THE HARDER I FIGHT THE MORE I LOVE YOU

The alt-rock and country singer recalls childhood abuse, misogyny, and a wayward path to success.

Case’s memoir is informed by injustice, betrayal, and the serial mistreatment of women. Growing up in Washington state, her family was a study in dysfunction; when she was in second grade, she was told that cancer had killed her mother, who returned home a year-and-a-half later, apparently cured. (She wouldn’t get the full story till years later.) Date-raped at 14, Case spent her teens and 20s in a drug-addled world, then all but stumbled onto a music career. Though her experiences are despondent, the tone of this well-turned book is lively and often funny. That’s partly because Case has a songwriter’s gift for potent imagery. Her parents started out “poor as empty acorns” and drove a car that “looked like a nauseous basking shark”; during winters in Chicago, where her career took off, she felt the “wind hammering in like a bouquet of cold fists”; at a soundcheck, her voice “sounds like it’s being piped through a thrift-store whale’s carcass into a pirate’s wet diaper.” That imagination and wit speak to the other prevailing theme in the memoir, the element that gives it a lift: Case’s observations of her hard-won resilience. By turns, that has meant processing the psychic damage of her rape and her family’s betrayals, a disastrous fit of heatstroke at the Grand Ole Opry, an even-worse encounter with country legend (and overt bigot) Charlie Louvin, and more. Case chronicles her various career achievements as a singer-songwriter (including three Grammy nominations), but those feel almost secondary to her study of her emotional growth, which she discusses with a rare candor. “There are moments so lonely they become like personal national parks,” she writes, but the life of a touring musician is irresistible: “It’s both harder than the myth and also contains a more terrible, crunchy joy.”

A sweet-and-sour study of a songwriter’s coming-of-age.