Indie-rock artist Neko Case opens up about her childhood in a new memoir

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Books, Arts

4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2025

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

Singer-songwriter Neko Case of The New Pornographers band has just released a memoir titled The Harder I Fight the More I Love You. While the book touches on her time with the Canadian indie-rock group, Case's memoir focuses more on her upbringing – she opens up about her complex relationship with her mother, who faked her own death when Case was young. In today's episode, Case speaks with NPR's Ari Shapiro about tracing her own family history, allowing room for rage, and seeing forgiveness not as an act, but an organic state of being.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Ampier's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. Rock memoirs usually start to pick up
0:06.7	once the band in question starts to pick up. You know, you expect crazy stories from the road,
0:11.3	wild shows, diehard fans, that sort of thing. Nico Case's memoir is a little different. It's titled
0:17.6	The Harder I Fight, the More I Love You. And a lot of the meat of the memoir happens before her band, the new pornographers ever play a show.
0:26.0	It's a lot about her upbringing, about her relationship with her mother, or maybe I should say lack of a relationship.
0:33.0	I don't want to spoil too much, but she talks to NPR's R. Shapiro about how overcoming hardship
0:38.4	doesn't always leave you with any grand lessons about life. That's coming up.
0:44.6	In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life. Distant wars, murky conflicts,
0:51.5	diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show show, Sources and Methods.
0:55.9	NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people,
0:59.7	helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.
1:03.6	Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:09.1	As a child of the Pacific Northwest, I've always thought of the musician Nico Case as one of
1:14.6	ours. Her solo records and her albums with the band The New Pornographers sound to me like
1:20.0	they come from the gray skies and green hills of Washington State where she grew up.
1:25.1	I'm so tired. I'm so tired. And I wish I was the Washington State where she grew up.
1:41.4	Nico Case's new memoir paints her upbringing as something out of a dark fairy tale,
1:46.0	where adults are wicked, and animals come to the rescue. Here she is reading from her book, The harder I fight, the more I love you. As a kid, it seemed so obvious
1:52.2	that there was a violent force breathing hard behind us, dragging itself, wounded, and angry,
1:58.3	toward us faster than we could run. Eventually, my parents were destroyed by it,
2:02.4	but nobody would tell me its name or where it had come from. No wonder I went looking in all these
2:07.9	old folktales trying to find the answers. No wonder I wanted to turn myself into a creature who knew
	...

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