Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon

Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon, 273 pages.

A lot of the stories,vignettes, and the people in them in Gordon's memoir lead you to beleive that the author assumes that the reader knows a fair amount about her, about Sonic Youth, the band she co-founded, and about her ex-husband, Thurston. This was not the case for me, I'm aware of the band, but am not familiar with their music, nor did I know anything about Gordon. She's an interesting writer, and her interests range widely. Gordon is an accomplished visual artist, has had her own fashion line,  worked on a number of interesting and groundbreaking projects in No Wave and Alternative music (and she does seem to care way more than I do about the difference between punk, hardcore, new wave, no wave, and alternative).
Gordon met and worked with a lot of interesting people, but most of them come and go quickly in her account. Her paranoid-schizophrenic older brother looms large in her life, as does her Sonic Youth co-founder and husband (now ex-husband), Thurston Moore. There's an odd, "I don't want to talk about it" vibe to Gordon's account of her marriage's end, and Sonic Youth, and touring and performing with the band don't seem to be the focus of her life or of this book.
An interesting account of one artist's life, and a great portrait of the New York art and music scenes in the eighties and nineties.
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