Rat girl /

ONE night in 1985, a teenage Kristin Hersh got inspired to pick up her guitar and compose a tune for her punk band, Throwing Muses. "So I wrote a dumb little song about smack freaks, unemployment and holocausts," she remembers in her memoir, "Rat Girl." "It was only a minute long 'cause I got bored, but it was funny." The song, "Hate My Way," rants about the aforementioned topics as well as God (it's all his fault), her father (no, it's his fault), school (to blame), society (totally to blame) and wanting to die (although she doesn't want to want to die). And that was the band's pop song. Based on Hersh's diary, "Rat Girl" chronicles the singer's turbulent life from the spring of 1985 to the spring of '86: she was given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, signed a record deal, made Throwing Muses' cult-classic debut album and became a single mother at age 19. The book begins in Rhode Island, where Hersh squats in an abandoned house, her hair dyed blue by a drug-addicted friend. It ends in a hospital, where she's left to reconcile parenthood with the punk-rock road-warrior existence. "I'll cross the living-in-a-van-is-probably-child-abuse bridge when I come to it," she decides early in her pregnancy. "Rat Girl" is sensitive and emotionally raw, which figures; it's also wildly funny, which didn't figure at all, since the Muses were never big on humor. Hersh, now a solo artist, has a generous adult affection for her adolescent self. She started the band with her stepsister, Tanya Donelly (who later fronted the successful '90s band Belly), and in the year chronicled here played with the bassist Leslie Langston and the drummer David Narcizo, the group's token boy. Having suffered a concussion in a car accident, Hersh grew up hearing music ("sound tapping me on the shoulder") and believed her songs were psychic revelations. This was no secret - like her teen-mom back story, it was a crucial part of her mystique. Hersh was a messed-up kid, just like her fans, except far more confident. When I caught a Throwing Muses show on Valentine's Day 1987, in a college dining hall, it was the first time I'd ever seen a rock band with three women up front, as well as the first time I'd seen a singer keep her eyes shut tight all the way through every song. She apparently didn't even notice we were there - and that seemed indescribably cool. At the Catholic university where her father teaches, Hersh befriends a student who turns out to be the old-time Hollywood star Betty Hutton, long past the glitter days of "Annie Get Your Gun." In one of the book's oddest moments, Hutton comes to see Hersh's band in a sleazy club, bringing her priest along. She gives her protégée show-biz tips she claims to have received firsthand from Al Jolson. But her advice (don't just sing, "fall in love") falls on seriously deaf ears. "Betty sings about starlight and Champagne," Hersh writes. "I sing about dead rabbits." Hersh's memories of her long-suffering bandmates help make "Rat Girl" an uncommonly touching punk memoir. Throwing Muses don't bicker about whose amp was turned up loudest. They make herbal tea and listen to one another's problems. Hersh even designated her drummer as the "friend, family member and work associate" on call for the hospital during her pregnancy. (In your usual rock 'n' roll mythology, this would be like asking Keith Moon for a ride home.) Like Michael Azerrad's classic "Our Band Could Be Your Life," "Rat Girl" reveals the inspiring camaraderie at the heart of '80s indie rock. These kids took care of one another because they knew nobody else would. In one year, Hersh cut a record, learned she had bipolar disorder and had a baby. At 19. Rob Sheffield is a contributing editor at Roiling Stone and the author, most recently, of "Talking to Girls About Duran Duran."

Hersh, who founded the band the Throwing Muses in the 1980s, explores the mysterious, volatile nature of both creativity and mental balance in this flinty, dreamlike memoir of her precocious, unconventional teens. As her band gains recognition, Hersh is diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and with riveting prose, she describes episodes of burning energy in which music comes in both sound and color and demands to be written: My job, as it turns out, is only to shut up and listen. Prescription drugs mute the process, but after she becomes pregnant and chooses to have the child, Hersh tries life without meds. Song lyrics and diary entries mix with Hersh's memories, which read more like poetic, sometimes satiric impressions rather than traditional autobiography. Whether she is describing her childhood with hippie parents (Dude and Crane), her wildly diverse friends (including Betty, an aging, self-proclaimed former Hollywood star), or childbirth classes with grimly competitive yuppies, Hersh presents a refreshingly raw, insightful, and singular coming-of-age story.--Engberg, Gillian Copyright 2010 Booklist

In this rambling and unremarkable journal of the year 1985-1986 in the life of an 18-year-old musician in Providence, R.I., Hersh tells of her coping with the sensory-overload of manic-depression and pregnancy. The daughter of divorced hippie intellectuals, raised in Georgia, Hersh crashed in a messy, rat-infested house of painters, attended classes at a Catholic college where her philosophy professor father (called Dude) taught, and fronted the rock band Throwing Muses. Young Hersh was shy and a little too squeaky clean for some of the grungy venues the band played; her unlikely best friend at school was the older movie star Betty Hutton, "a warm heart in a cold world," who had returned to school for a master's degree, and often drew on her famous life story for cautionary lessons. Hersh began having perception difficulties on stage, first because she refused to wear her glasses; she then started having visions that involved snakes and colorful sounds. These manic episodes were finally diagnosed by mental health professionals as evidence of bipolar disorder. On lithium, Hersh grew shaky and bloated; her band pushed to move to Boston, with hopes of recording. Hersh unexpectedly became pregnant and had to face grownup concerns way before she was ready, which she chronicles in flat, sophomoric prose. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Funny, quirky coming-of-age story from a unique musical artist.For her first work of nonfiction, Hersh (Toby Snax, 2007), best known as founder and principal songwriter of art-rock band Throwing Muses, revisited the journal she kept from the winter of 1985 through the spring of 1986, when her band made the critical decision to leave provincial Rhode Island and join Boston's thriving music scene. It was a monumental year for Hersh personally, as well. At 18, she was a bit of an oddball. Hit by a car some years before, she started hearingand seeingmusic that she felt compelled to get out of her head and into the world. Other eccentricities may have preceded the accident: her dislike of being indoors, her refusal to wear glasses or lenses during shows so as not to make eye contact with her audiences, her need to swim in any available pool, with or without the permission of the owner. In the summer of 1985, Hersh suffered a frightening breakdown and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Refreshingly, though the book is not the kind of memoir that lingers in angst, perhaps because Hersh prefers to keep her delightfully childlike focus outward. Drawn to other outsiders, she had become close friends with one of her college-professor father's favorite students, the former movie star Betty Hutton, who, then in her 60s, had become a devout Catholic and had nominally renounced her Hollywood past. One of the narrative's many charms is Hersh's apparently effortless, razor-sharp portraiture of the diverse characters in her life: Hutton; her former-hippie parents; her bandmates; a parade of music journalists, an Indian psychiatrist (Dr. Seven Syllables, she names him) who helped her navigate her illness without medication upon learning she was pregnant by an unnamed lover; the British record-label owner and his producer who took great pains to get her genius on tape.A thoroughly engrossing work by an original voicehopefully the first of many.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.