Rebel Girl

Hanna, lead singer of the punk feminist band Bikini Kill, debuts with a no-holds-barred account of her turbulent life. Growing up with a violent, alcoholic father who once threatened suicide, Hanna began singing as an artistic outlet in college. After her roommate was attacked by a man, Hanna trained as a volunteer at a domestic violence shelter, awakening feminist convictions that she explored in punk band Viva Knievel and—starting in 1991—in Bikini Kill. Later chapters discuss the somewhat accidental origins of riot grrrl, a feminist punk movement that elicited anger from male concertgoers and sexist takes from the media (she’d held the meeting that established it partly to find writers for her zine). Also recounted are Bikini Kill’s late-1990s breakup (they’d go on to reunite in 2017 and 2019), and Hanna’s tenure as frontwoman for the band Le Tigre in 1999, a period during which she gained a measure of healing; though she’d informally counseled women about sexual abuse for years, she’d never processed her own traumas, including abuse by her father, stalkings, and rapes (“I just kept overworking and stuffing it down”). While the narrative feels unstructured in places—early performances, creative tensions between bandmembers, and feminist musings blend together—Hanna’s visceral prose captivates, and she’s refreshingly candid about the riot grrrl movement’s failures, including its whiteness and her “tokenistic” efforts to diversify it (at one workshop, she realized that “BIPOC women were as disappointed in white punk feminists as I’d been by white male punks”). It’s a raw and revealing portrait of a vital figure in the feminist punk scene. (May)