MEMOIR
The Harder I Fight The More I Love You: A Memoir
Neko Case
Hachette, $34.99
I’m a tiny bit miffed with Neko Case right now. When we spoke about her Hell-On album in 2018, she rather gallantly mentioned her respect for music writers. “I don’t envy your job,” she said. “Coming up with ways to describe music? That’s hard. I’d just say everything was ‘awesome’.” Naw shucks, etc.
Now, it turns out, she writes about music as brilliantly as she makes it. “Gramma would sing along in the proper ‘barely louder than your breath’ lady volume,” she tells us in one childhood car-seat memory. “It sounded just like the last three Certs candies from the bottom of a purse tasted, like the last candy on earth.”
Later, a rock-club epiphany goes like this: “They tapped into some feral vein that ran to the centre of the earth, like a stick of dynamite that could control how much it exploded while still preserving its sweating cylinder … something unlocked for me that day … making music could become a physical manifestation of the blazing wild horse energy inside of my body.”
I don’t think the blazing wild horse of the American indie/alt-country frontier was being disingenuous with me back in 2018. Time and again in her riveting and often shocking memoir, she prises the claws of self-doubt from her half-starved and abused flesh to discover a new superpower sprung from sheer defiance.
The “fight” in the book’s title is animal instinct, a means of survival learnt through a childhood of poverty, emotional cruelty and worse. Against those odds, the “love” part is all her own work: a steel thread of compassion and wonder drawn from the beauty of nature and animals and art and (surprise) cars; private elations she describes in glorious, sensuous colour.
Singer-songwriter Neko Case in 2018.
Case was born to parents too young and too broken to care for her. How broken? When she was seven, they faked her mother’s death so she could abandon her child and go and live in Hawaii. Consider that a clue to the generations of brutal physical and psychological damage her daughter would later uncover.
Mum returned, but the truth remained elusive. “I felt the unfinished math of her disappearance like thunder under the ground,” Case writes. There are ominous rumblings from Dad’s weed-and-crackers corner too. Their lone child bounced between shifting, more-or-less squalid homes in the freezing Pacific north-west, neglected but for the beloved dogs and dreams of horses that sustained her.
Episodes of respite are exhilarating by contrast: escapes with gentle neighbours and grandparents; winning a gymkhana on the pony owned by a kind new friend; and golden days with cousins at Northwest Washington Fair rush from the page like sugar highs. From someone else’s mother she learns that “this is how the world could be when someone really loved you”.
But it’s Case’s default loneliness, it seems, that makes her the artist she becomes: doggedly self-reliant and hyper-alert to an inner voice that knows injustice as the enemy and those flashes of beauty as truth. “Bullies could be vanquished,” she learns, steeled in opposition to neighbourhood thugs and a repellent, Bible-thumping uncle named Junior.
Case on stage in Sydney in 2010.Credit: Edwina Pickles
“The darkness around me,” she writes, “coalesced into a stubborn force that kept me half feral. But I knew in my heart it was better to be a beast and live than try to be good when the rules of being good were meant to kill your soul.” Ripe for rock’n’roll redemption or what? The fan became a ferocious drummer, and ultimately the kinda country/entirely unique singer-songwriter we know today.
Like Rickie Lee Jones’ outstanding Last Chance Texaco, this is one of those rare music memoirs that leaves us in no hurry to get to the rock star part. However difficult, the advantage of a rich pre-fame life is a sense of perspective that can dissect the alchemy of songwriting, the challenges of road life and (shudder) the music business with stark clarity and engaging humility.
The vile stink of misogyny, sadly, permeates the whole arc. “Being a woman in this world means moving through constant threats of rape and predation, stalking and abuse,” Case states as “the endless freight of being a woman” finally catches up with her in her 40s. “I’ve lived it, and I’ve seen in happen to most of the women I love.”
Even as she embarks on a personal education about “the breakdown and manipulation of egalitarian society” going back to ancient Greece, she channels white-hot rage into cast-iron will. “I know my own tenacity and desire. I know the desires and passions of other women, and we are unstoppable,” she writes. “We are not passengers, we are not drones. We are lightning and creation.”
Weirdly, by the way, I still find it hard to adequately describe Neko Case’s music. But if it was any of my business to judge her humanity, I’d go with “awesome”.
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