The Bikini Kill singer mined decades of trauma and joy to write her new memoir.
Shes grateful she made it to the other side.
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Her prose cuts and shimmers, particularly when shes describing the music she made from the inside out.
Singing has never stopped being the tiny tornado I most want to be in, she writes.
Today Hannas cultural impact is overwhelming.
What do you remember about those interviews?A lot, actually.
Weekly, and it was about riot grrrl.
A friend of a friend asked me.
The writer was really fun to talk to.
[Laughs]
The second one was a doozy.
Thisll get people to the shows.
I didnt want to do it because by then the way people were writing about us was prettyhorrible.
Anyway, it was at a restaurant two doors down from the club I was stripping at.
And questions about sexual assault that were really inappropriate.
Like, Have you been sexually assaulted?
Can you tell me in detail?
It was every artists horror story of the worst questions, and they were all directed at me.
Thats not how I remember it.
For me, it was a mental-health protective thing.
It was like,I literally cannot mentally keep going through this.
I just threw it out as an idea.
I didnt make a proclamation.
Some people went with it and some people didnt.
I didnt really give a shit what people did.
I just felt like the media is all bullshit anyway.
A lot of times when people write about you, theyre really writing about themselves.
I just take it with a grain of salt.
Ive read so many things about myself or people I know that are completely false.
I got diagnosed with C-PTSD while I was working on it.
So I took time off.
I was figuring out how to process this mental diagnosis.
I would get bummed out like,I dont wanna finish it.
Hayley Williams from Paramoretalkedabout being sexually harassed on the Warped Tour.
And so that kind of kept me going.
And I dont really wanna talk about riot grrrl anymore, honestly.
Im bored of that conversation and I dont want it to be the only thing Im known for.
There is something very practical about being like,Im gonna tell this one fucking time.
It was a huge therapeutic cleanse for me.
Were you referring back to diaries or interviewing other people?I didnt use journals at all.
In the very beginning, I tried.
I pulled out all my journals, boxes and boxes, and brought them to my office.
I am planning a large bonfire for my journals at some point.
A lot of stuff came back to me as I was writing.
There were things that were these really visceral memories, and part of it was super joyous.
The book is this miraculous balance of humor and trauma.
I see it everywhere.
I love the comedian Hari Kondabolu.
Im a big fan of lemons to lemonade.
She has a wicked fucking sense of humor, and that really made her a person.
If you might make people laugh, youre an active agent in your own life.
We always had weird private jokes with each other.
That was most of our communication.
But I saw her as this larger-than-life hilarious-ass person.
Having a woman like that in my life made me feel like I could be larger than life.
I was always treated like I was too much.
It led me to feel like language was useless and nobody understood anything I said.
Thats lasted my whole life.
It was obvious what I was saying.
I had pictures behind me and I was being very clear.
But I always have this fear of being misunderstood.
Thats whereGirls to the Frontcame from.
That was then, now is different.
My personal experiences with language are very heavy to me.
My relationship with language is as important as my relationship with my husband.
We were operating within a scene that wasnt necessarily super welcoming to feminist content.
Boys in the scene treated any lyric I wrote as if it was an arrow directed at them.
When actually it had nothing to fuckin do with them at all.
But you know, if the shoe fits.
But I wasnt really thinking about men that much at all when I was writing.
I was writing for other women.
Double Dare Ya definitely felt like a breakthrough.
It felt super cringe, but it also felt really powerful.
I wrote that after this adult man hit on me when I was like 16.
He was a scientist and a friend of an adult in my life.
We were drinking, which should have been a red flag.
Then he hit on me.
I was lucky he didnt pursue it when I said no, but I felt really demoralized and sad.
I thought he really liked me as an intellectual.
I wrote poetry all the time since I was really young.
It was just the first verse of the song that came from that poem.
I was always thinking more psychologically, like,How does the world affect our personal psychology?
I always turned around to look back out, but it was a different way of processing the world.
I was universalizing more, writing from this place of, Hey, girlfriend!
or This is for all girls!
The book includes so many incredible details about Bikini Kill and Nirvanas friendship.
You write about your and Kurts joint mission as feminist vigilantes defacing a fake abortion clinic.
If I heard they were playing, I wanted to be there.
But we were in the scene at the same time.
Everybody would put together bands and play at parties I thinkBillyand Tobi and Kurt were in a band.
I loved learning more about your 1998 solo album, released as Julie Ruin.
Thescrunchie-cladphilosopheris an important addition to the lexicon of girl genius.
What informed that song?In the 90s, there was this whole dont sell out thing.
When I started writing on my own, I let go and did whatever the fuck I wanted.
Fuck all you fuckers.
[Laughs] So I was doing something that felt absolutely off-limits, which was writing, Im great.
People made fun of my voice in articles.
Women academics would be like, Oh my God, you read?
[Laughs] That does not mean Im stupid.
To speak back to that felt super powerful.
How did Joan influence the song itself?I didnt formally know her yet.
She could have just not done that; she was pretty busy.
She also totally reminds me of my older sister.
For all the issues I may have with my sister, shes definitely a fighter.
Joan is the loveliest person in the world, but she doesnt take fuckin shit.
About the writing of Rebel Girl, you wrote, I realized this song was already written.
I just had to reach up and grab the lyrics.
Those moments and those people were in the room at that moment and wrote the song.
I was a vessel for it.
The songwriting lesson is I stepped out of the way of the song.
I didnt overthink it.
I let myself open my mouth and see what happened.
I trusted my band not to laugh at me.
Whats another song you liked immediately after writing it?I really liked Hot Topic.
I remember writing that in a basement on Mott Street in New York.
We had gotten the instrumentation together and the drumbeat.
I love the way the verse cuts through on top of it.
This is the right direction.
What bands do you find interesting today?
What have you been reading that inspires you?I like Lambrini Girls.
I listen to Lana Del Rey a lot.
I think she represents a new way of absorbing information.
Her songs are almost like dioramas that have a lot of drapery in them.
I wanna see Paramore live so bad.
I was watching tons of videos of Paramore on tour.
I went down this Paramore wormhole.
Shes such a magnetic performer and her singing is just great.
I dont know how she keeps her voice in shape.
I really wanna chitchat with her about that someday.
Theres this final poem in it at the back and it became like my mantra.
I was feeling like,What if I TMId in the book?
Whats gonna happen?
People are gonna kill me.
I smile during Double Dare Ya remembering being in my white jacked-up truck.
The way my voice came back to me sounded really nice.
So it gave me a lot of confidence.
How the fuck did that happen?
Im just so much more appreciative and grateful that Im able to be onstage.
Shes not a musician.
I would say the 14 women who were murdered by Marc Lepine at the technical school in Montreal.
It was just seen as Hes a crazy guy.
The fact that they were killed in the process of gaining an education particularly struck me.
Im influenced by whether I ate today or not.
Im influenced by the Anita Hill hearing.
So I can see why people got the perception that I was an activist and not a musician.
And theyre like, I saw myself in what you made and that gave me the courage to continue.
Or, You guys created this soil for my thing to grow in.
I can be happy with helping create that soil that people can grow in.
When was the last time you felt like you were really heard?Do you know Fabi Reyna?
She didShe Shredsand shes a musician, shes gonna interview me in Portland about the book.
We dont really know each other so we did a pre-interview, get-to-know-each-other kind of thing.
I felt very seen and heard by her.
She asked, What happens when youre victimized in some way, but you learn something from it?
But theres shame around the fact that you may get something out of being victimized.
Its like having 20 blank canvases prepared for you.
I was like,Well, someone has to write about this.Ive never had to search for material.
Ive never been bored.
Life has thrown too much at me to ever get bored or complacent.
