Rat Girl

July 12, 2010
In this rambling and unremarkable journal of the year 1985–1986 in the life of an 18-year-old musician in Providence, R.I., Hersh tells of her coping with the sensory-overload of manic-depression and pregnancy. The daughter of divorced hippie intellectuals, raised in Georgia, Hersh crashed in a messy, rat-infested house of painters, attended classes at a Catholic college where her philosophy professor father (called Dude) taught, and fronted the rock band Throwing Muses. Young Hersh was shy and a little too squeaky clean for some of the grungy venues the band played; her unlikely best friend at school was the older movie star Betty Hutton, "a warm heart in a cold world," who had returned to school for a master's degree, and often drew on her famous life story for cautionary lessons. Hersh began having perception difficulties on stage, first because she refused to wear her glasses; she then started having visions that involved snakes and colorful sounds. These manic episodes were finally diagnosed by mental health professionals as evidence of bipolar disorder. On lithium, Hersh grew shaky and bloated; her band pushed to move to Boston, with hopes of recording. Hersh unexpectedly became pregnant and had to face grownup concerns way before she was ready, which she chronicles in flat, sophomoric prose.

Starred review from August 1, 2010

Funny, quirky coming-of-age story from a unique musical artist.

For her first work of nonfiction, Hersh (Toby Snax, 2007), best known as founder and principal songwriter of art-rock band Throwing Muses, revisited the journal she kept from the winter of 1985 through the spring of 1986, when her band made the critical decision to leave provincial Rhode Island and join Boston's thriving music scene. It was a monumental year for Hersh personally, as well. At 18, she was a bit of an oddball. Hit by a car some years before, she started hearing—and seeing—music that she felt compelled to get out of her head and into the world. Other eccentricities may have preceded the accident: her dislike of being indoors, her refusal to wear glasses or lenses during shows so as not to make eye contact with her audiences, her need to swim in any available pool, with or without the permission of the owner. In the summer of 1985, Hersh suffered a frightening breakdown and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Refreshingly, though the book is not the kind of memoir that lingers in angst, perhaps because Hersh prefers to keep her delightfully childlike focus outward. Drawn to other outsiders, she had become close friends with one of her college-professor father's favorite students, the former movie star Betty Hutton, who, then in her 60s, had become a devout Catholic and had nominally renounced her Hollywood past. One of the narrative's many charms is Hersh's apparently effortless, razor-sharp portraiture of the diverse characters in her life: Hutton; her former-hippie parents; her bandmates; a parade of music journalists, an Indian psychiatrist (Dr. Seven Syllables, she names him) who helped her navigate her illness without medication upon learning she was pregnant by an unnamed lover; the British record-label owner and his producer who took great pains to get her genius on tape.

A thoroughly engrossing work by an original voice—hopefully the first of many.

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August 1, 2010
Hersh, who founded the band the Throwing Muses in the 1980s, explores the mysterious, volatile nature of both creativity and mental balance in this flinty, dreamlike memoir of her precocious, unconventional teens. As her band gains recognition, Hersh is diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and with riveting prose, she describes episodes of burning energy in which music comes in both sound and color and demands to be written: My job, as it turns out, is only to shut up and listen. Prescription drugs mute the process, but after she becomes pregnant and chooses to have the child, Hersh tries life without meds. Song lyrics and diary entries mix with Hershs memories, which read more like poetic, sometimes satiric impressions rather than traditional autobiography. Whether she is describing her childhood with hippie parents (Dude and Crane), her wildly diverse friends (including Betty, an aging, self-proclaimed former Hollywood star), or childbirth classes with grimly competitive yuppies, Hersh presents a refreshingly raw, insightful, and singular coming-of-age story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)