‘I Love Rock ’N’ Roll’: Women And The Music Memoir

Loved Dua’s Monthly Read for April, Crying In H Mart by Michelle Zauner? Here, the author of My Family And Other Rock Stars Tiffany Murray looks at other female-written music memoirs and their perennial appeal

What makes a compelling music memoir? The trajectory of fame and/or failure? Authenticity? Voice? One thing is certain, memoir often comes from voices that are not always heard. Memoirs by women musicians, or women using music to tell parts of their lives isn’t a new phenomenon. From poet Lavinia Greenlaw’s The Importance Of Music To Girls to This Woman’s Work: Essays On Music (‘published to challenge the historic narrative of music and music writing being written by men, for men’) these books sing out their place at the music table.  

As a teenager I read and reread Billie Holiday’s Lady Sings The Blues. Ghost-written by William Dufty from his interviews, the book can be challenged on its inaccuracies, but it has the authenticity of voice: Billie’s voice. It’s a hard read but Billie’s was a hard life: teenage prostitution, abusive men, life under segregation as a Black woman artist, heroin addiction, drinking, and prison. Published three years before Billie died in a New York hospital at the age of 44, it’s an intimate, heart-breaking Billie Holiday song of a book. The Woman In Me by Britney Spears, a global bestseller and created via interview and ghostwriters is an astounding story of familial and industry exploitation, of finding voice. It is authentic in this, bittersweet and powerful. “May her truth pose a legitimate threat to the system that exploited her,” said The Guardian. 

Just Kids by Patti Smith was Dua’s Monthly Read for September 2023. Beginning as a love story it ends as an elegy. A portrait of two young artists, sated only by art and experience. It’s also an unforgettable portrait of New York, its musicians and artists, those who made it and those whose memory lingers nearby. Is this the contemporary seminal text in this category? Probably. See also these from trailblazing icons: Viv Albertine’s Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys and Debbie Harry’s Face It. 

Part biography, part criticism, part memoir, Shine Bright is an intimate history of Black women’s music as the foundational story of American pop. Writer, editor and the host of podcast Black Girl Songbook, Danyel Smith’s narrative begins with Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved woman who sang her poems, and continues through the stories of Mahalia Jackson, Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, and Mariah Carey. 

Kim Gordon called Carrie Brownstein’s Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl: A Memoir ‘the book everyone has been waiting for’. In Sleater-Kinney, Brownstein rose to prominence in the underground feminist punk-rock movement that would define the 1990s, while Lush’s Miki Berenyi exposes the highs and lows of the ’90s from a UK perspective in Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me From Success. 

Oral histories are the chorus that creates the main frame. Audrey Golden’s I Thought I Heard You Speak: Women At Factory Records, is one of women’s work: from recording music, pioneering sound technology, DJing, and running The Haçienda. Women Of Rock Oral History Project, the work of Tanya Pearson based at Smith College, focuses on American women and gender non-conforming, LGBTQ, and feminist rock and roll and punk music musicians from the 1970s to the present, in digital interviews and written transcripts. 

We are not musicians but women memoirists who anchor their stories in music are also staking their claim. In Why Karen Carpenter Matters, Karen Tongson interweaves the story of Carpenter with her trans-Pacific journey between the Philippines and Southern California. Sylvia Patterson’s moving and hilarious I’m Not With The Band takes us on the ride of her 30 years as a writer in the music business. And me: My Family And Other Rock Stars is about growing up at Rockfield Studios in the 1970s, where from Ozzy Osbourne to Freddie Mercury to Iggy Pop it was men, men, always men. Maybe I’m at least sitting at a side table now. 

Tiffany Murray is a novelist and her memoir My Family And Other Rock Stars is published by Fleet on 16th May 2024