[Brownstein] gives us a sharp, unromanticized portrait of her restless soul, one for whom 'home' is an elusive psychic state. Titled after a rich line in the Sleater-Kinney song 'Modern Girl,' the book is perceptive, unblinking, and intelligently written.
The book is spare and arching like a stripped-down rock song, but it rarely has the rawness Sleater-Kinney fans might expect. Running throughout is the tension between wanting to be seen and wanting to hide, wanting to reveal and wanting to retreat, wanting to tell but wanting to decide how much.
Throughout, Brownstein is refreshingly un-rock-and-roll. At times, that thoroughgoing decency might frustrate readers...In fact, she hovers at a remove from large swaths of her own story, which can make for a flat reading experience.
[H]er honesty is disarming, and buoyed by the same dry wit that makes her scenester-lacerating IFC series Portlandia so good. That’s how she artfully manages to transcend the backstage tropes of the rock-bio genre, and why Hunger should become the new handbook for every modern girl (and yes, boys, too) looking for the courage to pursue a life less ordinary.
A hunger to be noticed, a hunger to perform and a hunger to be loved are clear motivators for Brownstein as she looks back on her childhood at the start of her entirely self-written and often funny book.
This is not a dramatic memoir: Fans hoping for a tour-bus tell-all will probably be disappointed—there is scant booze and even less sex and the three women plainly respect and admire each other. Instead, Ms. Brownstein describes the book as an attempt to create a territory from out of her 'archipelago of identities.'
Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl is a smart and stirring memoir about finding what brings you joy, pursuing it with your heart and soul, and letting the rest fade into the distance. A perhaps atypical approach, but not for the woman who has always sought to elude labels and classification.
So you can feel what Brownstein is saying by the way she says it: thoughtful, everything put in doubt, a level, sober tone, so that the slightest gesture towards a smile...may go off like a little bomb, or make no sound at all. As someone supposedly writing about herself, Brownstein is also a music critic, of her own band, a social critic, of her own milieu, and a literary critic, of her self as she constructed it.
Brownstein has insightful things to say about growing up with a closeted gay dad and an anorexic mom, about how the creative process works, about the performance' of the audience at a concert, about the punk aesthetic. She deconstructs Sleater-Kinney's music as a rock critic would, sometimes giving in to a touch of self-importance, forgivable in light of Sleater-Kinney having been anointed 'the best rock band in the world' by Time magazine.
Like in Portlandia, there are laughs here – mostly to be found in Brownstein’s amused tone as she dissects childhood escapades, failed try-outs for bands, her penchant for adopting rescue animals. When they get loose, adopting too many animals isn’t remotely funny any more. And so it’s the emotive revelations that make up the grist of this memoir...
Reading Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, Carrie Brownstein’s memoir of her life as a member of Sleater-Kinney, is an enjoyable, albeit less complicated experience. In some way, this is understandable enough as the book offers a single perspective, rather than three. But memoir as a form does present ample opportunity to portray conflicting desires and emotional messiness—in short, the stuff of Sleater-Kinney songs.
