Kathleen Hanna has led such a high-octane life that her memoir wouldn't need to be especially well written to hold reader interest. As it happens, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk delivers on both the sentence and the story fronts.
Born in 1968, Hanna grew up "at the lower end of middle class," bouncing between suburbs in Oregon and Maryland. Her father's alcoholism blighted a childhood redeemed by Hanna's youthful epiphany: "I had something to live for. I was a good singer." Despite a minefield of challenges, including being the victim of sexual violence, Hanna got into and graduated from Washington's Evergreen State College. In Olympia, she played in a couple of punk bands before becoming "indie famous" fronting Bikini Kill, in which she finally had bandmates who didn't consider "my 'domestic violence/feminist stuff' annoying"; meanwhile, she was a force behind the feminist-punk Riot Grrrl movement. In 1998, Hanna quit Bikini Kill, tired of the fishbowl life, male violence at gigs, and hostility from women who felt she wasn't leading the feminist charge perfectly. Rebel Girl takes readers up to the present, which, following a debilitating stretch with Lyme disease, finds Hanna in a good place.
The book's hundred-odd chapters, many with punch-line-like endings, conjure Bikini Kill songs: they come on like a storm and are over before people know what hit them. Rebel Girl is the kind of book that leaves readers, like concertgoers after watching their favorite band play its last song, wishing it wasn't over. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer