For the “who?” crowd: Neko Case is a member of The New Pornographers and a solo artist who has been active since the late 90s. Her memoir, The Harder I Fight The More I Love You is out today. The title is derived from her similarly-named 2013 album. TW: Neko’s early life was very traumatic and that is a lot of the content of her book (or at least what’s being shared in promotional interviews). I won’t include any of those details below, just know they’re there if you go to the sources.
Speaking to NPR (source 1), Neko discusses the book and her upbringing:
- Neko’s parents were “teenagers who weren’t ready to be parents”, and they split up early on in her life
- Her mother faked her death when Neko was in elementary school, complete with a wake held by her grandmother, disappearing to Hawaii for 18 months before returning
- She started her music career as a drummer
- On trauma, she says: “Well, there’s a lot of talk with trauma, especially when dealing with, you know, trauma that’s held by women, where you are told that forgiving the situation or the person makes you a better person – that you’re the better person if you do that. And it’s not true at all. It’s kind of used as a way to make us let go of the truth of that particular situation. Forgiveness itself is one of the most beautiful things in the world, but it is not something that you perform. It’s its own, you know, organic state of being. You know, working through things and forgiving someone naturally because you want to or because that’s really how you feel is great, but I don’t think forgiveness as a blanket solution is at all healthy. There’s absolutely room for people’s rage. And I think that validating your own rage is much more important than trying to follow some prescribed path of forgiveness.”
From an interview with The Irish Times (source 2), which, TW again, contains more explicit details of some of what she survived:
- Describes her songwriting as “telling most women’s stories about how we feel fairly insignificant because we were made to feel insignificant in very subtle and very direct ways.”
- Talks about leaving home at 15 (she was emancipated, but they don’t mention this directly here) and how music became a lifeline
- “Now I’m a full-on witch, menopausal, and I just don’t give a fuck any more.” (OP note: this energy is why she is my idol)
