I was in college when “Exile in Guyville” was released. I listened to it all the time. Liz Phair basically wrote the soundtrack to my coming-of-age years.
I saw her at the Warfield in San Francisco in 1998, which felt like a big deal at the time given her stage fright. There she was under the lights, slight in stature and loose limbed, holding center stage. Her voice was off-key, her lyrics confessional, making the music seem unseemly, yet I knew it all by heart.
Horror Stories is like that too. The stories are unsettling, they make you feel uneasy, you feel upset for her and with her. She makes bad choices, sometimes knowingly so. But in her stories we can see bits of our self, our own flaws and willful mistakes. The times when we turned a blind eye in situations when we should have known better, done better.
It’s hard to tell the truth about ourselves. It opens us up to being judged and rejected. We’re afraid we will be defined by our worst decisions instead of our best.
Our impulse is always to hide the evidence, blame someone else, put the things we feel guilty about or that were traumatizing behind us and act like everything is fine. But that robs us of the opportunity to really know and care about one another. It closes a door that could lead to someone else’s heart.
Our flaws and our failures make us relatable, not unloveable.
Liz Phair
Her memoir isn’t a chronological account of her life, nor is it an in-depth look at her music career. Horror Stories is a collection of 17 essays that are wistful, reflective, and painfully honest ruminations on moments in her life, flaws and all. She doesn’t paint herself with a rosy glow, instead she focuses on experiences in her life that one might wish to forget.
Her stories do not shy away from her mistakes, small and large. From looking away when a fellow student is passed out on a bathroom floor from alcohol poisoning, to foolishly walking through NYC in a whiteout snowstorm in the middle of the night, to indulgently having an affair and ruining her marriage.
Her writing is light and lyrical, confessional like her songs, and quite honestly a joy to read. All the while she asks us, the reader, to consider what it is that we chose to look at, to learn from and allow to guide us in our life.
Hindsight and karma, luck and blessings, good and evil – what is it that shapes our journey?
So you don’t believe in the devil? That’s good. I’m happy for you.
Liz Phair
Rating
The Seventeenth Line 