Neko Case looks a little jet-lagged, her eyes a touch bleary, as she says that The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, her new memoir, isn’t the book she had been hoping to write. “Writing about myself is not something that seems interesting to me,” she says. “It doesn’t seem that it would be interesting to other people, either. I would have wanted to write fiction or something.”
But the acutely incisive American singer-songwriter, who has spent 30 prolific years as a solo artist and member of the Canadian indie-pop group The New Pornographers, has some story to tell. The book, whose title Case has borrowed from her 2013 album of almost the same name, outlines an early life of neglect and poverty for the only child of unhappy, dysfunctional parents. She was, she writes, “raised by two dogs and a space heater”. One of her parents “would disappear, but in a way far more complicated and destructive, a stunt so bizarre I’m reluctant even to tell it, as it’s completely unbelievable”.
It’s certainly a startling episode: her father arrived to pick her up from primary school one day – her parents had separated some time before – then began to cry and told Neko that her mother had died of cancer. Eighteen difficult months later, Case writes, her father told her that, in fact, her mother was alive, and that they were on their way to see her. The truth, her parents then explained, was that her mother had been ill with a life-threatening disease and gone away – all the way to Hawaii – so that Neko would not have to see her suffer.
An older, less vulnerable child might have questioned the story. Instead, Case writes, “I forgave her with such desperate haste, I didn’t even have time to be mad.”
It was a pattern that was to continue for decades, Case’s mother appearing in her life only intermittently – “that love held out to dance before me, always snatched back just as I reached out my arms for it”. Could it be possible, she writes, that her mother had never been sick to begin with?
It’s hard not to shiver at the honesty of Case’s memoir. Sentences seem written with the sharp end of a stick. “I grew up believing I was nothing, and sometimes my own insignificance wracked me with pain,” she writes at one point. “This is when it turned ... He raped me ... I was fourteen,” she writes at another. “I was saturated by male violence until around the age of 22.” These are weighty admissions, disquieting truths.
“I’m still saturated by male violence, because the trauma doesn’t go away,” Case says. “Depending on where I am or what I’m holding on to at that time, the curtain comes down. It’s a bit of a dangerous place to be, but it’s also saved my life so many times. Things were not great for women before the Victorian era, but after that they got really bad. In general, human beings became extremely conservative and very puritanical.
“Women are still dealing with the hangover from that and trying their best to get out of it. If societal and sexual matters had been different for women, I’m sure I would have been able to navigate the saturation I write about in the book. That saturation would not exist, because I would have been able to process it healthily. But I never had that, and I don’t think a lot of women have had that.”
Her songwriting, Case says, is “telling most women’s stories about how we feel fairly insignificant because we were made to feel insignificant in very subtle and very direct ways. If you are loved I’m sure it’s very different. Little kids are hardy, because they don’t know what other lives they’re missing out on, you know? They think, well, this is the life I’m having.”
Case’s salvation was leaving home at the age of 15 – she bunked with friends and strangers around the US – although it also brought challenges. Those nights “sometimes had a scavenged sort of beauty, but they were awful, too”, she writes. “There were times I’d realise that if I disappeared, it was possible no one would notice.”
By the time Case was 18 she had chosen music as the way out of something disturbing and into something fulfilling. It was, she writes, “a friend in the dark and the physical outlet that helped me shed some of the pent-up sorrow and frustration that was within me”.
Part of the soundtrack to her teenage years was formed by The Pogues, who were, she says, “beloved by the punk-rock community and anyone who listened to alternative radio stations. They were so undeniably singular, so unmistakable and fully formed at the same time.” She also listened to Björk and Sinéad O’Connor. “You can’t mistake them for anyone else. They’re the beginning and the end.”
She was also inspired by Joni Mitchell, Rickie Lee Jones, The Go-Go’s and Blondie. “I’m glad I got to take them for granted and that they were on the radio a lot. It wasn’t as widespread as it is now to have women songwriters in every genre, but when I was growing up they were definitely in the charts. They stood tall. They weren’t behind a bunch of men or anything. Men got most of the attention, of course, but I can’t imagine an artist more respected than Joni Mitchell. I reckon a lot of people probably underestimated her, but that’s pretty much most women’s lives, right?”
Being underestimated is something Case has had to negotiate over the decades, but her resolve has strengthened with each slight and deepened with each album. “I definitely do things on my terms,” she says. “I’ve never wanted to be Madonna famous. That sort of fame is too big.” She has opened big arena shows with The New Pornographers, “but I feel too far away from the audience. I like to see people a little closer, in smaller venues or seated theatre shows ... That’s my comfort level.”
Case says she started playing music “in places that were safe to me, like my friends’ houses. I trusted the people I was with enough to dare to do those things. I started playing drums before I did anything else. I was an aggressive kid, so playing drums felt good, and I was also a shy kid, so sitting behind the drum kit felt comforting.”
Becoming a musician, she says, was more like sliding into position than confidently making a decision. “I was loving it and trying it and graduating to playing live. Then I was in art school in Vancouver, and I thought I was going to be an artist, but I had been told my whole life that things like art and music were not for me.
“I wasn’t told this by my family, I was told this by our society. Business was the important thing, apparently, and everything else was just a silly pipe dream. Music was a pipe dream. Art was a pipe dream. In my mind I was, like, oh well, nobody’s going to be interested in whatever I say or do. Eventually I realised that if nobody was going to notice what I said or did, then I could say or do anything I wanted. There was a great freedom in that.”
There remains a great freedom in saying and doing whatever she wants, I suggest. Case’s reaction is sparky, the jet lag subsided. “Oh yeah! Now I’m a full-on witch, menopausal, and I just don’t give a fuck any more. I now enjoy that sense of liberation. It’s the greatest part of a human’s life, the best. What was I so afraid of all this time?”
The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, by Neko Case, is published by Headline
