Hunger Makes me a Modern Girl, by Carrie Brownstein - book review: Rise of a punk princess

As a young girl, Carrie Brownstein of the US rock band Sleater-Kinney would write letters to soap actors detailing her problems at home. That the small-screen stars of General Hospital and Days of Our Lives responded kindly with hand-written notes meant everything to her.

“Suddenly I didn’t feel small,” she says in her memoir. “I was bigger than the house I was living in, larger than my town. Thanks to them, I somehow belonged in the world.”

As one third of an iconic rock trio and, more recently, as the writer and one of the stars of the Emmy-nominated television show, Portlandia, Brownstein has kept this in mind when faced by fans looking for similar acknowledgement: “I try to recall the sturdiness that comes from recognition.”

Yet, in chronicling her turbulent childhood in the Pacific Northwest and her rise to fame in a band that would be called “the best American punk band ever” by Rolling Stone, it’s clear that Brownstein’s own relationship with fame was frequently uncomfortable.

Heartfelt and disarmingly honest, Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl is far from a regular tale of rock’n’roll dissolution. It is, instead, a tale of a young woman with a complex interior life struggling to grow up and find her identity in a family who were strangers to her, amid school friends who were baffled by her, and among music lovers and musicians who were cooler, older or, to her mind, better than her. It is the story of her struggle to belong.

Loved by critics, Sleater-Kinney were nevertheless seen as “too scary for the mainstream, our songs too strange”. Yet their legacy is huge, particularly for female fans and performers who had precious few role models in the realms of alt-rock.

It’s no wonder that much of Brownstein’s observations come from being viewed as a curio owing to her gender. Sleater-Kinney did battle with sanctimonious sound engineers, condescending commentators and were once, prior to playing a support slot for Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, mistaken for groupies by a security guard. “We’re not here to fuck the band,” fumed Brownstein’s bandmate Corin Tucker. “We are the band.”

Over the course of her career, Brownstein’s music has come from a place of rage and defiance against conformity, the music industry, and the concept of male dominance. And these battles are clearly drawn in her book.

However, her greatest achievement here is in opening up about her most enduring adversary: herself.

Hunger Makes me a Modern Girl, by Carrie Brownstein, Virago £16.99