Kathleen Hanna has always been dead serious and slyly funny at once. More perspicacious than angry invective alone, that alchemy of tones has been her signature since the early ’90s, when a 20-something Hanna fronted Bikini Kill, the punk band that became the most visible act associated with the third-wave feminist movement known as riot grrrl. “Suck my left one,” she growled, in the face of an abuser, on one of their most famous tracks. Her subsequent solo project, Julie Ruin, conjured visions of a subversive, scrunchie-wearing “valley girl intelligentsia” over a bouncy surf beat. And at the turn of the millennium, she pivoted to dance-punk with the trio Le Tigre, executing synchronized choreography while channeling Fred Flintstone (“Yabba-dabba-dabba-doo, man”) in a song with the sarcastic title “Mediocrity Rules.”
Hanna’s new memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk, out May 14, applies that same caustic, introspective, politically astute, and often mischievously playful voice to the ups and downs of her own life story. “There’ve been a lot of situations where I felt like I could roll up in a ball and just cry and cry and cry,” she explains, over the phone from Southern California. “And I do cry. But then I start to find the funny in the tragic.” In the book, “I hope I struck a balance between being able to laugh at myself and be serious, because I didn’t want to make light of stuff like I usually did.” In her first draft, “all the rape stuff was really funny.” But the final product, achieved only after an overdue stint in trauma therapy, contains moving yet incisive, generously frank passages about the sexual assaults she survived as a teen and young adult.
This is one aspect of her origin story that will likely be familiar to fans, who have over the years gleaned a sketchy timeline of her life, from difficult childhood to ’90s notoriety to a diagnosis of late-stage Lyme disease that sidelined her for years following…
