She makes no bones about her privilege - she’s white, upper-middle-class, suburban, Oberlin-educated. “We can be monsters, we human beings,” she writes, and she is including herself in that company. More often than not in this uniquely thoughtful, self-aware memoir, the horrors she describes are mistakes she made, ethical challenges she failed, and moments of anxiety, bewilderment and being lost, often literally and sometimes because of her own flawed decisions. Her horrors are, by and large, what she calls “the callous gestures that we make toward one another … brief interactions that are as cumulatively powerful as the splashy heart-stoppers, because that’s where we live most of our lives.” She isn’t recounting the blows she took as a woman in a male-dominated industry, or a woman in the world, full stop. What Phair means by the “horror” in her title isn’t the horror show that we now call the daily news. Along with boundary-busting female musicians of those years like PJ Harvey, the Breeders, Hole, Salt-N-Pepa and Björk, among others, Phair was, to quote Joni Mitchell, “a woman of heart and mind” and genitals, too nothing that was human was alien to Phair’s expression or her image. “Guyville” made Phair a star and an indie darling. In a recent interview with The Independent, Phair summed it up as, “It was like seeing the girl next door go nuclear.” The sound was lo-fi the lyrics were about desire, rejection, humiliation, rage, ambivalence and the rocky seas of sex the concept was meta.
That record, originally a few tracks on cassette tapes that Phair recorded while living in her parents’ house in her 20s, was a song-by-song response to the Rolling Stones’ cocky, much revered, double-album paean to bad boys, “Exile on Main St.” The complicated truth of being smart, young, female and heterosexual was what “Guyville” dived deep to get at with unbound candor.
“It’s hard to tell the truth about ourselves,” Liz Phair writes in the prologue to her memoir, “Horror Stories.” “We’re afraid,” she continues, “we will be defined by our worst decisions instead of our best.” This is a surprising statement from the woman who wrote and recorded the raw indie-rock classic “Exile in Guyville,” released in 1993.
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