Girl in a Band

I started “Girl in a Band” with only passing knowledge of Kim Gordon’s band, Sonic Youth, and little to no knowledge about Gordon herself.

Having recently read “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” Lizzy Goodman’s oral history of New York’s music scene in the 2000s, I expected Gordon to provide an equally fun and gossipy romp through late 80s New York. Instead, she delivers a no frills account of her life starting with Sonic Youth’s final show together and her impending divorce from bandmate Thurston Moore. 

Sonic Youth’s final concert is not a happy memory for Gordon. She despises Moore, having recently found out he had been cheating on her. Even sharing a stage with him during soundcheck is torturous. The emotions she expresses about the band and her soon to be ex-husband introduce the reader to the facets of her personality, each needing something different and not getting it. To help explain these warring selves and how she got to such a desperate point in her life, Gordon skips back to her childhood in the second chapter and proceeds chronologically from there.

Gordon’s most vivid childhood memories in Los Angeles involve her getting bullied by her older brother Keller who she describes as being, “...brilliant, manipulative, sadistic.” Even today she has conflicted feelings about him, especially because her parents largely ignored Keller’s schizophrenia diagnosis, leaving her to fend for herself against his erratic behavior. 

Gordon arrives in New York just as the 1970s rock scene was dying out. The Velvet Underground and the Ramones are considered mythic bands but not particularly relevant to the new generation of musicians moving to the city. I thought, then, that Gordon would talk about the scene she came up in and what it was like to be there at the start of No Wave. 

Instead, she continues her short, direct writing style, never giving any event or chapter more than six or seven pages. While I’m disappointed she never gets into the weeds about the inspiration or recording of an album (though she does tell the story behind Goo’s iconic cover art), I’m relieved that she never verges into the kind of self-indulgent myth-making that plagues so many other music memoirs.

By the end of the book, we get to see a more mature Gordon who, if she hasn’t fully come to terms with her abusive brother, cheating ex-husband, and the challenges of motherhood, has at least learned to balance these realities and accept them as a part of who she is. Ever the pragmatist, Gordon feels that, “All that young-girl idealism is someone else's now.”

At times angry, conflicted, resentful, and tender, Girl in a Band is Gordon’s clear eyed look back at her life as a shy California girl turned rock star, turned wife, mother, and fully realized woman. Though not the gossipy trip down memory lane I expected, it is the fullest expression of Gordon’s talents yet.

The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You

Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s first short story collection reads like neighborhood gossip shared between friends with each story giving voice to New Orleans’ overlooked residents.

Many of the stories are only a couple pages long, giving the reader only partial glimpses into their characters’ lives. Ruffin makes the most of the limited space, however, with sharp and creative observations, describing one character as a man who, “...got a fat neck and skin like old peaches;” and another as “...a scruffy little cat...” The stories’ short length invites the reader to enjoy several at a time and let the collection’s kaleidoscopic view of New Orleans slowly come into focus. 

Longer stories like “Before I Let Go” offer a deeper look into how gentrification affects the lives of longtime Black residents and the fallout that occurs when they are displaced. The story’s protagonist Gailya struggles to keep a job, first as a nanny to a white family and then as a maid at a hotel, in order to pay her property taxes. She is one of the few Black residents left on her block and is constantly being asked by her white neighbors to join their neighborhood council. 

Living paycheck to paycheck and facing the prospect of displacement, Gailya accepts her neighbors’ invitation and attends their meeting in a recently opened local coffee shop. Gailya recalls:

The coffee shop had been a po’ boy shop….Now there’s a drawing of a po’ boy, like a science man might make, with details of where to insert the fried shrimps, where to put the mayonnaise.

When she looks around at the meeting’s attendees she thinks most of them look:

 ...like people she’s worked for at one point or another. She knows that if any of her old neighbors were here, they would make them understand. But she realizes it falls on her. It always fell on her, and that if she were gone, nobody would ever come to understand anything at all.

Gailya’s story, like all the stories in this collection, are both an elegy to and celebration of Black life in New Orleans. And though the characters’ lives are filled with hardship, they take comfort in the community they have left. In the closing pages of the final story, Gailya hears a parade marching toward her street and she can’t wait to, “...be in the crush of bodies when it turns the corner to the next block, thousands of arms, legs, and eyes reaching for a bell of brass.” The book, like the parade, is a joyful bearing of witness that’s a pleasure to get lost in.