In Neko Case’s riveting new memoir, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, the musician often refers to herself as an animal: a “beast” as a child, as someone still with “werewolf inside”—most often, a “wounded critter.” It’s not difficult, reading this primal howl of a book, to see why Case might have identified with the tenderness of animals. Case’s rough upbringing (with one plot twist so surprising, I can’t bring myself to spoil it here) might have made her hard, might have kept her from making any music at all.
It almost did. When Case’s mother caught her looking in the mirror and predicts she will become “vain,” the daughter spends a good part of her life trying to avoid the shame of bearing out her mother’s dire prophecy—of proving her mother right. But because her grandmother sang to the radio, Case could too, without being vain. Because her people had grown up in the same hollers singers like Loretta Lynn had, she felt as though she had permission, somehow, a strange sort of inheritance.
Case identified another type of inheritance when recalling that her grandmother used to devour romance novels while she rocked in a rocking chair. “All the women on my mom’s side of the family would rock themselves,” Case recalls. “That was the way of my mom’s family—to rock yourself and stay silent about all the things you weren’t naming.” Case clearly laid claim to the rocking—rock, country, Americana, folk, indie, whatever label it acquires next—but finally worked her way toward permission to perform, without believing it was vanity. There had to be, she writes, “some way of inhabiting the world that was big and defiant and incredibly radiant, too, like allowing all the corners and recesses of yourself, even the weird ones, to become a part of your art.” In writing her memoir, Case also rejects the inheritance of silence. The Harder I Fight the More I Love You doesn’t keep its secrets. It tells them, even when they are blistering, bruising.
Tenderness, after all, is the point.
Case will speak about The Harder I Fight the More I Love You at the Studebaker Theatre in the Fine Arts Building for the bookstore Exile in Bookville on Friday, February 4, 2025. Tickets include a signed copy of the book.
I spoke to Case by Zoom about being creative in Chicago, county fair ribbons, and listening to your gut.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Lori Rader-Day
Tell me about when and how you decided that a memoir is what you wanted to write.
Neko Case
I never wanted to write a memoir before, but I was approached by Grand Central at the height of the pandemic. I wanted to write fiction, but they were like, “Well… but we’ll pay you really good to write a memoir,” and I was like… “Who am I to say [no]? Sure!”
And that sounds like a complaint. But it was actually like, Okay, I can pivot with that. Sure. I didn’t really know how it was gonna be.
Lori Rader-Day
Had you ever tried to write down some of your stories before, or was this totally new?
Neko Case
This was pretty new. I write fiction sometimes, but writing about myself was not something I ever thought I would be doing.
Lori Rader-Day
Yeah, I got from the book that you were raised—or not raised—to… what’s the phrase from the book? “Become vain.” Maybe writing about yourself would seem like…
Neko Case
Yeah, don’t blow your own horn, you know.
Lori Rader-Day
So how was writing this book, then, different from, say, writing song lyrics?
Neko Case
It doesn’t make you feel as floaty. You know, starting to write about yourself can be really tricky, because you know there’s not the excitement of creating something in there.
Luckily, I had a great editor, who is also a really great writer, and she had prompts for me. So then, writing about myself became a word puzzle, and that’s when my brain would go ooooh. Because my brain loves word puzzles, and not like games or crossword puzzles, but writing songs is a kind of word puzzle. She would say, like, write down the names of all the kids you knew in fourth grade that you can remember the names of. And those things really trigger lots of memories. You come up with some pretty hilarious stuff.
Lori Rader-Day
One of the things I enjoyed in the book was where you’re talking about 4-H ribbons, the county fair. Was that from one of the prompts?
Neko Case
No, that’s one of my more treasured memories, that year at the county fair [showing a pony with her best friend]. We’d go every year, but that one was particularly good.
Lori Rader-Day
How did you struggle—or not, I guess—with what to include in the book and what not to include?
Neko Case
I wrote way more than ended up in the book. It felt kind of natural to me, what shouldn’t be in there, and what should. You know: Not writing about people you don’t like, that’s a good thing to do. ’Cause you’re just making them more powerful that way, somehow. I liked focusing on memories and creating a scene. Trying to remember all the details of a scene was very fun for me.
[The most challenging part was] the mundane parts, you know. The stuff that felt boring. I think my brain like literally blacked it out. The stuff about like, well, what was it like when you first started writing this record? Blah blah blah! And it’s like, I don’t have a good memory of that, because I was so forward thinking, so on to the next thing. I hadn’t learned how to be in the moment. I was always worried about what the next thing was. I was always like a dog who didn’t know where its next meal was coming from, so I was like… over there. I’m eating this, but I’m looking over there looking at that food, you know.I would just get frustrated, trying to remember details of things like that.
Lori Rader-Day
It’s interesting because you talk about being forward-looking as both a positive and a negative in the book.
Did you have to do any kind of research into your own past to capture some of those memories that weren’t coming?
Neko Case
I talked to one of my cousins a bit just to say this was this bad, right? And she was like, yeah. It was that bad. I don’t want to give a false representation of something, you know. But, I didn’t.
I kind of just had to do everything by memory, because everyone in my family is dead. I can’t really ask them. And they weren’t gonna tell me anything about themselves, anyway. Being the clams that they were.
Lori Rader-Day
So when you were talking to your cousin, did you discover anything different from her perspective, or remember anything that you had completely forgotten?
Neko Case
Not so much… We just kind of validated each other like, no, this really happened. And it wasn’t good.
Lori Rader-Day
Chicago seems to have played a pretty big role in your early career. I’m calling you today from Chicago. Chicago loves to hear about itself. So for the Chicago Review of Books, can you talk a little bit about Chicago’s place in your creative life?
Neko Case
Well, I moved to Chicago at a really good time. I was just at the lowest point that I could be. And Chicago was a very fully developed, organic, living, breathing community of people, all different kinds of people; and the music scene was great. There were lots of clubs to play in. And it just wasn’t that expensive to live there at the time. My roommate got us an apartment for nothing. And she talked the landlord down. I was like, what? What did you just do?
It was a good home base. I was on tour a lot of the time I lived in Chicago, but there was just such a gregariousness there that I really needed. I was tired of the northwest coldness. And it was great to see people who were doing many different disciplines of art, including music and acting and painting and making things. Welding, you know, like people were just into everything. And it was really exciting.
Lori Rader-Day
Do you have any special spots or activities you’d like to shout out?
Neko Case
I spent a lot of time at The Hideout which I love, and the street I lived on. I lived on Maplewood in Humboldt Park. That’s where I spent most of my time. I worked downtown a bit. I used to work at an animation place called Calabash and I would go eat lunch at Bari Foods, have their delicious fucking sandwiches. To La Scarola and get their minestrone, which is insanely good.
So much happened at the Hideout. I kind of think of it as the stage for everything that happened later.
Lori Rader-Day
You did great work in Chicago, including the first-ever song you wrote by yourself, “Favorite,” which is one of my favorites. Is there any one song from that part of your life that you think when you hear it now, like that’s my Chicago song?
Neko Case
“Star Witness.” “Star Witness” is a Chicago song.
Lori Rader-Day
Another one of my favorites.
Your music seems to defy labels. People are just stumped about what to call you. And this is interesting to me because I write novels, and even though they’re crime fiction, all of them, they also sort of confuse labels. I would love to hear anything you want to say about the concept of needing to be marketed as this one thing, and maybe not all the pieces of yourself that you want to be.
Neko Case
Well, on one hand, I don’t envy the job of a music journalist that has to write about a trillion things and listen to a trillion things. It is a lot easier for them when you think of yourself as something, but you know I never thought of myself as alt-country. I felt like I was what country would evolve into. I didn’t feel like it was an alternative. I felt it was maybe not super describable, and not completely country either. But it’s a very American trajectory for any kind of genre, you know. It morphs, it grows, it becomes another thing.
I understand the drive for [alt-country, Americana] to separate itself from modern country radio, which made sense. I thought of myself as more of a filmmaker in a way, more of a storyteller. Or that’s what I wanted to be. I didn’t think I was fully formed, but I wanted to tell stories. I wasn’t looking to be like on the Americana [Music] Awards. Not that they existed then.
Lori Rader-Day
I watch those every year. I’m sure you get maybe younger women artists who are looking to you for advice on how to be in the tough world of music. What advice would you give them?
Neko Case
Listen to your gut. And not to the mythology of rock and roll, that you’re lucky to be here. [Musicians] work hard. It’s hard to be in a touring band, and it’s hard to make music. And nobody can tell you that you’re lucky to be there or to have that attitude at you. That attitude is just a really good way to control people. They’re not doing you some big favor. It’s a business agreement. They’re not your fairy godmother. It’s a business agreement and you are part of the agreement. You don’t have to work with assholes, either. If somebody’s a fucking asshole, jettison them. Do not work with them. This is why we’re still in this hole. People are so afraid of that mythology. It’s like, go make your own thing.
Like country radio. They don’t play women, and there are even rules where [DJs] can only have one woman an hour or something, because they’re afraid people will turn off their radios. Some people are trying to bust that open, and it’s like, don’t even bother. Let it die. Let that thing just finally poison itself. Don’t try to enrich it. Don’t try to make it better. Fucking radio country should die, period, and a new thing should rise up in its place, or in front of it, or around it, or whatever, but. It’s an institution not worth saving.
Lori Rader-Day
I watched a conversation you had with Roseanne Cash a while back where you said something like… “it’s going to sound like a negative, but as a woman in America nobody really gave a shit what I was doing. Well, if they don’t care, anyway, I guess I can do whatever I want. If I’m that unimportant, HOLY… the possibilities.”
Neko Case
Yeah, pressure’s off.
Lori Rader-Day
What possibilities do we have to look forward to from you?
Neko Case
I just finished a record that’ll come out next year. I’m working on a musical, which hopefully will be out in 2026. It’s a musical version of [the film] Thelma & Louise. I’ve been working on it for, like, seven years. Callie Khouri, who wrote Thelma & Louise, is writing it, and that’s why it’s so good. That will see the light of day one of these days.
Lori Rader-Day
Anything else you want to say about the book before I let you get back to your album mastering?
Neko Case
I’m grateful to have gotten the opportunity to write it, and I had such great help from the folks at Grand Central and my editor Carrie Frye and my book agent. I didn’t know how to do any of this stuff, and they were all just a galvanized force for good. They helped me do it. Not in a way where they had to do it for me but they gave me confidence, and they were such wonderful cheerleaders. It’s not every day you get to work with people like that.
Lori Rader-Day
Well, I love the book. It’s really good, Neko, and I don’t say that lightly.
Neko Case
I appreciate it. I’ll try to come up with a good genre name for what you write. We can think of something.
NON-FICTION
The Harder I Fight the More I Love You
by Neko Case
Grand Central Publishing
Published January 29, 2025
