HUNGER MAKES ME A MODERN GIRL by Carrie Brownstein

Refinished Th 2/6/25

This is a hardback that I got on Amazon in May of 2018 and I first finished Su 5/6/18. 

One of the better written Rock Profiles.

Her father came out as gay when she was out of the house and her mother was under treatment for anorexia Carrie's whole life. 

Interesting Observation: When she was 13 she saw her first rock show. One of her young friends exclaimed, 'I'd really like to fuck that guy!'. Carrie was thinking that she had no desire for 'that guy'. She wanted to BE 'that guy'. 

Unfortunately, the book only ends with the break up of SLEATER-KINNEY. Her move into acting might make an even more interesting book. 

From The Guardian:

"Her father did not come out as a gay man until very late in life; her mother developed a case of anorexia severe enough for hospitalization. She has had her own struggles with depression and one very frightening breakdown whose elements you’re best to read about in the book itself. (There is a story about her pets in this book that you should probably not read in a public place.)

But Brownstein’s way of telling those stories is from a rather intellectualized, even aestheticized, distance. Much of her mother’s disease, for example, is summed up in the single image of a beach photograph that shows “bags of white pus forming on her sternum”. It’s an image that proves difficult to forget once you have read it, one that cuts into you. It is also one which has a way of instantly transporting you to the depths of her mother’s suffering without seeming maudlin.

This “yearning” side of Brownstein, the sad part – “I continually made a ritual of emptiness,” she admits – does not correlate so well with her current public image. Certainly there is little of the laconic, laid back satire of Portlandia in this book. There is also little of the somewhat glamorous image she’s come to cut, the polish and the finesse.

But even more importantly, for cultural history purposes, there is also little of what most people who are only casual observers of the Riot Grrrl “scene” have come to expect of it. Moments of visceral anger are rarely dramatized as such, just reported matter-of-factly; feminism is mentioned but more often analyzed from a distance. Brownstein explains that in fact the politics could get toxic, refers even to a sort of public-shaming process that might sound familiar."