Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl By Carrie Brownstein
I think I was either slightly too old, or Sleater-Kinney was slightly too obscure for me to have formed much of a view about Carrie Brownstein's band contemporaneously. By the time that she's talking about (late 90s) I had moved on, really, from Seattle grunge and was deeply into the Sydney band scene. Which of course was so heavily influence by Seattle, but had a very specific Australian pub rock and punk twist. I was also by that time able to more fully admit my love of actual pop music, and that I found the most low-fi and discordant of the grunge bands actually pretty hard to listen to. In any case, Carrie is most definitely a pioneer and legend of the scene, and Portlandia is so, so hilarious. Her family sounds messed up. Thank you Carrie Brownstein, for your gifts to the arts and your cool hair and makeup and for continuing a fine tradition of music.
An Education by Lynn Barber
This memoir was famously made into a movie with Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard about Lyn's years as a teenage girl seduced by a real-life conman. The movie only goes up to the first two or so chapters of the book, and the rest of the book is about her life at Oxford, and then long career in media and publishing. Lynn is quite clear that she spent her whole time at Oxford smoking pot, sleeping with fellow students (50, she reckons) and exaggerating bouts of ill health to pass with an aegrotat. She then casts herself as somewhat of a pioneering truth-teller, giving the people the nasty tabloid gossip that they want. That sounds like kind of a gross career to have to, to me, but she seems happy with it. Good for you, Lynn Barber.
Ohhhhhhh, this book is so sad. This memoir was published in 2012; Charlotte Dawson killed herself with a drug overdose in February 2014. The book definitely details her life's ups and downs. The marriage to Scott Miller and the abortion she was pressured to have so as to avoid ruining his training preparation for the 2000 Olympics (a team he didn't make, in the end, due to his own drug use and personal problems) sounds like the worst. After that, she relocated to New Zealand while pursing defamation litigation against News Corp Australia that took seven years to settle in her favour. It seemed like she was treated awfully in NZ as a public persona. Throughout the writing she does maintain a cheerful attitude and a workhorse-like approach to her career, taking whatever came her way as a D-list TV presenter and erstwhile 90s department store model. You cannot fault her willingness to work. There are obviously moments recast with her in the best light, including some very fake ANTM backstage dialogue about the arrest of her last boyfriend, a con-man developer. That event also gives rise to the funniest moment of the book, her response to a fellow air traveller, asked why she is crying on a late night flight from Brisbane to Sydney, that her partner has just been arrested for millions of dollars’ worth of bank fraud, and so she has to go home to walk the dog. Ugh, Charlotte. Sorry people were so crap to you.
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