To say that Liz Phair is an important voice of my generation is an understatement. That being said, I really didn’t know who she was when I was a teenager (beyond a certain Rolling Stone cover), preferring male-fronted bands really to any of the great Nineties bands that were helmed by or featured women. I’ve since corrected that mistake.

It took me a while to get around to her memoir, Horror Stories, which came out in 2019. I knew about it, had listened to an interview with her about it, and even put it on my TBR, but for whatever reason that’s where it sat. Well, until a few weeks ago when I was poking around and someone I know mentioned it in some post or another.

Forgive me for the badly phrased vague language here. I don’t remember who mentioned it or where; all I know is that I saw that and immediately put a hold on it at the library.

Anyway, Horror Stories is titled a memoir, but it’s not a memoir in the autobiography sense. Sure, the titular stories that Phair tells are true and they are from her own life, but it’s more of a collection of essays than a chronological narrative of her life and career. As you go through the book, you jump around to various points and places, with Phair sticking to a topic or title and a story that goes along with it. This makes it easy to put down and pick up, since there’s not a lot of continuity between chapters.

I didn’t realize this going in, so I was a little surprised at first. But that settled down pretty quickly, and having read autobiographic essay collections time and time again from a ton of authors, I was good. And I have to say that it’s a format that suited the writer. Phair has a good conversational tone to her writing along with a gift for vivid description and hitting the right mood. Okay, that last item is kind of a given; after all, she’s a musician. But really, some people don’t translate across different media, and those flaws show up really easily. Phair doesn’t have that problem. She also knew exactly what stories to choose and what to tell her reader.

What does she tell us? Well, it’s hard to get too much into specifics without making this too long of an entry. I can say that she deliberately goes for the more unflattering material in here: reckless youth stories, affairs that affected both her and someone’s marriages. She also goes for the very dark: sexual harrassment that she’s faced in the music industry, including a lengthy piece about an unnamed producer with whom she never finished an album, especially after details of his treatment and assault of women he worked with surfaced (it’s not hard to figure out that it’s Ryan Adams, btw). Throughout, she’s brutally honest, even knowing that some of the things that she does are going to make her unlikable in some way.

I appreciated that honesty. And what I appreciated about this book was that Phair is way more … well, normal than I expected her to be. I guess when your only exposure to someone is their rock and roll persona, the idea that they are a person from the suburbs who is now middle aged (she’s turning 60 next year) and has gone through a lot of the shit that so many other non-rock stars have is kind of refreshing. It certainly make her relatable, even though she’s about a billion times cooler than I ever will be.

Read or Skip?

Read.