Verbal Magazine

Musical Musings

Although the events depicted in Kristin Hersh’s debut publication are often troubling, the strength of her voice throughout the book never falters. 

When I meet Hersh in Dublin’s Buswells Hotel I find her to be just as engaging as her narration suggests. The interview turns into a wonderful, warm chat and we are also joined by Billy O’Connell, her husband and manager of twenty years.
Hersh’s enthralling memoir Paradoxical Undressing is based on a diary the singer kept over one year, from ’85 to ’86, when she was eighteen. At the start of this period Hersh had been playing with seminal punk band Throwing Muses for four years, attending university for three and living out of her car or crashing in abandoned houses since her parents divorced. The diary chronicles, on one hand, a very happy period during which Throwing Muses are 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 often the highlights of the book. On the other hand, the memoir sees Hersh’s crushing descent into the depths of a debilitating nervous breakdown, which subsequently leaves her with a diagnosis of Bi Polar Disorder. To top things off, 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 if the diary itself is something she 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,’ Hersh explains, ‘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. Having been told by her editor that the first draft of the book wasn’t readable enough, Hersh needed to change it. ‘I ended up yelling at the manuscript for a week (after I spoke to the editor) and when I got 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. 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 with flashbacks from her childhood, including memories of her father teaching her the guitar, which she had an average appreciation of, until being knocked down by what she calls ‘a witch in a Chevy’. When Hersh woke up in the hospital with a head injury she was haunted by songs that played so noisily and violently in her head that she had to get them out. At one point she tried to achieve this with a blade - but mostly through writing the music she has become renowned for. When I ask her, 25 years on, if this still happens, she answers in the affirmative. Hersh hears songs and music everywhere. Which explains why, to date, she has written and recorded forty new songs for Throwing Muses, twenty for her other band 50 Foot Wave, as well as her expanding list of solo material. She is a music making machine.
Much to the delight of anyone who has read Paradoxical Undressing and finished the book wanting more, Hersh is now back to the late night writing process. Her newest writing project is another memoir that continues the story three years on from the first and, if it’s anything like this one, will be another spellbinding read.
Paradoxical Undressing is available now, published by Atlantic Books.

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