Books

Sleater-Kinney Guitarist Carrie Brownstein's Memoir 'Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl' Is Coming in October

by Caitlin White

Today in hooray, hooray, hooray, jumping-up-and-down news, Carrie Brownstein is publishing a memoir Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl October 27. Brownstein is the guitarist for feminist rock band Sleater-Kinney, and Portlandia fans will also recognize her as Fred Armisen's partner in crime on the Emmy-winning show. Her memoir will focus on her long career as a musician and it will cap off around the time Sleater-Kinney took their 2006 hiatus. Therefore, it won't mention her turn to acting — but holy cow there's still so much to love.

Penguin Books’ website says this about Hunger Makes me a Modern Girl, and I'm already dying:

Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl is the deeply personal and revealing narrative of Brownstein’s life in music, from ardent fan to pioneering female guitarist to comedic performer and luminary in the independent rock world. Though Brownstein struggled against the music industry’s sexist double standards, by 2006 she was the only woman to earn a spot on Rolling Stone readers’ list of the “25 Most Underrated Guitarists of All-Time.” This book intimately captures what it feels like to be a young woman in a rock-and-roll band, from her days at the dawn of the underground feminist punk-rock movement that would define music and pop culture in the 1990s through today.

Brownstein is an innovator in the riot grrrl movement, having formed the pioneering band Excuse 17 with CJ Phillips and Becca Albee while she was still a college student in Olympia, Washington, where the underground feminist punk movement sprouted up from. After meeting another riot grrrl pioneer Corin Tucker, formerly of the band Heavens to Betsy, the two together formed Sleater-Kinney alongside Janet Weiss. Sleater-Kinney released seven studio albums from 1994 until their hiatus in 2006. After their recent 2014 reunion, the band dropped the album No Cities to Love in January.

First Kim Gordon's memoir and now this? How are we expected to contain ourselves?