.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/jarrylee/the-most-beautiful-book-covers-of-2016?utm_term=.ugJQPBYWN#.eeP9xlwD8

BOOK 118: NAKED: DAVID SEDARIS

Naked, published in 1997, is a collection of essays by American humorist David Sedaris. The book details Sedaris’ life, from his unusual upbringing in the suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina, to his booze-and-drug-ridden college years, to his Kerouacian wandering as a young adult. The book became a best-seller and was acclaimed for its wit, dark humor and irreverent tackling of tragic events, including the death of Sedaris’ mother. Prior to publication, several of the essays were read by the author on the Public Radio International program This American Life.

Naked won the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Non-Fiction from Publishing Triangle in 1998.

Book 85: Grace: A Memoir: Grace Coddington

Beautiful. Willful. Charming. Blunt. Grace Coddington’s extraordinary talent and fierce dedication to her work as creative director of Vogue have made her an international icon. Known through much of her career only to those behind the scenes, she might have remained fashion’s best-kept secret were it not for The September Issue, the acclaimed 2009 documentary that turned publicity-averse Grace into a sudden, reluctant celebrity. Grace’s palpable engagement with her work brought a rare insight into the passion that produces many of the magazine’s most memorable shoots.