Hersch But True

When Kristin Hersh was 17 her life changed in profound and frightening ways. Struck by a car whilst cycling to a part-time job in Providence, Rhode Island, the future Throwing Muses singer suffered chronic concussion. An aspiring songwriter, she regained consciousness in hospital several days later only to discover she couldn’t switch off the “music in her head”. For a while she feared this unstoppable outpouring of sound might drive her mad. Later she discovered she had developed bipolar disorder and was borderline schizophrenic.

“My manias and depressions have coloured songs in ways that were inappropriate,” she says. “When I am free and clear and healthy, the songs are also free and healthy, without me getting in the way.”
It’s a grey January morning and Hersh, pixie-like with vast blue eyes, sits in the lobby of Dublin’s Buswells Hotel. We meet her on day two of the European promotion tour for her memoir, originally entitled Rat Girl (her nickname for her teenage self) but in this part of the world lumbered with the more unwieldy moniker Paradoxical Undressing (“they wanted to present it as a graphic novel in America, where it’s better to come across as dumb than pretentious”.)
Rejecting the conventional rock autobiography arc, this “novel that happens to be true”, draws on Hersh’s diaries from the early days of Throwing Muses, the late ‘80s indie rock outfit that exploded out of New England alongside Pixies and Dinosaur Jr. Chronicling her experiences as a footloose, occasionally reckless, adolescent, it is as much a study of a young person struggling with mental illness as coming-of-age rock yarn. Even if you don’t care for Throwing Muse’s arty alt.pop, it’s a gripping read, encompassing Hersh’s friendship with a fading Hollywood starlet, Betty Hutton, her hippy parents (everyone referred to her father as “Dude”) and teenage pregnancy (in the confessional’s solitary coy moment, she declines to identify the father, offering only that certain boys have a weakness for “rat girls”).
“It’s a very visceral book,” she says, explaining that, during the writing, she drew on extensive diaries she kept through the ‘80s and ‘90s. “I read those entries all the time, in an almost superstitious way, because I didn’t want it to happen again. It took me four years to turn out what is essentially a non-fiction novel. I had to pare down the cast of my life to six people. It was strange and confusing. There was so much to wrap your head around. And also I was revisiting people in my life who had died. When I handed in the manuscript the publisher said, ‘Great – when’s the next volume?’ And I was like, ‘Whaaaat? It took me four years to get this one out!”
If she has any hopes for the book, it is that it will help dispel the popularly held perception that mental illness can make for innovative art. Far from adding authenticity to early Throwing Muses albums such as The Real Ramona and Hunkpapa, bipolar disorder skewed the work in unpleasant ways, she feels. Certainly she doesn’t regard what she went through – the sleepless nights, the medication, the hospitalisation – as a ‘price’ worth paying for her musical gifts. That said, she understands that her troubles would make her music more fascinating for fans.
“Not everyone is musically educated enough to know when they are hearing ‘wrong’ material. Sometimes the dumbest songs are the ones they like best,” she says. “When my songs are ‘interfered’ with [by her bipolar disorder], that makes them attractive to people. I struggle with that. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. But I feel suspicious of the songs they like. I do not feel a sick mind is able to create work that helps well minds.”
So was she offended that Sufjan Stevens recently based an entire record on the work of mentally disturbing ‘naïve’ artist Royal Robertson?
“Ummm. I can admit that it [mental illness] can expand your emotional vocabulary to the extent it makes you the right person for the right song. I know I have the right to write the songs the way they come to me. Other than that... I just don’t want to think that, evolutionarily speaking, we would have gotten to the point where mental illness is valuable in any way. It doesn’t make sense to my scientific mind. That said... I don’t think rich people are very good at writing songs either. I would definitely trust a crazy person before a rich person. Rich people are protected – they don’t know the fears the rest of us know. Even if they are jumping off a cliff, they are only doing so because they feel essentially safe.”
Though it is beyond the scope of the book, Hersh has struggled with bipolar disorder through most of her career. Indeed she feels she only brought the condition fully under control a few years ago, when she discovered acupuncture.
“It was the strangest experience. At the start it hurt – a lot. I went for quite an extreme version and had this woman treat me on tour for months. But eventually it seemed to work and I no longer had the symptoms. The energy is strange. It’s like cars racing around your outline. That’s the best way I can describe it.”
For all her difficulties, Hersh comes across as preternaturally savvy, careerist even, in Rat Girl. When Throwing Muses – which she started as a 14 year old with her step-twin, Tanya Donnelly (later of Belly) – fetch up in Boston, they are feted by a string of major label suits. But Hersh sees them for the the trend-hopping vampires they are, and refuses to be strung along (Throwing Muses eventually signed to storied UK label 4AD).
“We were part of the underground,” she says. “What we were doing was a response to Top 40 radio. You weren’t supposed to be stupid – there was no way we were ever going to be played on the radio. So we thought that, instead of being popular, we would be good. We weren’t going to suck. We didn’t have time to suck. There are starry-eyed people out there who are literally self-conscious. They are conscious of themselves, of their image, of the effect they have on others. And their music, if it can be called that. It’s a fashion sound. For me, it’s like comparing apples to McDonald’s. Apples grow on trees, McDonald’s is gonna kill you. But it makes a lot of money in the meantime.”

Pardoxical Undressing is published by Atlantic Books.