BOOK REVIEW: Neko Case’s Life Was Saved By Rock and Roll
From Americana Highways, January 22, 2025
Neko Case’s harrowing new memoir, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You, is like her music — challenging, powerful, beautiful, sad, and ultimately uplifting.
The stories she shares of her childhood are absolutely heartbreaking. Throughout the book, Case refers to herself as someone who was “feral,” left alone to raise herself in the wild. Many artists are given to hyperbole. It’s possible that Case is, but every word she writes here has the absolute ring of truth.
Sharing some her life when she was in fourth grade, Case writes:
Here’s something I’d do: I’d pick fleas off the dogs and cat, bite their tiny heads off, and spit them into the grill of the shitty Superelectric Instaheat space heater, where they would mingle with dog hair and fry next to the fluorescent orange ribbon of heat, making a smell that was too disgusting to even try to describe.
I did not use my teeth, so I didn’t taste the fleas, but I may as well have. I was reduced to a beast, a low-grade beast stewing in its own juice, waiting for something I couldn’t name. Around the edges of my life, the Green River Killer stalked the forest, and his victims continued to flash across the TV screen at night.
But I knew in my heart that it was better to be a beast and live than to try to be good when the rules of being good were meant to kill your soul.
As you can see, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You is not an “easy read.” At the same time, I had a tough time putting it down. Case’s writing — her honesty, her agility with language, her creative and idiosyncratic descriptions of people and places – is engrossing.
Even when the story is dark (as it often is), it is far from grim. No one other than Case, for example, would describe eating a “fake fruit jelly candy” by comparing it to the feel of eating “a dead cartoon character’s tongue, like you were a shark taking a perfect crescent-shaped bite out of a swollen gray whale carcass.” Not just a “cartoon character’s tongue,” but a “dead cartoon character’s tongue.” (Emphasis added.)
At times, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You feels like a Rosetta stone illuminating Case’s music. She brings many of the characteristics of someone whose childhood was difficult, even abusive, to her songwriting. The emotional intensity and empathy of her lyrics, as well as the determination she has brought to her career, were clearly shaped by her childhood. It is hardly surprising that there is a persistent sense of darkness and unease in Case’s work; She often explores themes of mortality, loss, loneliness, and the decay of things.
Reading The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You I could not stop thinking about Jenny, the stand-in for himself Lou Reed created for the Velvet Underground in 1970, immortalized in the song “Rock and Roll.”
Then one fine mornin’ she hears a New York station
She just didn’t believe what she heard at all, hey, not at all
She started dancin’ to that fine fine music
You know her life was saved by rock ‘n’ roll, yes rock ‘n’ roll
For Case, it was not “a New York station,” it was AC/DC’s “Back in Black.” She remembers hearing it for the first time:
A powerful pressure built up in my chest with the first hammerhead creeper notes of the song…. the energy could not be dimmed. I was too shy to dance around, and it was sublime torture to sit still. My foot started to tap and tap some more. It might not have looked like much from the outside, but inside it felt I had turned into an electrical transformer – showering spark as the lyrics snaked through the room. This music, this feeling was going to be MINE, all mine – I just knew it.
From that moment, Case feels like her life has meaning. It takes some time, a rocky journey through a few music scenes, before Case is finally able to see herself not only as a fan but as someone who could actually make music. That moment was not the end of the challenges Cases had to overcome, but it set her on a creative path that she continues to tread today.
Like many musicians before her — Dolly Parton, Iggy Pop, Eminem, among many others – Case has somehow managed not just to transcend her upbringing but to harness it, turning personal pain into memorable art. The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You is an unforgettable portrait of an artist; a powerful, compelling, memoir, helping us understand the life of one of our most interesting, insightful, and important songwriters.
Find more details about the memoir and her music here on her website: https://nekocase.com/memoir
Enjoy a show review here: Show Review: Neko Case Thrills Crowd in DC’s Lincoln Theatre with Balanced Selection
Mark Pelavin is a consultant, writer, and freelance. music critic living, very happily, on Maryland’s East. Shore. He can be reached at mark@markpelavin.com.