The Harder I Fight the More I Love You: a memoir by Neko Case
I love Case’s music, which I discovered by chance around 2023 after listening to her being interviewed in The Witch Wave podcast with Pam Grossman. I’m specially fascinated by her mysterious lyrics, often based on her own personal life, so I was intrigued to read this. Interestingly enough, Case has admitted that she was more interested in writing fiction (I would actually be curious to read a novel by her!) but during the Covid-19 pandemic she, like many other musicians, found herself struggling financially because she couldn’t tour and so getting commissioned to write this memoir really helped her.
Case definitely has a story to tell that goes way beyond her experience as a musician, though. In fact, most of this memoir focuses on her unusual (and disturbing) childhood. Her parents who had her in their teens, were not prepared for children at all, which sadly meant they were not only neglectful but also abusive to her only child. For example, when Case is really young, her mother leaves the family and to do so fakes her own death. In a bizarre turn of events, her father goes along with this lie, gathering the family to have a wake for his wife who has presumably died of cancer. Case goes through mourning just to get her mother ‘back’ a year or so after the event. I mean, that alone would had made me go mad as a child.
Inés G. Labarta 