Renaissance Woman Carrie Brownstein Writes of Her Life in Rock

If hipsters had a patron saint, it would be Carrie Brownstein. As one-third of the band Sleater-Kinney, which TIME once hailed as America’s best rock group, Brownstein rose from the embers of a ’90s feminist punk movement to become an indie-rock icon. She hopped from concert venues to red carpets as a co-creator of IFC’s Peabody Award–winning comedy series Portlandia, in which she and ex–Saturday Night Live star Fred Armisen satirize the quirky lifestyles of Oregon’s most stereotypical, eco-conscious, flannel-wearing residents. (The first episode, from 2011, featured a now infamous sketch at a farm-to-table restaurant, where their characters ask whether the locally raised, free-range chicken on the menu had any friends.)

Now, with Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, a memoir out Oct. 27 about her time in the band, Brownstein, 41, adds author to her counterculture résumé. “I always felt like such an outsider, always existing on the periphery, and I am really grateful for that,” she says. “Starting from a place of normalcy or mainstream, you don’t get the same gumption or drive that you do from the fringes.”

Hunger, which gets its title from the lyrics of a Sleater-Kinney song, is the story of how she patched together not just a life, but a remarkably successful one, from the fringes. It’s not meant as a how-to manual, but it does show how Brownstein’s effortlessly cool image–and the quietly chic style that launched a thousand Pinterest boards–came only after years of insecurity and hustle. “This is a story of the ways I created a territory, something more than just an archipelago of identities,” Brownstein writes.

She wouldn’t have guessed she’d be here after Sleater-Kinney announced an “indefinite hiatus” in 2006. That year she won the Oregon Humane Society Volunteer of the Year Award, spending her free time spearheading adoption programs and hosing down dog poop. She worked in an ad agency for six months. She blogged for NPR. She balanced Portlandia’s comedy with a dramatic role in the acclaimed Amazon series Transparent, which returns for a second season in December.

“I really wondered what my value was,” Brownstein says of her time away from the band. “Do I have value outside of work?” The answer would appear to be yes–although her value in rock hasn’t gone away. This year’s ferocious comeback album, No Cities to Love, gave Sleater-Kinney its biggest sales week ever in January and introduced it to a new wave of listeners. If being reduced to our occupations is a common existential fear, then Brownstein is revered by fans because she represents the possibility of a fruitful, fulfilling life not defined by any one title–or rather, defined by many.

As a child in Redmond, Wash., Brownstein remembers, she had a strong desire to perform and become someone else. She’d dress up and put on concerts, but family turmoil–her mother battled an eating disorder, her father was closeted and hard to connect with–later turned these impulses into “a way of escape,” she says. After playing in a few bands in her teens and college years, she met Corin Tucker and moved to the fertile music scene of Olympia, Wash., where the two guitarist-vocalists formed a group they named after a street near their practice space. (Drummer Janet Weiss joined in 1996.)

For Brownstein, Sleater-Kinney was a fantasy that didn’t require exaggerated stage personas or dress-up to live out. With voices that howled and yelped and guitars that circled one another like birds of prey, their songs tested out the power and privilege Brownstein didn’t feel she had. Singing them, she bottled some of it for herself. “I could play at bravery in the songs, I could play at sexiness or humor, long before I could actually be or embody any of those things,” she writes.

Sleater-Kinney wrote songs that addressed desire, rage, the male gaze and sexual assault, practicing a kind of feminism that couldn’t be “sloganized and diminished,” Brownstein writes. Still, it had an uneasy relationship with the press and received plenty of sexist coverage, some of which Brownstein rounds up in the book to humorous effect.

Brownstein briefly dated Tucker in the band’s early days and was outed after a 1996 Spin magazine story referenced the breakup, even though neither brought it up in interviews. Perhaps as a result, Brownstein, who has since identified publicly as bisexual yet expressed an aversion to particular labels, is private about her relationships and barely details them in the book. Today, acknowledging the importance of her visibility as a woman and queer person without letting those identities eclipse her work is a tough line to walk.”To deny it does feel like an amputation–what, just say, ‘No, don’t look at us as women’?” she says. “How can I start to parcel out parts of myself to determine what made this band or how people should view it?”

The book ends with Sleater-Kinney’s hiatus, skipping Portlandia, and relegating the reunion to an epilogue. Tucker wanted to spend more time with her husband and young son, while Brownstein had health issues (a bout of shingles, as well as anxiety and depression) that made her a volatile presence on tour. (She once fantasized about slamming her hand in a door so she could go home.) “Considering we weren’t doing a bunch of cocaine and heroin, it’s as dramatic as it gets,” Brownstein says.

Hunger doesn’t try to enumerate every hat she’s ever worn, only what emboldened her to keep experimenting. Through her band, she says, “I built up the confidence I needed to keep moving through the world in all of the different ways that I wanted to.” She’s found an identity that works for her, even if the job descriptions can’t keep up.