It must be difficult to reflect on places and events in your life that you know are beloved by thousands who may even define their own lives through them. To honour each moment in a way that maintains the fantasies, or to recount those times through an experience-weary lens that knows how the story ends? With Girl in a Band, Kim Gordon manages to do both with blunt honesty and vulnerability.

This memoir supposedly begins at the end. “Marriage is a long conversation, someone once said, and maybe so is a rock band’s life. A few minutes later, both were done.” Sonic Youth’s final show in Brazil marked the end of not just one of the best-known indie bands of the 80s and 90s but also the end of Gordon’s marriage to fellow band member Thurston Moore. She opens up about her 30 years as bassist and singer for Sonic Youth and the parallel growth and disintegration of her personal relationship. From the opening paragraphs we know that she will pull back the curtains now that she can bear the gaze, a difficult thing for a self-confessed shy and distrustful individual. It is distinctly her voice throughout––words written so you can’t help but hear that deadpan delivery she does so well on Kool Thing––which adds weight to the insights she exposes to the reader.

Sonic Youth, London, 1993 Photo by Geraint Lewis/REX

Gordon takes us on a journey that examines the influence of her upbringing in LA, her time spent living in Hawaii and Hong Kong, which formed the sense of ‘outsider’ and ‘other’ that would drive her creatively. She reflects on the experiences that eventually drove her to New York, the place where her artistic and musical morés collided. The book lists a plethora of influences on Gordon’s creativity and processes and the many artists who she came to work with, perform with and with whom she built strong bonds. Moving through the art world friendships of Danny Elfman, Dan Graham and Richard Prince through to seeing the last of the ‘No Wave’ bands in New York such as DNA and Mars, she draws us a map of how the sound and visual concepts of Sonic Youth came to be.

She gifts us with her take on Sonic Youth’s most significant songs and albums, why the dissonance in their sound feels to her like both freedom and realism at once. Gordon names the best gig she’s ever seen and paints a vivid picture of travelling with other great bands of the era. The sheer volume of bands they toured with––Swans, The Bad Seeds, The Meat Puppets, Neil Young, Nirvana, Pavement––gives any fan a chance to review their ‘desert island’ list and compare how many of them are on it.

This book gives a real sense of Gordon’s complexity as an artist and how the role is at once all consuming and simultaneously liberating. “ … for a performer that’s what a stage becomes: a space you can fill up with what can’t be expressed or gotten anywhere else.” While the English press may have asked her the same question over and over again, Kim Gordon was, and continues to be, more than just a girl in a band.