In this book’s prologue, Liz Phair explains that the book is about “the small indignities we all suffer daily, the silent insults to our system, the callous gestures we make toward one another” (4). These are everyday horror stories, for some definition of “everyday”: affairs, relationship troubles, performance mishaps, brushes with danger. As others have noted, this isn’t really a music-centric memoir, but I was fine with that. Phair’s writing has some clunky moments (like when she describes people temporarily without air-conditioning as stuck in their “stultifying domiciles”), but overall I found this very readable, the kind of book where I kept pausing to tell my fiancé about what I’d just read.
As a New Yorker who missed the 2003 blackout (I was living in Massachusetts that summer) I thoroughly enjoyed Phair’s chapter about it, which she starts by talking about how she was “spellbound by the sight of an unlit Central Park at sunset. Dusk is falling, but there are no streetlights illuminating the sidewalks, no traffic signals changing from red to green” (80). I like how the blackout is presented as a moment of potential discomfort and danger but also a moment of chance connections, and how it’s juxtaposed with Phair realizing that she and her guitar player “are into each other”, though he’s dating someone else (81).
I also really liked the chapter where Phair is on a plane and the flight attendant tells her there’s someone on board who knows her and wants to say hi; it turns out to be a guy from her hometown who had a leg amputated after an accident. Phair thinks this guy “probably doesn’t get out that much” and thinks about how to make sure their interaction is fun and positive, and then has to laugh at herself when her assumptions turn out to be totally wrong (116). (He tells her he’s been touring as a competitive wheelchair athlete and his schedule has been packed, and then hilariously gets her to help him out by carrying his prosthetic leg through the airport so he can make his connecting flight.)
And I loved “Red Bird Hollow”, the chapter where Phair writes about how she and her brother would spend time with their grandparents in Ohio. I like how Phair captures moments of connection with nature (feeding the horses in the barn, finding toadstools and birds’ eggs and wild blackberries). And the chapter’s central story, which is about climbing up a tall pine tree, is totally gripping.
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