Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

Before she played guitar in Sleater-Kinney, Carrie Brownstein grew up in the Pacific Northwest at the moment it became the setting for an important movement in rock history. Her memoir, named for one of her own lyrics, begins with her running, as a hyper-performative young nerd, for vice president of her elementary school in Washington state, then follows how she fled a turbulent family life for music, which offered self-invention, community and rescue. With Sleater-Kinney she rose in the underground feminist punk-rock movement of the 1990s, and she records the excitement and contradictions of that independent scene, including experiences that later fed the satire of the television series Portlandia. Riverhead published it in 2015.

Emma Watson chose it for her book club, Our Shared Shelf.