ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
As a child of the Pacific Northwest, I've always thought of the musician Neko Case as one of ours. Her solo records and her albums with the band the New Pornographers sound to me like they come from the gray skies and green hills of Washington state where she grew up.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I WISH I WAS THE MOON")
NEKO CASE: (Singing) I'm so tired. I'm so tired, and I wish I was the moon tonight.
SHAPIRO: Neko Case's new memoir paints her upbringing as something out of a dark fairy tale, where adults are wicked and animals come to the rescue. Here she is reading from her book "The Harder I Fight The More I Love You."
CASE: (Reading) As a kid, it seemed so obvious that there was a violent force breathing hard behind us, dragging itself, wounded and angry, toward us faster than we could run. Eventually, my parents were destroyed by it, but nobody would tell me its name or where it had come from. No wonder I went looking in all these old folk tales trying to find the answers. No wonder I wanted to turn myself into a creature who knew all the answers.
SHAPIRO: Neko Case was born to teenagers who weren't ready to be parents, and she begins her memoir with a shocking episode involving her mother. As she writes - (reading) a stunt so bizarre I'm reluctant to even tell it, as it's completely unbelievable.
Her father, sobbing, told young Neko, your mommy died. But that wasn't true.
CASE: She faked her death, and she went to live in Hawaii. And I thought she was dead. My father thought she was dead. My stepfather thought she was dead. And I even went to a wake that my grandmother had at her house for my mother. So I thought my mother had died for a year and a half, two years.
SHAPIRO: And when you were told that she actually wasn't dead and that she had come back?
CASE: I was just so excited she was back that I didn't really care what the reasoning was. I just was so depressed and so sad that I just - I was like, OK, I don't have to be depressed and sad anymore. So I didn't question it. And also, you know, I was in third grade.
SHAPIRO: Sure. And it also seems like it had you walking on eggshells.
CASE: Yeah. She said she had come back for me, but she wasn't really around much. And so I kind of put two and two together after a while that, like, I kind of had to be an extra-good kid to keep her around, which I didn't manage to do.
SHAPIRO: Because she was never going to stay around, no matter what kind of a kid you were.
CASE: Exactly. Like, she just didn't want kids, which is absolutely valid and acceptable, but to go to such lengths to not have a kid is really, you know, driving it home in a way that is really hard to come back from. When you try to find yourself on the map of where you are, you have to consider everything that's gone before you. I am a white settler child of immigrants, and there's something about the way indigenous people here in North America talk about their ancestors and their ancestors being present that I really wish I had, that I don't.
SHAPIRO: And yet the fact that your family never talked about themselves allows you to make some discoveries late in life that are really quite wonderful - like your grandmother.
CASE: Yeah. Old Silent Clam herself, my grandmother
SHAPIRO: (Laughter) Old Silent Clam herself.
CASE: (Laughter) Yeah. She never talked about herself.
SHAPIRO: But you learned...
CASE: I learned that she was in a harmony-singing band with her brother. And, you know, I think I'd made, like, three records by then. And then one day, she's like, oh, yes, I was in a band with Edwin (ph). And I'm like, what? What are you talking about? Why wouldn't I want to have known that (laughter)? I don't know. You know, she just was like, I don't know.
SHAPIRO: How did that shape your understanding of who you are and where you come from?
CASE: It shaped the part that says, you'll never know where you come from because nobody's going to tell you (laughter) unless you accidentally bring it up. Like, I didn't know I had an aunt who was a big-time wrestler either...
SHAPIRO: Right.
CASE: ...Until I questioned my grandmother about it. I was like, do we have a relative? Oh, yes. Elsie (ph) - she was a wrestler, very famous. And I was just like, what? Why wouldn't you tell me that either?
SHAPIRO: You didn't grow up dreaming of being a singer-songwriter or a band leader. And in fact, when you did start making music, it was as the drummer. You say that - making music could become a physical manifestation of the blazing, wild-horse energy inside my body.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MAYBE SPARROW")
CASE: (Singing) Notes are hung so effortless with the rise and fall of sparrow's breast.
SHAPIRO: Can you describe what that feels like?
CASE: Well, drumming is very different from singing, but you need your whole body to do both of the things. It's a continuous movement where you're constantly changing what your body is doing. But there's this constant clench that's happening, and it feels really good because it's also releasing something.
SHAPIRO: Right.
CASE: And I've never tried to describe drumming to people before. That one seems...
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
CASE: Think of the visual and think of how good that looks like it must feel, and it does.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter) That's perfect. It's perfect. It feels exactly how it looks. I've never drummed, but I totally understand what you mean by that (laughter).
CASE: It really feels fantastic.
SHAPIRO: You know, a lot of memoirs that excavate stories of trauma have some kind of larger moral or lesson, and there is a moment in this book when you say bad things aren't always teaching you a lesson, which is a tough thing to absorb. And I wonder what the journey was that you took to get to that place.
CASE: Well, there's a lot of talk with trauma, especially when dealing with, you know, trauma that's held by women, where you are told that forgiving the situation or the person makes you a better person - that you're the better person if you do that. And it's not true at all. It's kind of used as a way to make us let go of the truth of that particular situation. Forgiveness itself is one of the most beautiful things in the world, but it is not something that you perform. It's its own, you know, organic state of being. You know, working through things and forgiving someone naturally because you want to or because that's really how you feel is great, but I don't think forgiveness as a blanket solution is at all healthy. There's absolutely room for people's rage. And I think that validating your own rage is much more important than trying to follow some prescribed path of forgiveness.
SHAPIRO: Well, Neko Case, it's really been a pleasure talking with you. Thank you for your candor and your openness.
CASE: Thank you. I appreciate it.
SHAPIRO: Her memoir, "The Harder I Fight The More I Love You," is out tomorrow.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PITCH OR HONEY")
CASE: (Singing) Hey, I love you better when you're wild. Suits you better if I say so. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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