The Harder I Fight the More I Love You by Neko Case

I’ve been loving Neko Case for nearly a quarter-century now. Possessed of a voice whose key verb is “reverberate” and which sounds like John Bonham playing drums at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Her reverb-soaked songs have always spoken to me. It’s like the Pacific Northwest feel of Twin Peaks relocated to Roy Orbison’s home of Wink, Texas. Roy sang into the black, nighttime void of the Lone Star State; Neko’s voice tries to lift the oppressive cloud deck. Last February, I received a copy of her memoir after Lauren and I went to see her in conversation with Samantha Bee at Symphony Space. It took me ’til now to get to it in my book stack.

Case’s music has always had a stripe of autobiography running through it, but she’s never been confessional. She’s always felt aloof and her music allusive and referential. Consequently, she’s always been unapproachable and fascinating. But in Case’s telling, it’s not that she’s too cool to talk to you, but rather the soft, wispy tendrils of approachability and bonding that “normal” people walk around projecting in hopes of snagging friendship or romance had been abused, battered, and cleft away by the isolation and neglect she was forced to survive.

She’s never talked about a love life (“I leave the party at 3 a.m., alone thank God.”) and has often preferred to sing about a love of animals (“Y’know, they call them killer whales”) or to animals ("…sparrow, you didn’t heed my warning."). And many of her songs are soaked in parental neglect (“Honolulu 3 a.m.” comes to mind), familial risk ("…my own blood is much too dangerous" in “Hold On, Hold On”), and serial killers (“Deep Red Bells”).

The book offers some insights into her history. Yes, she was poor and doesn’t think poverty should be stigmatized (“Poor is the default state around this whole world. Why is it shameful?”). She thinks animals are honest and true and lethal; and she thinks that humans are dishonest and unreliable, and indifferent to poor little girls living in the shadow of the Green River Killer, whose ghastly menace lay thick over Washington State like its low clouds.

She was raped. You always knew it. But she admits it; she names the rapist. She notes it was two weeks past her first menstrual onset. That’s just another searing indignity laid on the burden of girls, especially poor ones.

Her mother was narcissistic and drunk. When a lonely girl stared a moment too long at her new womanly-turning body in the mirror, she was called vain and humiliated (in “Pretty Girls:” “…With curves so comely and sinister…they’ll blame it on you, pretty girls.”). She was abandoned and, to cover it, Neko’s family told her that her mother had died. The lady whom she so uncomfortably resembles hadn’t. And when her mother returned, she was often drunk and required Neko to help the unloving woman who bore her face her own rape.

Her father was shell-shocked by her mother’s volatility and could only cope with chemicals.

She was so very, very lonely.

And she grew stronger in spite of it. And when she came, scarred and tough, to a music industry run by vapid MBAs and gender-norm policing “nice-girls-don’t-complain” bullshit in general, she had no tolerance for it. Her feminism and absolute fearlessness about being broke gave her an immunity to manipulation and furious exhaust of righteous, flaking embers of rage.

My favorite episodes are the way she talks about poor life; her tropes and vivid phrases popped me into nostalgia of my own middle-class American childhood outside of New Orleans. She describes the biting frost of Coke on ice at a demolition derby (I can remember the sodas’ serrated lashing of my tongue at the Houston Rodeo). She talks about the huge cars of the late 70’s and early 80’s that I, too, remember: station wagons and Ford Falcons.

Unsurprisingly for a book by a songwriter, many paragraphs close their block with metaphors of heartbreaking beauty like:

There were grasping ferns and impossible magenta foxgloves with burgundy-spotted throats reaching up to me like I was floating over them in a palanquin…My family was already unhappy, and we were only going to get unhappier. Our miserableness enacted itself as a series of moves from one tiny old house to another, our path around Bellingham like the cracked jagged part of a water-damaged ceiling that’s eventually going to cave.

pp. 9-10

The writing about oppressive sorrow is related matter-of-factly. Perhaps she’s dissociated; she’s definitely carrying decades of suppressed rage. But she can write, and she can sing, and she can — in a chapter-two digression that reads as entirely plausible — summon horses. Most artists’ memoirs turn bland as they start to find success, and this memoir is no different, but the novelty, honesty, and the oppressive, dismal circumstances of her youth make for a captivating and harrowing first three-quarters of the book, rendering it a bracing read.

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