“Growing up as a neglected girl helped me learn about the relationship between humans and nature is not to [let humans] subjugate it,” Neko Case told the crowd on Saturday, April 5 at the Recital Hall of the University of Iowa Voxman Music Building. “Plants and animals are not secondary. I get so much from my relationship with the natural world.”
Case, a Grammy-nominated singer from Washington state, was a headlining musician at last year’s Mission Creek Festival. She was invited back to Iowa City this spring to discuss her recent memoir, The Harder I Fight The More I Love You, as part of Mission Creek’s literary lineup.
The onstage conversation with the New Pornographers singer was hosted by bestselling author Melissa Febos, a professor in the UI Creative Nonfiction program. Now a touring author, Case talked about the physical demands of being on a music tour versus the intellectual energy required to talk about her memoir in front of an audience. “Thinking can also be exhausting,” she said.
She described writing the book as a mysterious, often erratic process. “I wanted to write about the days when you feel lost and go down a rabbit hole as well as those moments of bliss when you work for three days nonstop.”
When she was first approached by publisher Hachette to write a book, Case said she assumed it was the novel-writing opportunity she’d always dreamed of. Instead, the offer was for a memoir.
It took some time for Case to be convinced her personal stories were book material. Eventually, she decided on a non-linear storytelling style that matched her creative process.
“I had regular calls with my editor who would instead give me prompts,” she said. “Those prompts helped me see an apparently boring moment with different eyes. She helped me gain perspective and give richness to a story that didn’t have to be told in a linear way.”
The Harder I Fight the More I Love You covers stories from Case’s troubled and occasionally bizarre childhood in the Pacific Northwest, including her legal emancipation at the age of 15. Surfing couches and looking out for herself, Case recalls a time in her teens when she had to defend herself violently from a sexual predator. She said she feels a strange ambivalence about it.
“I’ve been called a monster, but at the same time, had I not reacted that way, I would have died,” she said.
Case survived, and soon found her way to art school in Vancouver. She became immersed in the indie-punk scene, and found her creative language.
“I grew up believing I was nothing,” she writes in the preface, “and sometimes my insignificance wracked me with pain. But luckily, somewhere down the line, I came to realize that if I’m nothing, and I have nothing, what is the real risk of putting myself out there?”
She became fascinated by one topic in particular: Why do some men hate women so much? She read about the silencing of women in Victorian England, and the history of Amazon women. “They were not mythical,” she said. “They used the Scythian bow. They were warriors.” She explored her family’s own history in Ukraine, the Slavic legends her grandmother shared with her.
At the end of Saturday’s reading, Case offered up some encouraging words about the power of women’s creativity and resilience. “We’re not going anywhere.”
