Female rockers crank out volumes

Chrissie Hynde.

It's an all-girl supergroup like no other: Pretenders leader Chrissie Hynde, Jamaican-born singer Grace Jones, Sleater-Kinney guitarist and Portlandia star Carrie Brownstein, folkie Jewel, punk poet Patti Smith and 1970s icon Carly Simon. Only these women aren't reviving Lilith Fair. They're part of the latest trend in book publishing.

In a genre once wholly dominated by male rockers, female musicians are now finding their voices - and their book deals.

Hynde's Reckless: My Life As A Pretender, sparking headlines for the singer's controversial comments on rape, has recently been released. It will be followed by memoirs from Jones, Jewel, Brownstein, Simon and Smith. These come on the heels of books by Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, Slits guitarist Viv Albertine, Carole King, Ann and Nancy Wilson, Cyndi Lauper and Linda Ronstadt.

The rise of the female rock memoir is rooted in several factors, some market-based, others more open to interpretation. There is, publishers and writers say, generally a different way that women rockers tell stories - with more humility and vulnerability than their male counterparts. There are also the simple numbers, both in book sales and on the pop charts.

"This is the era of the female act, be it Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Gaga, and maybe that has caused overall a hunger for reading about female artists," says David Rosenthal, the former Rolling Stone editor who, as president of Blue Rider Press, is publishing Jewel's memoir as well as upcoming books by Emmylou Harris and Sinead O'Connor.

Male rock memoirs are still dominant on the best-seller lists, whether Bob Dylan's Chronicles, with more than 560,000 copies sold to date, or Keith Richards's Life, at 760,000 and counting, according to Nielsen BookScan. But Smith's 2010 book, Just Kids, sold more than 430,000 copies and won the National Book Award.

"It wasn't like Patti Smith's success gave me the green light," says Carrie Thornton, who published Gordon's Girl In A Band earlier this year. "But publishing is a business ... that success certainly helps this make sense to the accountants."

Editorial director of HarperCollins imprint Dey Street Books, Thornton watched Richards' 2010 biography, Life, earn rave reviews and rise up the best-seller lists.

"That was the gold standard, and there were just so many guys of that generation publishing their memoirs," says Thornton. "My peers were shaking their heads and saying, 'Where are the women? Where's Chrissie Hynde? Where's Stevie Nicks? Where's Kim Gordon?'"

So she reached out to Gordon, whose 27-year marriage to bandmate Thurston Moore was dissolving, which also meant the end for Sonic Youth. "I hadn't thought of doing a conventional book," says Gordon. "My first idea was to make one book. One copy. And sell it in a gallery for a lot of money. But everyone was so curious about what happened."

Girl In A Band, heartbreaking and poetic as well as deliciously dishy, explores Gordon's relationships with Moore, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. The book rose as high as No 2 on the New York Times best-seller list.

"That was a tremendous surprise in terms of sales, and a lot people perked up their ears to think, oh, that's quite fascinating," says Rosenthal, publisher of Blue Rider Press. "This is a book off the mainstream, and yet there's a real market for it."

The success of Girl raised another question. Publishers know that women read more than men. Were memoirs penned by women more accessible to that core group?

It's a complicated subject and one that can easily slip into Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus territory. But Mary Karr, the master memoirist and author of The Liars' Club, believes gender does matter.

"Your femininity is sort of gauged by some kind of modesty that most male rock stars don't suffer from," she says. "To me, rock 'n' roll is all about adolescence. Male rock stars are brimming with male bravado. Women, I see it in my poetry classes. Virtually every young woman poet comes and says, 'I don't know if what I'm writing is important?'"

"Men are all about mythmaking," adds Viv Albertine, the punk icon and founding member of the Slits, whose book Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, came out last November. "They're attempting to build the myths and sustain the myths. Where I thought, I could call this book 'Deconstruction of a Legend'. To deconstruct what people think is a successful person, a groomed person, an attractive person. I'm going to put it to pieces and show what's underneath."

In Hynde's case, her openness is startling. She recounts being raped, in her early 20s while in a drug haze, by a group of bikers in an abandoned building in Cleveland. But she blames herself as much as the rapists, a take that has angered rape victim advocates. "You can't f*** around with people, especially people who wear I Heart Rape and On Your Knees badges," she writes.

She also downplays her own spot in music history. While Hynde's voice and songwriting chops have generally placed her alongside such pop-punk innovators as Elvis Costello and David Byrne, she levels considerable praise on the late Pretenders guitarist James Honeyman-Scott. "Without him," she writes, "I'm sure I would have made only the smallest splash with my talents."

Hynde, in an interview, said that she reads primarily fiction, not memoirs, and wasn't aware that so many books were coming from female artists. "I don't care. A good book is a good book. A good song is a good song. Let me hear it, let me read it. I'm not very gender-driven."

Reckless by Chrissie Hynde (Ebury Press $38) is out now.
I'll Never Write My Memoirs by Grace Jones (Simon & Schuster $45) is out in November.