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    Horror Stories: A Memoir
    Unavailable
    Horror Stories: A Memoir
    Unavailable
    Horror Stories: A Memoir
    Ebook332 pages5 hours

    Horror Stories: A Memoir

    By Liz Phair

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The two-time Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter behind the groundbreaking album Exile in Guyville traces her life and career in a genre-bending memoir in stories about the pivotal moments that haunt her.

    “Honest, original and absolutely remarkable.”—NPR (Best Books of the Year)

    When Liz Phair shook things up with her musical debut, Exile in Guyville—making her as much a cultural figure as a feminist pioneer and rock star—her raw candor, uncompromising authenticity, and deft storytelling inspired a legion of critics, songwriters, musicians, and fans alike. Now, like a Gen X Patti Smith, Liz Phair reflects on the path she has taken in these piercing essays that reveal the indelible memories that have stayed with her.
     
    For Phair, horror is in the eye of the beholder—in the often unrecognized universal experiences of daily pain, guilt, and fear that make up our humanity. Illuminating despair with hope and consolation, tempering it all with her signature wit, Horror Stories is immersive, taking readers inside the most intimate junctures of Phair’s life, from facing her own bad behavior and the repercussions of betraying her fundamental values, to watching her beloved grandmother inevitably fade, to undergoing the beauty of childbirth while being hit up for an autograph by the anesthesiologist.
     
    Horror Stories is a literary accomplishment that reads like the confessions of a friend. It gathers up all of our isolated shames and draws them out into the light, uniting us in our shared imperfection, our uncertainty and our cowardice, smashing the stigma of not being in control. But most importantly, the uncompromising precision and candor of Horror Stories transforms these deeply personal experiences into tales about each and every one of us.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateOct 8, 2019
    ISBN9780525511991
    Unavailable
    Horror Stories: A Memoir

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    Reviews for Horror Stories

    3.5/5

    34 ratings4 reviews

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    • 3/5
      In the stories that make up this book, I am trusting you with my deepest self. We spend so much time hiding what we’re ashamed of, denying what we’re wounded by, and portraying ourselves as competent, successful individuals that we don’t always realize where and when we’ve gone missing.

      How foolish we feel in those rare instances when the fog dissipates, the path is clear, and we see our hapless footprints wandering around all over the place. Those are the resolute moments, the sober morning-after reflections when we plant our feet facing in the direction we wish to go and vow never to deviate from honesty, empathy, and inspiration.

      I’ve yet to experience Liz Phair. I’ve not listened to Exit in Guyville, which feels somewhat shameful. I can’t remember it.

      What I will remember is this book.

      Phair writes in frank and straightforward style while saving her flair for short and punchy sentences that ring true of humanism and care for others. Still, she’s not solipsistically hagiographic in her writing; she’s human, she fucks up, she exposes her vulnerabilities.

      I remember one photo shoot I did at the beginning of my career, maybe my first or second ever. Some newspaper in Chicago commissioned it and threw a party for themselves during the session. They laid me out on a fur carpet, wearing nothing but trousers and suspenders over my nipples, while anonymous guests—strangers—sipped cocktails and watched me from the periphery. It was disturbing, like the orgy scene in the film Eyes Wide Shut. I could hear the spectators commenting, but I couldn’t see them very well, because I was under bright lights while they were in the dim candlelit recesses of the studio.

      Some of my lyrics are explicit, so I’m sure they expected me to dance around and be outrageous. But I couldn’t move. I just lay there, a photo-shoot virgin, dull-eyed and mute. I was so freaked out that I retreated inside myself, disconnecting mentally from my surroundings. They were left with an empty shell of a person to work with. It was like bad sex. No one knew what to do about it. I didn’t know how to say no back then. I didn’t have a manager. I had no concept of what was normal for my profession.

      The funny thing was, although I felt exploited and I hated it, it was the way my makeup looked that made me cry afterward. The makeup artist was the nicest, sweetest man, and my only ally in this upsetting situation, so I didn’t have the heart to tell him that his heavy bronzer, nude lips, and spidery fake eyelashes made me feel clownish and ashamed, like a dog wearing a cone collar or one of the last kids to be picked for a PE team. I kept thinking about how many people in the city were going to see me looking like this, and I was devastated.

      There is no lack of content and Phair seems to be acute when putting words to the page, although the results are edited well; her style works with this book, that has chapters that are divided by stories that do not intertwine other than giving structure to who she is, much like bones which make up a skeleton.

      I stand in my dressing room, staring at my naked body. It’s been ravaged by pregnancy: a road map of stretch marks and veins, a sullen little pooch where the baby bump was. I’m the kind of person who notices every microfluctuation in my figure. All I want is to have some control back, to feel like I am the master of my own ship so I can focus on caring for my newborn son. Yet on top of everything, I also have to contend with this stranger I see in the reflection. It’s going to take a lot of work to put myself back together again. My tits are the size of cantaloupes. All of a sudden, milk shoots straight out of both nipples, like bullets out of the fembots in an Austin Powers movie, spraying all over the mirror. I clasp my hands over my chest, trying to stanch the flow, but it squirts out between my fingers. I am horrified, and I have absolutely no idea what to do. Tears springs to my eyes. I cry out for the one person I depend on above all others. “Moooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!”

      Her relationship descriptions sucked me into reading them without pause; the reflections on men, what men think, have said to her, how they’ve expected her to react, how men have harassed her, become married with her, split up from her, befriended her, remained a memory in her mind.

      Some people have compared this book with Patti Smith’s writings; I disagree because Smith is quite obviously fated to write tersely as though directed by the hands of Rimbaud; Smith is a poet, Phair is not. In spite of her tongue swathed in everyday Americana, she succeeds in unapologetic fashion, and the reader is richer for it.

      “Try this.”

      Nate shoves a forkful of pasta into Matt’s mouth.

      “It’s really fucking good.”

      “Oh my God.”

      Matt groans like he’s just tasted Aphrodite’s bathwater.

      So, in the end, what’s it all for? Here I was feeling like a star, and being treated like a star, but what’s important in real life is doing the decent thing. It’s like Camus says in The Plague, that there’s an absurdity to the universe, and you can either do nothing or continue to push to do the best you can. And the best you can do is just do the decent thing. There’s no payoff. The good people of the world are those who, in spite of there being no payoff, do the decent thing anyway. That’s what being human is. That’s the example of a human, being.

      I can remember a time when we’d stay in bed all day having sex, then throw on jeans and T-shirts and meet our friends for dinner. Now when we go out on “date night” (an awful term), I’m anxious the whole time that our son is missing me, that he doesn’t like the babysitter, that he’s crying for any one of a hundred possible reasons and can’t convey his needs well enough yet. Jim is frustrated, but he doesn’t criticize me. It’s a relief when we come home early.

      The thing is, I’m on tour. I’m busy and tired. It is crucial to me that I show up for all my gigs, give my fans a performance they love, and collect my pay. Nothing—not illness, injury, or an act of God—is going to stand in my way. This isn’t some playground on wheels or bacchanalian circus in the sky. This is business, and I take my job very seriously. I don’t have time for the weather to fuck up my itinerary.

      I’m also a mother. My son is entering high school. I need to be there for him, to make sure he’s supervised and has someone to talk to during this vulnerable transition into adulthood. If I have to be out on the road, I’m going to make sure that my time away from home counts. I’m going to crush it every night and leave the audiences cheering. We accomplished that goal at our show tonight. We rocked the house, played the hits, unearthed some rarities. People were hanging over the balconies, singing all the lyrics. It was a total madhouse backstage.

      That was only a few hours ago, and yet it’s hard to believe any of it was real now that I’m out here by myself braving the cold, dark night. The rock-and-roll lifestyle trains you to withstand extremes. One minute you’re partying in a mansion, the next you’re parked in a urine-soaked alley. But the fact that I’m determined to go through this ordeal to get back on track with our schedule goes beyond dedication. It borders on self-punishment.

      I was a sham, a fraud. The world saw me as a renegade, a fearless maverick, and here I was nervous about making the one big jaunt of my day to the grocery store to flirt with a checkout clerk. This Trader Joe’s guy was paid to be friendly. It wasn’t even a challenge. I didn’t care. I needed something to make the pain disappear for half an hour, and this worked. The pot didn’t work, the booze didn’t work, but this did. I would come home from Trader Joe’s on the days I’d seen him feeling happy and attractive, like I had something to look forward to in life. Where was the harm in it? In the grand scheme of things it seemed like an innocent if embarrassing indulgence. What could go wrong?

      All in all, this book is an easy read, provides some thought-worthy moments, and contains some beautiful photographs.
    • 5/5
      Horror Stories:A Memoir by Liz Phair due 10-8-2019 Random House 4.5/5.0 Thanks to Goodreads and the publisher for sending this ARC for review. This is a brilliantly written and completely honest, intimate and endearing memoir. It is refreshing to read a memoir that is more than just facts; one that also shares the personal feelings; personal stories and moments; the courage and despair; the pain and reality that distinguish each of us and make us who we are. Phairs premise was to remind us horror is more than just a scary movie. Its scary actions, based on perception, for horrible reasons.She successfully does this in each of the 18 stories here. They each reminds us how essential personal accountability and our personal pro-activeness really is. Each story holds meaning beyond the words on the page, they will resonate with the reader, and help us to face the truths within all of us. With charisma and wit, Phair faces the complexities and ideologies of her life, and gives us an honest and meaningful work.Stories of being a passive bystander to a girl passed out in a public restroom; meeting an old friend on an airplane and their trek through the airport; a story of her grandparents; of being stuck in the blizzard of 2010 in NYC and a story of accidentally being hit by a flying meat tenderizing mallet, and many more stories, remind me that it is the moments that we share and experience that make our lives, as much as it is the facts.The ARC does not show the art work between each story, it is just an empty page with ¨art¨ written on it, but I am hoping they some of Liz Phairs art.
    • 4/5
      I was expecting more of a music memoir than what I got, but Phair is just as unsparing and no-nonsense in giving you the nitty-gritty of her anxieties and doubts, along with the nuggets of wisdom that she has picked up along the way, as she is in her music. On the whole, quite worthwhile.
    • 4/5
      Brilliant, bite-sized essays full of poetry and emotion. Above all, an unflinching portrait of an artist, a woman, a mother, and a human being.