One morning, when she was about 7 years old, Neko Case stood on her front porch, closed her eyes and wished with all her might to see a horse. It was a tall order. She and her parents lived in the coastal city of Bellingham, Wash., and none of their neighbors were equestrians. But, as the musician recalls in her new memoir, “The Harder I Fight the More I Love You,” the young Case “clench-focused as hard as I could,” and when she opened her eyes, something incredible had happened: Two gorgeous horses, ridden by two girls, came clomping directly toward her. In the midst of a difficult childhood, this stands out as one fleeting moment when she believed irrefutably in miracles, fairy tales and the possibility that good things could happen to her. At 52 years old, she can still see the horses clear as day.
A cult-favorite singer-songwriter with a gale-force voice and a spiky, irreverent personality, Case has been releasing acclaimed solo and collaborative albums for nearly three decades, and has built an adoring fan base. But readers don’t need to be familiar with her music to be moved by her raw, unflinching memoir, which chronicles her impoverished and at times surreal upbringing as well as her long journey toward self-confidence. It’s a book that mixes defiant humor with an unsentimental resilience that recalls Cheryl Strayed.
I wasn’t going to go tabloid, Case said with a dry shrug, sitting in a booth at the Cosmic Diner in Manhattan on a recent, chilly Saturday morning. I never had sex with famous people, so.
Still, the book depicts her early life as a minefield of emotional trauma. In a phone interview, A.C. Newman, her longtime bandmate in the power-pop group the New Pornographers, recalled a mutual friend once marveling of Case, “For her to achieve what she’s done, considering where she came from, it’s like winning a marathon with one leg.
Her mother flickered in and out of her life for the next several decades, but even when they were living under the same roof, Case came to experience her mother like “a deer, always just out of reach,” she writes.
After a final, failed attempt at reconnection when Case was in her late 30s — her mother moved in with her when she was living in Tucson and suddenly left without a word — Case cut ties with her mother for good. Shortly after, as she writes in the book, she had a revelation: Perhaps her mother had never been sick at all. The thought was at once crushing and profoundly liberating.
There was much I could have forgiven, she writes. But it was the grift of her that ground that down — that love held out to dance before me, always snatched back just as I reached out my arms for it.
I guess I was an over-sharer out of desperation, like, ‘Please, notice me,” Case said, noting that there is nothing in the book about her childhood that her closest friends do not already know.
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