Latest news with #MEMOIRTheHarderIFight
The Age
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
A haunting memoir of a broken girl saved by rock and roll
MEMOIR The Harder I Fight The More I Love You: A Memoir Neko Case Hachette, $34.99 I'm a tiny bit miffed with Neko Case right now. When we spoke about her Hell-On album in 2018, she rather gallantly mentioned her respect for music writers. 'I don't envy your job,' she said. 'Coming up with ways to describe music? That's hard. I'd just say everything was 'awesome'.' Naw shucks, etc. Now, it turns out, she writes about music as brilliantly as she makes it. 'Gramma would sing along in the proper 'barely louder than your breath' lady volume,' she tells us in one childhood car-seat memory. 'It sounded just like the last three Certs candies from the bottom of a purse tasted, like the last candy on earth.' Later, a rock-club epiphany goes like this: 'They tapped into some feral vein that ran to the centre of the earth, like a stick of dynamite that could control how much it exploded while still preserving its sweating cylinder … something unlocked for me that day … making music could become a physical manifestation of the blazing wild horse energy inside of my body.' I don't think the blazing wild horse of the American indie/alt-country frontier was being disingenuous with me back in 2018. Time and again in her riveting and often shocking memoir, she prises the claws of self-doubt from her half-starved and abused flesh to discover a new superpower sprung from sheer defiance. The 'fight' in the book's title is animal instinct, a means of survival learnt through a childhood of poverty, emotional cruelty and worse. Against those odds, the 'love' part is all her own work: a steel thread of compassion and wonder drawn from the beauty of nature and animals and art and (surprise) cars; private elations she describes in glorious, sensuous colour. Case was born to parents too young and too broken to care for her. How broken? When she was seven, they faked her mother's death so she could abandon her child and go and live in Hawaii. Consider that a clue to the generations of brutal physical and psychological damage her daughter would later uncover. Mum returned, but the truth remained elusive. 'I felt the unfinished math of her disappearance like thunder under the ground,' Case writes. There are ominous rumblings from Dad's weed-and-crackers corner too. Their lone child bounced between shifting, more-or-less squalid homes in the freezing Pacific north-west, neglected but for the beloved dogs and dreams of horses that sustained her.
Sydney Morning Herald
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
A haunting memoir of a broken girl saved by rock and roll
MEMOIR The Harder I Fight The More I Love You: A Memoir Neko Case Hachette, $34.99 I'm a tiny bit miffed with Neko Case right now. When we spoke about her Hell-On album in 2018, she rather gallantly mentioned her respect for music writers. 'I don't envy your job,' she said. 'Coming up with ways to describe music? That's hard. I'd just say everything was 'awesome'.' Naw shucks, etc. Now, it turns out, she writes about music as brilliantly as she makes it. 'Gramma would sing along in the proper 'barely louder than your breath' lady volume,' she tells us in one childhood car-seat memory. 'It sounded just like the last three Certs candies from the bottom of a purse tasted, like the last candy on earth.' Later, a rock-club epiphany goes like this: 'They tapped into some feral vein that ran to the centre of the earth, like a stick of dynamite that could control how much it exploded while still preserving its sweating cylinder … something unlocked for me that day … making music could become a physical manifestation of the blazing wild horse energy inside of my body.' I don't think the blazing wild horse of the American indie/alt-country frontier was being disingenuous with me back in 2018. Time and again in her riveting and often shocking memoir, she prises the claws of self-doubt from her half-starved and abused flesh to discover a new superpower sprung from sheer defiance. The 'fight' in the book's title is animal instinct, a means of survival learnt through a childhood of poverty, emotional cruelty and worse. Against those odds, the 'love' part is all her own work: a steel thread of compassion and wonder drawn from the beauty of nature and animals and art and (surprise) cars; private elations she describes in glorious, sensuous colour. Case was born to parents too young and too broken to care for her. How broken? When she was seven, they faked her mother's death so she could abandon her child and go and live in Hawaii. Consider that a clue to the generations of brutal physical and psychological damage her daughter would later uncover. Mum returned, but the truth remained elusive. 'I felt the unfinished math of her disappearance like thunder under the ground,' Case writes. There are ominous rumblings from Dad's weed-and-crackers corner too. Their lone child bounced between shifting, more-or-less squalid homes in the freezing Pacific north-west, neglected but for the beloved dogs and dreams of horses that sustained her.
