I think the most anxious part about being in a band is that something is going to happen to someone you love. You feel trapped in this world of tour. Every minute is accounted for. Every night is accounted for. How would I attend a funeral on the road? It’s such an unforgiving part of tour.
On Sleater-Kinney:
Three is a very complex number for a collaboration. When it’s firing, it’s very galvanizing, and very intense. But it’s so easy for it to be imbalanced, two versus one.
On her first experiences with seeing music:
My first concert was Madonna. It was 1985, the Virgin tour. She had never played outside New York. You guys know who I’m talking about, right? Madonna? I asked my parents, specifically my mom, if I could wear her wedding dress to the show. My mom said no. So I wore a shirt with a lot of exotic fruits on it, because that showed off my fun side.
I remember such a sense of elation from that show, but it took me seeing local bands to learn that it could be played and not programmed.
On being a performer:
I was kind of my neighborhood impresario. I had a Duran Duran cover band called “Little D Duran Duran.” Cover band is a generous term because we didn’t play music. We took plywood from everyone’s collective garages and painted them. And, you know, in the eighties guitars were basically triangles anyway. We used house paint so the instruments were all grey. We just lip synced to Duran Duran.
On her youth:
My childhood was interesting. Both parents really wanted to be invisible in many ways. My father was closeted and didn’t come out until he was 55. My mother was anorexic, so there was this sense of disappearance. Everyone was sort of fading, or lacking visibility. So I think that so much of my journey was about seeking a place where I could be seen. It instilled in me a willfulness.
On Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl:
It’s not diaristic. It’s not a journal. I was thinking a lot about story, and arc, and syntax, and the craft of the book. I wanted to tell a story essentially about belonging. Each section of the book is about family or the lack thereof, the ways we find substitution for that. The middle section is the band. The last section has to do with animals.
I was writing not what I know but what I wanted to know. I wanted to figure out ways that things could reveal themselves. It was very deliberate. It was terribly difficult. It took a long time. It was the least fun thing I’ve ever done. There’s no magic behind it. You just get up and write. It’s terrible. There’s no one that ever talks about writing being fun. It’s not fun. It’s not cathartic. It’s just work.
On procrastination:
The New York Times, that’s such a high level procrastination because you can tell yourself: this is edifying. I’m reading the paper. Then you’re answering email. Then you’re answering email from your family. Then you’re answering email from people who wrote you a month ago. Then you’re just looking up face lotions.
"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit."
