Andrew Petrie has written the Bookend column for this week’s magazine. Here it is an exclusive for readers of this blog.
‘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 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.
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