Living in the Real World: Rock Memoirs
Blog Writer // Heather Thorn
In the past decade, the publishing industry has seen more and more rock stars releasing memoirs that serve as a tell-all about their experience backstage, onstage, and everything in between from tour buses to performing gigs. Although songwriting provides insight to artists’ thoughts, feelings, and life experiences, memoirs provide something that songs will never be able to: a platform whereby they can say anything and everything. Unrestricted by meter, beats, and rhyming in songs, celebrities have a chance to fully spill their guts for their fans and offer a piece of their lives we otherwise wouldn’t be able to see.
Rock memoirs have surged in popularity in recent years from Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, The Rolling Stones’s guitarist Keith Richards, and Kathleen Hanna, founder of bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre and creator of the rock feminist movement Riot Grrrl.
With the increase of rock memoirs comes the question of how much information fans receive about their favorite rockstar’s life that they otherwise wouldn’t know. Memoirs offer celebrities a unique opportunity to be vulnerable and honest about every part of their lives, from early childhood to drug addictions. The utter openness within memoirs allows writers to take their experiences and use them as a lesson to the reader. The artist shares any detail they’d like to, leaving their life story on the dining table for any reader—whether a diehard fan or a casual listener—to pick at like a vulture. Although memoirs serve to further expose the writer’s life, it is done with mutual consent: each singer personally chooses which details to share and why. These experiences weave together the writer’s life story whilst also providing guidance for younger fans, especially those looking to follow in their favorite singer’s footsteps.
In her 2024 memoir Rebel Girl, Hanna chooses to be completely upfront about her health issues with Lyme Disease, alcoholism, and fertility—all while providing fans a glimpse into the process whereby she started the Riot Grrrl movement in Olympia, Washington during her college education. By inviting readers into her world, Hanna reveals personal stories that otherwise wouldn’t have been heard. Her carefully crafted memoir offers fans a space of comfort in which they can resonate with her experiences—and if not her experiences, then her feelings. Hanna details her tumultuous upbringing, her fighting force of feminism, and her struggles with alcoholism in her youth and consequently creates a space of empowerment and inspiration within her novel.
Rockstar memoirs simultaneously deglamorize fame and humanize the iconic figures that have dominated audiences for decades. The humanization of celebrities has much to be appreciated for. Although memoirs delve deeper into the inner workings of artists, it is less of a microscopic peek and more of a conversation. By acknowledging the reality of fame and all it entails, including health issues, severe stress, and exhaustion, celebrities redefine what it means to “make it big” in the music scene.
In Face It, Harry discloses her experiences of substance abuse, the package deal of privacy concerns and celebrity, and her suburban upbringing that became her leading inspiration to make a name for herself. Sharing personal stories and anecdotes allows memoirists to forge a personal connection with their audiences and reinvent their upheld untouchable image. Memoirs invite empathetic readings in which the author’s decisions and actions are told directly from their perspective.
The uprising of rock memoirs brings with it better consideration of the pressures that come with music and fame. Artists contribute to a larger conversation about the expectations of celebrities every time they write from their own experiences. Beyond living vicariously through their favorite singers’ re-lived tales of music-making and performing, readers gain a new perspective while learning what it really means to get on stage.