Seeing Sideways: a Memoir of Music and Motherhood

March 1, 2021
The rock musician recalls episodes from her prolific and unconventional career--as a mom. Throwing Muses founder Hersh won accolades for her memoir Rat Girl (2010) and her tribute to her friend and colleague Vic Chesnutt, Don't Suck, Don't Die (2015). Here, the author follows up with stories of raising Doony, Ryder, Wyatt and Bodhi, the sons of her 25-year marriage to her former manager, Billy O'Connell. (They divorced in 2013; O'Connell appears in these pages as "the man.") In one of the first of many stream-of-consciousness anecdotes punctuated by lines from her songs, Hersh's infant son is taken away by the authorities. However, as with the many other crises the singer faces in the three-decade period covered by the text, everything turns out OK. House fire and flood, a horrifying accident on a mountain road, and a jellyfish attack appear on the more alarming extreme of the disaster continuum; on the lighter end, there's a show where the audience was so high the band was terrified and a few ridiculous experiences with music videos and late-night TV. Throughout the book, there are excerpts of an interview with a journalist who moved in with the family for a while; some of the most memorable lines occur in these snippets: "Everyone knows a Grammy is an award for a marketing department, but they don't always see that their opinions are too"; "The only true cultural shifts are small fish, small pond. After that, an honest movement is an organic snowballing effect: an idea spreads when its time has come....We aren't a culture, we're an economy. We mimic an impression of cultures we've heard of, but our system is a pickpocket talking at your face while it reaches behind you for your wallet." Dates are never mentioned, and major events are often wrapped in gauze or left out--but you just have to go with the flow. Inimitable, unsinkable, kooky, and full of love for her boys.

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