Eye of the storm Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon reflects on love, loss and a life of creativity. By

misjudgement is an accomplishment that few of her peers can match. Such is Gordon’s aura of serenity that it would have been no surprise had her memoir passed over the recent break-up of her marriage to the band’s co-founder Thurston Moore. That this is not the case is clear on page one, when Moore slaps the shoulder of the band’s bass player as they head onstage for their final gig at a rain-lashed South American festival. “I found that gesture so phoney, so childish, such a fantasy,” Gordon notes, revealing that in the middle of a marriage break-up “little things you never noticed before practically make your brain split open”. She describes turning away from the huge crowd in the hope of hiding her distress, only to remember that her every move and facial expression was being broadcast to the throng of Brazilian revellers from one of two 40ft video screens. After such a blistering opening, Girl in a Band could all too easily Sonic boom: Kim Gordon survived – and thrived – in a male-dominated world have lost momentum in the inevitable flashback to childhood and adolescence, or tumbled down a rabbit hole of score-settling and self-justification. Happily, it does neither. Although this is often a sad book, especially in its reflections on the deaths of close friends such as Bruce Berry (Neil Young’s muse) and Kurt Cobain, it is also an entertaining one, with pithy character judgments and counterculture gossip wrapped up in a series of meditations on creativity. Gordon identifies the starting point for her progression from artworld neophyte to rock pin-up and back again as a dysfunctional relationship with her charismatic older brother, Keller. The latter’s severe mental illness was not properly diagnosed until long after his malevolent interventions – arranging fights between his teenage sister and the boys down the street for himself to gamble on – had left their mark. “The image a lot of people have of me as detached, impassive or remote,” Gordon explains, “is a persona that comes from years of being teased for every feeling I ever expressed.” But she doesn’t hold back in these pages, administering verbal justice to a range of hapless defendants, from out-of-favour contemporaries such as the Smashing Pumpkins lead singer Billy Corgan (“whom nobody liked because he was such a cry-baby”) to the relative newcomer Lana Del Rey, “who doesn’t even know what feminism is”. Among those who come off better is Madonna during her Desperately Seeking Susan days: “You could feel how happy she was inhabiting that body.” The overall tone of Girl in a Band is bittersweet, rather than bitter. The reader’s awareness that Gordon’s resources of rapture are finite makes her a more sympathetic character as a narrator than wedded bliss would have allowed. It also lends an elegiac kick to her recollections of the lost New York netherworld of the late Seventies and early Eighties. “Where did all the Chock Full o’Nuts [a chain of New York coffee shops] go?” she wonders, “or the Blarney Stone bars with the corned beef and cabbage buffet-table lunch deals?” The question of whether Sonic Youth were mere witnesses to this change, or actual agents of it, is one for another book.