Grrrl lit

As a book reading, fanzine writing, punk listening grrrl in the 1990s I longed, and longed, to find a book that truly represented my teenage experience. 

Occasionally something would come along that seemed like it might possibly hit the spot - Douglas Coupland's Shampoo Planet and, later, Stephen Chobsky's Perks Of Being A Wallflower - only to not quite manage it: I read Shampoo Planet at least twice, but I barely got beyond the first page of Perks Of Being A Wallflower. 

A book that I felt closer to, at least emotionally and in a mental health sense, was Evelyn Lau's Runaway: Diary Of A Street Kid, which is made up of the authors diaries between 14 and 16. I read the book when I was 16. Our life experiences are massively different, but she can write like an angel. 

A few years after that came Linda Jaivin's Sci Fi erotic comedy Rock'N'Roll Babes From Outer Space, which was too wacky to be relatable but which, nevertheless, was still a book that made you want to read it in your Doc Martens and jump up and down to Babes In Toyland afterwards.

The (at face value) less relatable Beijing Doll (by Chun Sue) was probably the closest I could find to my own teenage experience, in that she was at least a teenage fanzine writer who liked punk bands. I think I was in my early twenties by the time that book came out.

With this in mind, you can see why the sudden appearance of not one but two (two!) books by women who were neck deep in the 1990s punk/riot grrrl scenes in the UK and US would make me very excited.

First out of the blocks has been Karren Ablaze!'s debut novel, Revolution On The Rock. Karren has been a fanzine writer since 1984 and was one of the Leeds and Bradford Riot Grrrls in the early to mid 1990s. She was also the singer in the bands Coping Saw and Wack Cat. I interviewed her for The F-Word back in 2016.

The second of the two books is Gogo Germaine's Glory Guitars: Memoirs Of A '90s Teenage Punk Rock Grrrl. While Germaine wasn't (at least during the course of this memoir) writing fanzines or playing in bands, she was a committed punk grrrl who was neck deep in her local scene from the age of 12 onwards. 

Cover by Joel Amat Guell.

The two books, while both very enjoyable, are very different in tone.

Revolution On The Rock follows the (mis)fortunes of Leeds sound engineer Bunty Maguire in the weeks before and after the EU Referendum of 2016, whereas Glory Guitars does exactly what it says on the tin: It's a vivid and often shocking, but also often hilarious, account of Germaine's teenage years in Nowheresville, USA.

I'd like to think that both of these books, following on from Carrie Brownstein's memoir Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl and the well meaning teenage novel Moxie, represent an opening of the floodgates when it comes to women writing about the 90s subcultural teenage experience. 

The lag in books appearing isn't entirely unexpected in that it's only since 2007 that we've really started to see accounts of the 1970s female punk experience being published. There was the odd exception before that, for example Deborah Spungeon's biography of/memoir about her daughter Nancy, the early parts of Toyah Wilcox's memoir Living Out Loud, plus the occasional book chapter or essay in wider works, but 2007 really was the moment when people started to make their voices heard again.

It takes a while for those who were present in a specific cultural moment, who saw and were seen, to decompress, take stock, process and document what happened. And the fight to have those testimonies heard is yet another battle in a long war within wider cultural histories in which women are not valued. With all this in mind, it's amazing that any punk women and punk grrrl books ever get published.

So, for this reason, I'm really pleased that these two very different punk grrrl books exist. But I also long for more.