Girl in a Band: A Memoir Audiobook by Kim Gordon
Kim Gordon's Girl in a Band is a cool, clear-eyed memoir from a founder of Sonic Youth, as much about being a woman in a man's scene and an artist who fell into music as it is about the band. It opens with the breakup that ended both her marriage and the group.
Why the audiobook wins
Kim Gordon reading her own memoir is the whole pitch: her voice is as controlled and watchful as her bass playing, exactly the cool, unsentimental register the book needs. Rachel Kushner joins the narration as well, and the pairing suits a memoir that's less interested in a conventional rock arc than in Gordon's eye for art, image, and the long discomfort of being looked at.
This is a book that opens with an ending, Sonic Youth's final show and a marriage dissolving in real time, and hearing Gordon narrate her own grief in a voice that refuses to perform it is a different experience than reading it cold. At just over seven hours, it's a tight, well-paced listen for anyone who wants the Sonic Youth story told by the person who actually lived inside the band's image-making.
Few music memoirs let you hear the artist's own restraint this directly. Seven hours, one Audible credit, and a founding member of one of alternative rock's most important bands narrating her own reckoning.
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