Musical Musings: An Interview With Kristin Hersh

An interview that is one of my fondest memories, on the weekend of the launch of Kristin Hersh’s gripping memoir Paradoxical Undressing I caught up with the Throwing Muses front woman for Verbal before its demise to discuss the diary the book is based on, her lifelong love affair with music and the fascinating characters she has met along the way.

 

Although the period of Kristin Hersh's life that Paradoxical Undressing is based on was in many ways deeply troubling, her voice remains sweet and endearing throughout. When I meet Hersh in Dublin’s Buswells Hotel I find her to be just as engaging as the narration throughout the book. The interview turns into a wonderful warm chat and we are also joined by Billy O’Connell, her husband and manager of 20 years.

Hersh’s enthralling memoir Paradoxical Undressing is based on a diary the singer kept over one year, from 1985 to 1986, when she was 18. By the start of this period she had been playing with seminal punk band Throwing Muses for four years, attending university for three and had been living out of her car or crashing in abandoned houses since her parents divorced.

The diary chronicles, on one hand, a very happy period where Throwing Muses gets signed by a record label and Hersh is surrounded by a very like-minded group of people – most notably her fellow band mates and her college friend and former Hollywood starlet Betty Hutton. The scenes between Hutton - who she refers to as “an alternative grandmother figure”-  and Hersh are among the highlights of the book. On the other hand, the memoir sees Hersh’s crushing descent into a nervous breakdown which subsequently leaves her with a diagnosis of Bi Polar. Following this, she also finds out she is pregnant with her first child and the book closes with the birth of her son Dylan.

Considering the contents of the diary were, in many ways, a harrowing reminder of a truly distressing time for the singer, I ask was this something she had carried around with her all this time. “Yeah I did, I was always afraid he (points to husband Billy) would pick it up and read it. You didn’t, did you?” “I respect your privacy” he replies, with a smile. “We lost all of our books in a flood in 2005 and the diary was one of them, I just happened to know it very well, it wasn’t very long, it just covered all of what this covers. It was just a little notebook.” “You called it a bad luck charm”, says Billy. “Yeah, it chronicled a year that I didn’t want to exist so I thought if I carried it around with me then history wouldn’t repeat itself. I thought the smarter I got the better able I was to understand it and wrap my head around it and make sure it didn’t happen again.”

Several years ago a team of writers approached Hersh and “offered to ghost write memoirs for me and I thought I could do it better without having to talk about feelings.” When she started the writing process she found it eye-opening. “I didn’t know I had all those memories, some of the people in it are dead and I had to remember all of their idiosyncrasies and the quality of their voices but you can - especially at 4am - and I wanted to because I missed them and I missed that time, which is weird because I thought I hated that time.”

However, considering Hersh is a musician by nature, the process of writing the book took time to get used to and was not without incident itself. Having been told by her editor that the first draft of the book wasn’t too readable, Hersh was told she needed to change it. “I ended up yelling at the manuscript for a week (after I spoke to the editor) and, when I get home from the tour I was on, I put the manuscript on my desk and just thought I can’t face this without a beer so I went to the kitchen, got a beer, opened it - which takes what, thirty seconds - and in this time my dog had completely destroyed the manuscript. She had never done anything like that before. So destroyed you couldn’t read it anymore, it was spread all over the room, chewed up, dog slobber on all of the editor’s comments. My son showed up at the same time and stood there frozen; he didn’t know what I was going to do but I just said ‘good dog’.” Hersh then went on to write the book that she wanted to write and, by the time she brought it back to the editor, the destroyed notes were forgotten and Hersh hadn’t sacrificed anything of what time had meant to her.

The diary is spliced intermittently by flashbacks of her childhood including memories of her father teaching her the guitar, which she had an average appreciation of until one day she gets knocked down by what she calls a witch in a Chevy. When she wakes up in the hospital with a head injury she describes being from then on chased by songs that play so noisily and violently in her head at times that she has to get them out - at one point with a blade - but mostly through writing the songs she has become known for. When I ask her, 25 years on, does this still happen, I find out it does. She hears songs and music everywhere. Which would explains how, at the moment, she has written and recorded forty new songs for Throwing Muses, twenty for her other band 50 Foot Wave, as well as solo material. She is a music making machine.

Much to the delight of anyone who has read Paradoxical Undressing and who finished the book wanting more, Hersh is now back to the late night writing process she became fond of putting this book together with another memoir that follows up the story three years later and, if it’s anything like this one, it will make for another spellbinding read.

Paradoxical Undressing is available now and is published by Atlantic Books.