In The Harder I Fight the More I Love You (Grand Central, Jan.), musician Neko Case chronicles her journey to find meaning from from her troubled childhood through the dawn of her career.
When you were young, your mother arranged for you to be told she’d died of cancer. Later, you learned that wasn’t true. What did you come to understand from that horrible hoax?
I learned a lot about myself from it, like what kind of fabrications I was willing to uphold so it wouldn’t be true that my mom didn’t love me. It’s very sad. Finding out that your parents don’t love you, especially at a young age, is kind of too much. Realizing that I was this problem for them was very scarring.
Were you surprised about anything that you recalled as you were writing this book?
I dug deep to remember the good times, and there were more good times than I thought there were—I managed to dig up some really lovely things from childhood. If you’ve been through lots of trauma, sometimes you’re in fight-or-flight mode, and your trauma center is alert. I was really happy to go back and think of some of the things that I really enjoyed as a kid, like the time my parents got me a puppy, which I named Buffy Saint-Marie.
How would you compare songwriting with writing prose?
When you’re writing a song, you want there to be gaps that hint at what the sense is. You don’t spell it out because you want the listener to insert themselves into the story. Whereas with a book, you want to be clear: you want the story to make complete sense to people. It was a real challenge. Usually, when I’m writing a song, I’m not writing completely about myself; I tend to take fragments of myself and spin them into stories. On the new record that isn’t done yet, there are some explicitly autobiographical things, which I don’t do very often.
In the book, you refer to music as a “soft rebellion.” Could you expand on what you mean by that?
It’s a rebellion that doesn’t hurt anyone. It’s a rebellion that makes good electricity instead of bad. It’s a rebellion that comforts people rather than breaks things down. When I make music, I want to be the voice in the dark that makes people feel like they’re not alone. I want them to feel like the song also belongs to them, and they can fit themselves into the song. I remember listening to music as a teenager, feeling like my parents didn’t understand me and I was all alone. But I was willing to listen to musicians, and I felt like they understood me, and that gave me a solid sense of not being alone.
