Horror Stories

by Liz Phair

Overview

The two-time Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter behind the groundbreaking album Exile in Guyville traces her life and career in a genre-bending memoir in stories about the pivotal moments that haunt her.

“Honest, original and absolutely remarkable.”—NPR (Best Books of the Year)

When Liz Phair shook things up with her musical debut, Exile in Guyville—making her as much a cultural figure as a feminist pioneer and rock star—her raw candor, uncompromising authenticity, and deft storytelling inspired a legion of critics, songwriters, musicians, and fans alike. Now, like a Gen X Patti Smith, Liz Phair reflects on the path she has taken in these piercing essays that reveal the indelible memories that have stayed with her.
 
For Phair, horror is in the eye of the beholder—in the often unrecognized universal experiences of daily pain, guilt, and fear that make up our humanity. Illuminating despair with hope and consolation, tempering it all with her signature wit, Horror Stories is immersive, taking readers inside the most intimate junctures of Phair’s life, from facing her own bad behavior and the repercussions of betraying her fundamental values, to watching her beloved grandmother inevitably fade, to undergoing the beauty of childbirth while being hit up for an autograph by the anesthesiologist.
 
Horror Stories is a literary accomplishment that reads like the confessions of a friend. It gathers up all of our isolated shames and draws them out into the light, uniting us in our shared imperfection, our uncertainty and our cowardice, smashing the stigma of not being in control. But most importantly, the uncompromising precision and candor of Horror Stories transforms these deeply personal experiences into tales about each and every one of us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525511984
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/08/2019
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	1,044,053
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Liz Phair is a Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter whose debut album, Exile in Guyville, has been hailed as a landmark of indie rock. She began her career in the early 1990s in Chicago by self-releasing audiocassettes under the name Girly-Sound. The intense response to these early tracks led to Phair’s signing with the independent record label Matador Records. She has been a recording artist and touring performer for over twenty-five years, paving the way for countless music artists, particularly women, who cite her among their major influences. Phair is also a visual artist who majored in studio art and art history at Oberlin College. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times and The Atlantic. Horror Stories is her first book.

Read an Excerpt

One

She Lies

We left her there. That’s the part that haunts me. We saw her need, and we ignored it. The bathroom was crowded. It was hot. I was waiting for my turn at the mirror to put on lipstick. I don’t know why I only see the scene from two angles: looking down out of the corner of my eye while I do my makeup, and waiting with my back against the wall for my friends to finish washing their hands.

I don’t know if she was a blonde, a brunette, or a redhead. I know that she was at the party. I think she was wearing an olive-green jacket, but actually, I might have made up that detail. I seem to be assembling her outfit partially from fact and partially from fiction, as if I’m trying to dress her the way I used to dress my old Barbie dolls, make her look presentable, give her that dignity. My conscience is a fantastic prosecutor. After so many years, only the damning evidence remains. I was there. I saw it. I did nothing.

Fear is an exhausting emotion, and I was scared so often that first semester in college. It was overwhelming trying to find my classrooms in a maze of unfamiliar buildings. I was afraid to ask the other students what the professor meant when she said our reading was reserved in the library. I was too scared to use my zip card in the cafeteria line, in case there was a trick to it. Trying to look like I knew what I was doing was my constant priority.

Looking back, I feel compassion for my younger self. I was just trying to get by. I was only eighteen, and my brain was still forming. I have to have something to say to the jury in my defense. The truth is, I was happy that night. I had met some girls I liked, finally. They all knew one another from a private school in Manhattan. They smoked clove cigarettes and smelled like patchouli. They had boyfriends and were trying to set me up with a guy from their group. One by one, they each took me aside and whispered something nice he’d said about me. They raised their eyebrows when they spoke about him, like I was lucky.

He wasn’t my type. He was okay. I went to a movie with him a week later, and we sat silently in the theater waiting for the lights to dim, having nothing to say to each other—just breathing slowly, acutely aware of the proximity of our limbs. He was nervous, I remember, because he blurted out, “If you’d ever hit somebody over the head with a baseball bat, you’d never forget it.” I agreed.

I’ve linked these memories together because, after I turned down the chance to be his girlfriend, my new friends looked for someone else to fill the vacancy and round out the octet. I didn’t see them much after that, which was probably for the best. Though we never discussed the girl in the restroom, I blamed them for not taking responsibility just as much as I blamed myself. How could we, how could any of us who were there, have turned a blind eye to what was happening? We can be monsters, we human beings, in the most offhand and cavalier ways.

It reminds me of those sociological experiments that expose how fundamental cruelty is to the establishment of society. A family, a clan, a nation, can’t be described without drawing a line around those who are included and leaving others outside the boundary. When researchers ask a group of students to single out and ostracize a member of their pack, someone always brings up William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, that story of shipwrecked children who devolve into a primitive tribe. But the shunning instinct doesn’t require isolation on a desert island or captivity in a science lab to find expression. It’s much, much closer at hand. Scratch the right tender spot and people turn savage.

It’s instinct, and that’s that. Not everyone regrets the unkind things they do. Guilt is the poisonous flower that springs up after a selfish act. In order to grow, there has to be soil present to begin with. The most impressive blooms get pressed into your book of recollections, and every time you go back and reread a chapter, their dry, skeletal remains drop out and fall into your lap. Decomposition marks the pages, and when you’ve interred too many bad memories, the book itself begins to smell.

We dig our disgrace by inches. Some of the meanest things I’ve done have been fleeting, momentary offenses. I only recognize their malignity once they’ve lingered overlong in my imagination. The painter Ed Paschke used to say, “They’re the bugs that get stuck in your grille.” I’d call them aftershocks of missiles lobbed from a safe distance. I’ve been carrying around for decades the tiny, toxic shards of souls I’ve casually shattered.

Late at night on a train, for instance, a man smiles at me, and I sneer—like he’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. I’m scared. I’m nineteen, and I don’t want to get raped. But as his face falls, I know instantly that he meant instead to reassure me that everything was okay. He was there. I was safe. If you think that’s the bad part, it isn’t. Everybody makes mistakes. My culpability begins the moment I turn my face away and stare out the window, pretending that I am better than he is. I let him think that he is repellent, allow him to sit there in shame and dwell on how poorly he was perceived. When he gets off the train, he looks as downcast as any man who hates himself will be. Wondering what kind of day he’d had, what situation he was going home to, what cares and worries weighed on him, this is my burden to bear for as long as I have a memory.

“If I Had Only” is the hit song I’ll never release. When quantum physicists talk about entanglement, I know exactly what they mean. When Einstein calls a phenomenon “spooky action at a distance,” I want to leap up out of my seat and shout, “Amen, brother! Preach!” It’s a lonely universe, and the void takes up so much of it. Why are we surprised to find dark matter residing within ourselves? Emptiness is filled to the brim with anti-starlight. Spread out a towel, lie down, and bleach beneath the not-done, the not-said, the not-redeemed.

A famous comedian left his dog on the back porch of his Mulholland Drive aerie. He lived in New York and rarely made it back to Los Angeles. His assistant would drive up twice a day to feed the crippled old Newfoundland and walk him for ten minutes along a dusty arroyo where no grass grew, on a bare gravel path along the scrubby side of a mountain. I visited the dog three times. I didn’t know the owner, so I just stood there beneath the tiny deck where this big creature lay all day, panting from the heat. I said nice things to him, like Romeo wooing Juliet. He had the sweetest, gentlest disposition despite being, for all intents and purposes, abandoned.

I had the chance to adopt the dog, but he was too big and too old for my narrow house, and he’d have had trouble climbing up and down all the stairs. I asked around at the stables where I rode horses. Nobody was interested. Many months later, after I’d given up hope, I got a call from someone who knew of a farm for Newfies that might be able to help. I didn’t respond. I never called back. I was on tour, I was busy, it fell through the cracks. And now I carry this dog around with me forever. He comes back and visits me like a ghost, that sweet face of his, to remind me that I am forging chains like Ebenezer’s, and they grow heavier as I go.

So who was the girl in the bathroom? I’ll never know. What were her dreams? Why was she there? What made her get so drunk? She was dressed the same way we all were, in a frilly miniskirt and ankle boots. She looked like she’d be a nice person to meet on another day, under different circumstances.

I could tell by her shape and the quality of her skin that she was pretty. But she had to be lonely, because where were her friends? Where were the people who were supposed to keep track of her? Where was the roommate or the boyfriend who was supposed to make sure she could stand up and get home again? She must have come alone to that party. It must have taken courage, a lot of liquid courage, to stand around not knowing anybody. Her unconscious body on the floor was proof of just how nervous she’d been.

Her legs were sticking out of the stall. We stepped around and over them. It reminded me of that scene in The Wizard of Oz when the Wicked Witch of the East lies prone after Dorothy’s house lands on her. People coming into the bathroom tittered and pointed at first, then gasped. Then they shut up.

The line right inside the door was still lively, still revved up from the party atmosphere outside, but as you moved deeper into the inner sanctum of the lavatory, it got silent. People went about their business with a grim, thin-lipped efficiency. Eyes darting, cheeks pale. Faucets turning on and off. Nobody saying anything. Nobody doing anything about it.

She was lying facedown, passed out, her head resting on the floor next to the toilet, a big smear of excrement extending out from between her sprawled legs. I’d never seen someone who’d shit themselves before, let alone publicly. The humiliation of it was extreme.

Editorial Reviews

★ 10/14/2019

In a debut memoir as candid as her music, Phair eschews themes of typical rock-and-roll tell-all for a more introspective look at events in her life. Phair, who released her debut album Exile in Guyville 1993, made her name with bluntly honest and sometimes sexually explicit lyrics focused on desire, independence, and relationships. She does the same her, moving nonlinearly through her life and focusing on “the small indignities we all suffer daily,” where horror is found “in brief interactions that are as cumulatively powerful as the splashy heart-stoppers, because that’s where we live most of our lives.” Nine months pregnant, she became self-conscious as she was examined by her ob-gyn, recalling her first visit with a male pediatrician who erroneously told her that “she was very tight. It may be difficult for her to have sex.” Her stories include realizing that a boyfriend is a “calculatingly dishonest” cheat, her own infidelity during her first marriage, getting lost in a blinding New York City snowstorm late at night, and dealing with the frightening fallout of a street fight in Shanghai that she started. Phair admits that she can still make “colossal errors in judgement,” but her empathy for people’s “private struggles” shines throughout: “The stranger next to you is so much more like you than you think.” This powerful debut will delight Phair’s many fans. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

01/10/2020

Indie-rock darling Phair's unconventional memoir details the moments that have haunted her, the ones that keep her up at night, the ones in which she acted against her best instincts, or reacted in a way that left her feeling ashamed or embarrassed. She writes that "examining the weaker moments in our lives makes us stronger," which is her aim here. Phair describes not helping a young woman passed out in a bathroom at a party and not speaking up when she was uncomfortable at photo shoots, as well as choices that doomed her marriage. She points out that it's difficult to share these kinds of truths and that doing so leaves us vulnerable to judgment and rejection, but that ultimately it reveals who we are more completely and leads to more fulfilling relationships.

VERDICT Fans of the author and those who enjoyed Patti Smith's memoirs will relish this book.—Stephanie Klose, Library Journal

Library Journal

Honest, original and absolutely remarkable . . . elegant but unpretentious writing . . . There are so many things to admire about Horror Stories, it’s hard to list them all. It’s a memoir with an original and fascinating structure. [Phair] mostly avoids writing about her own songs, and while this may seem to be an odd choice, it’s actually quite refreshing—her music, she seems to indicate, can speak for itself.”—NPR

“[A] uniquely thoughtful, self-aware memoir . . . bracing and refreshing . . . Horror Stories is more an archipelago of intense episodes of unknowing with the implicit understanding that life is a wayward, unresolvable business. . . . [A] rigorously open exploration of negative capability.”—The New York Times

“Like a batch of interrelated Phair songs, each chapter a separate and specific story, all together accumulating into an intimate self-portrait . . . with equal parts elegance, humor, and authenticity.”—The Boston Globe

“Liz Phair’s songwriting has always had the rare quality of being short-story-like. Damn good short stories, too. Horror Stories has that unique Liz Phair ability to make you look at something you’d rather not, but once you do you’re glad you did—like any form of honest art. This is why Liz Phair still is, and always will be, a threat.”—Ben Folds
 
“Horror Stories cracks open the idea of fear itself to see what's inside. Liz Phair’s stories are heartbreaking and inspiring, galvanizing and contemplative. This memoir is as much about the poignant luminosity of the subjects upon which Phair fixes her gaze as it is about the darkness she shows us. Witnessing her examine the moments that have stayed with her over the years is captivating: a literary triumph by a musical icon.”—Lily Brooks-Dalton, author of Good Morning, Midnight
 
“Horror Stories is a collection of turning points, plucked free of ongoing time and their original settings. Gathered, they sparkle eerily, expanding to occupy an entire remembered year—maybe even an entire remembered self.”—Sarah Manguso, author of Ongoingness: The End of a Diary
 
“Liz Phair’s Horror Stories is a deeply personal narrative about a groundbreaking musician’s intense love affair with life, with all its turbulent highs and lows. It is also about those things that have sustained Phair since childhood: the wonder and healing power of nature, music, and family. A compelling blend of riveting prose and soaring lyricism, Horror Stories is as enthralling and as addictive as Phair's music.”—Mira Bartók, New York Times bestselling author of The Memory Palace, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

“A debut memoir as candid as her music . . . This powerful debut will delight Phair’s many fans.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From the Publisher