Horror Stories, the memoir by recording artist Liz Phair, is not a bad book, but it’s an odd one with which to have made her debut as a writer, and it’s certainly not the one fans of her music will wish she’d have written. Despite Phair’s assertion that it’s her “effort to slow everything down and take a look at how we really become who we are,” it gives no sense of who she is as a musician, neither citing her influences nor recounting how she got her start. Die-hard fans, eager to finally know more about the legendary Girly-Sound tapes, the hand-made cassettes Phair recorded in her bedroom that anticipated her 1993 debut, Exile in Guyville, a milestone in the annals of indie rock, will find their love tested in these pages.
Phair writes, “I’ve been writing songs for thirty years. From the beginning, my songs have been my stories. Every time I recorded an album, I was writing my memoirs.” Perhaps assuming that readers will have some sense of who she is from her music, Phair absolves herself of the usual responsibilities of a narrator. Rather than tell her story in a straightforward way, she takes a more conceptual approach, focusing on seventeen anecdotes which jump around in time, and mostly focus on her relationships with her dying grandmother, her aging parents, her betrayed husband, and different inappropriate boyfriends.
Chances are taken and opportunities missed. The entries sometimes amount to the scrawling in a diary, full of self-importance and meaningless asides, but at other times demonstrate a keen intelligence strengthened by self-interrogation. Phair’s writing is marked throughout by an obsessive, brooding quality. She likens the stories to “music, not data—the haunting melodies I hear over and over again in my head.”
Phair writes, “Horror can be found in brief interactions that are as cumulatively powerful as the splashy heart-stoppers, because that’s where we live most of our lives.” There is a fair share of the mundane (such as what Phair wears when shopping at her local Trader Joe’s) along with the unexpected (she’s there to stalk a cashier who looks like her ex-boyfriend). “Our flaws and our failures make us relatable, not unlovable,” Phair elsewhere sniffs, but it feels like a slogan more than something she’s able to convince the reader she really believes in.
[pullquote]The stories are all told in the present tense, which gives them a sense of urgency, but which may raise some eyebrows, such as when she narrates “Red Bird Hollow” (memories of the danger of climbing a very tall tree with her brother Phillip at their grandparents’ house outside Cincinnati) completely from the perspective of her six-year-old self.[/pullquote] Looking back on such episodes from the present would have given her a wider range of perspective, and given the stories a greater depth and poignancy.
What’s impressive here is when Phair manages to write about complicated topics without resorting to cheap platitudes. “Break-In at Blue House” recounts her time living in a shared house while in college at Oberlin. Men break in one night while she’s sleeping in a nearby room; Phair manages to escape without ever seeing them, and calls the police. Relating details of what she heard, Phair “can’t decide if saying they were black is valid or racist.” She writes, “As soon as I hear the words come out of my mouth, I feel like I’ve stepped over an invisible line. I feel white, in a way that I didn’t at the time of the break-in.”
“The Devil’s Mistress” depicts Phair’s troubled marriage and the affair she had that put the nail in the coffin. What’s interesting is that this is really a story about faith, of having betrayed something bigger than a person. Phair writes, “At one time in my life, I believed in God and thought that when I talked to myself, He was listening. He was like a playmate or an imaginary friend.” Guilt and grief are two chords without easy resolution, but it’s one of the best pieces Phair plays here.
“Sotto Voice” recalls Phair’s humiliation singing a botched version of “Winter Wonderland” on live television with her hair in “Shirley Temple ringlets.” She writes, “Everybody in the United States knows the words to this song.”
For fans of Phair’s early work, this episode feels like the culmination of everything that went wrong with her career.
Phair might feel this way, too. Writing about being at a radio station event, she notes, “I feel like a prop, a cardboard cutout, a clone, and it’s a terrible feeling.”
Surely one of the reasons Exile in Guyville resonated was because it was a teenage fantasy of being alone in our rooms sharing our most secret selves and somehow having them not only seen and heard, but celebrated for their power. Phair notices this in fans’ response to this particular album: “They heard themselves in the music, not me.”
All these years later, Phair’s still the one fronting her band, but something has shifted. When Phair describes the band facing a crisis, “I want to be the girl. I want to be saved,” she writes. Totally understandable, totally relatable – but a little disappointing. We want Phair not only to face her demons, but to inspire us to face ours.
Readers won’t get the same picture of Phair they get from her songs, where there is a lot more rock ‘n’ roll posturing. On the page, Phair sometimes comes across as rather conventional, a real Normy Von Normalton, but more often she is simply an elusive, sometimes confounding presence. Writing Horror Stories was likely a fun game for Phair to play with herself, but for the reader it’s something else: all tails, no donkey to pin them on.
