Female rockers releasing memoirs
SLEATER-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein last week released further details about a memoir she’s set to publish in October. Also coming up is a second autobiographical book from punk icon Patti Smith and, possibly, a long-awaited memoir from Courtney Love.
The upcoming books join a few other recent and highly successful autobiographies from female rockers: Patti Smith’s “Just Kids,” which chronicled her relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe and earned a National Book Award; Kim Gordon’s “Girl in a Band,” about her time with Sonic Youth; and Amanda Palmer’s “The Art of Asking,” covering the scope of her musical career.
Carrie Brownstein: “Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl”
In her memoir, out Oct 27, the Sleater-Kinney guitarist covers her turbulent family life in the Pacific Northwest, the rise of Sleater-Kinney in the feminist punk-rock movement of the 1990s, and how her experiences in that subculture inspired some of the satire behind “Portlandia,” the TV series she co-created. Patti Smith: “Just Kids” After her highly successful autobiographical book “Just Kids,” the singer-songwriter is releasing “M Train”, which is described as a journeys through 18 “stations” starting in a Greenwich Village café. This journey into the mind of the artist goes on to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico, the graves of Plath and Rimbaud and other spots that have inspired her. Releases Oct 6.
Courtney Love: “Girl With the Most Cake”
Will it or won’t it be published? This autobiography by the Hole frontwoman and ex-wife of Kurt Cobain has been in the works since 2013 but plagued with problems along the way. In April 2014, she told The Daily Telegraph she had rejected a ghostwritten manuscript. However, in a piece that ran last July in XOJane marking the musician’s 50th birthday, she said the book was “coming soon from HarperCollins, and no, it won’t be a kiss and tell.” — Relaxnews