Before Carrie Brownstein became a music icon as the guitarist and vocalist of the band Sleater-Kinney, she was a young girl growing up in the Pacific Northwest just as it was becoming the setting for one the most important movements in rock history.
With Sleater-Kinney, Brownstein and her bandmates rose to prominence in the burgeoning underground feminist punk-rock movement that would define music and pop culture in the 1990s. They would be cited as “America’s best rock band” by legendary music critic Greil Marcus for their defiant, exuberant brand of punk that resisted labels and limitations, and redefined notions of gender in rock.
Brownstein’s memoir Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl is an intimate and revealing narrative of her escape from a turbulent family life into a world where music was the means toward self-invention, community, and rescue. Along the way, Brownstein chronicles the excitement and contradictions within the era’s flourishing and fiercely independent music subculture, including experiences that sowed the seeds for the observational satire of the Emmy-nominated popular television series Portlandia she created, wrote and co-starred in.
With deft, lucid prose Brownstein proves herself as formidable on the page as on the stage. Accessibly raw, honest and heartfelt, this book captures the experience of being a young woman, a born performer and an outsider, and ultimately finding one’s true calling through hard work, courage and the intoxicating power of rock and roll.
Thanks to Hachette Australia, we have 5 copies of Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl to give away. To enter just fill out the form you see on the right.
