You might know Carrie Brownstein from her award winning show on IFC, Portlandia,
but she is a woman of many talents. Her original claim to fame was as a guitarist in Sleater-Kinney. They were part of the 90s Riot Grrrl punk scene and they continue to make music. After a ten year hiatus, they released the album, No Cities to Love in January 2015. Brownstein is widely regarded as a feminist icon and was the only woman to make Rolling Stone’s “The Twenty-Five Most Underrated Guitarists” list.
As a musician she wrote many of her own songs, so the leap from writing music to writing books was not that far. Her autobiography, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, was released in October 2015. This book focuses almost entirely on her early life and music career, which makes it a great read for anyone who is a fan of music biographies. There are a ton of these books that are full of crazy rock n’ roll antics, however Brownstein writes about herself in a way that most people could relate to. We find out that her mother struggled with anorexia and her father came out of the closet when she was a teenager. She was unsure about college and dropped out of Western Washington University after being pressured into applying. Her early career is not the confident story of a rock goddess full of bravado, but the story of an awkward suburban teenage girl who desperately wanted to be seen as a punk.
Rock music has historically been a boys club, but there are plenty of women that have broken that stereotype and written about it. Some read-alikes to Carrie Brownstein are:
Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon, the guitarist of Sonic Youth. In Girl in a Band, the famously reserved superstar speaks candidly about her past and the future. From her childhood in the sunbaked suburbs of Southern California, growing up with a mentally ill sibling who often sapped her family of emotional capital, to New York’s downtown art and music scene in the eighties and nineties and the birth of a band that would pave the way for acts like Nirvana, as well as help inspire the Riot Grrl generation, here is an edgy and evocative portrait of a life in art.
Just Kids by Patti Smith. In this tough, tender memoir, singer-songwriter Patti Smith transports readers to what seemed like halcyon days for art and artists in New York as she shares tales of the denizens of Max’s Kansas City, the Hotel Chelsea, Scribner’s, Brentano’s and Strand bookstores and her new life in Brooklyn with a young man named Robert Mapplthorpe–the man who changed her life with his love, friendship, and genius.