Bipolar exploration

‘I’m not writing songs anymore; they’re writing me.’ Plagued by music in her head that arrived unbidden, drowning out conversation, Kristin Hersh was diagnosed with bipolar disorder just as psychologists stopped calling it ‘manic depression’. Always on the lookout for a mentally ill musician to acclaim as a genius, the British music press adopted Hersh and her band Throwing Muses in the late 1980s even as their native America remained indifferent.

Paradoxical Undressing (Atlantic Books, £18.99) is a memoir based on the diary Hersh kept as a teenager in the mid-Eighties, and tells a good story: precociously bright girl attempts suicide, lands a record deal and finds herself pregnant, all within the space of a year. Whether that year was worth revisiting in such punishing detail over 322 pages will be up to the reader, though lithium hasn’t affected Hersh’s turn of phrase: an antique synthesizer ‘sits onstage, drooling, like a demented robot friend’; hanging out with aging record company execs is ‘like going to Vegas — not funny enough’.