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Carrie Brownstein

Carrie Brownstein (b. 1974) is an American musician, writer, actress, section three
and comedian. Raised in Redmond, Washington, she started
playing guitar when she was fifteen, later saying that the guitar was Jerod Harris/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty
the “first [thing] that I had to save up my own money for — and /
maybe that was the whole reason that I actually stuck with it.”
Brownstein was a founding member of the pioneering riot grrrl rock
band Sleater-Kinney. Alongside Fred Armisen, she is the writer, star, Images Carrie Brownstein
and codeveloper of the sketch comedy show Portlandia. This
excerpt, from her memoir Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl (2015),
recounts a time as a teenager when she had to deal with her
mother’s illness.

first heard the term “anorexic” in the backseat sadness. She smiled with a strained, hesitant
I of a car on the way home from the movies. It warmth. In the years before my mother’s ill-
was the summer before seventh grade. From ness, it’s not her body that I recall being differ-
the burgundy insides of a Chevy Blazer, we all ent, though obviously it was — her cheeks fuller
turned to look at a jogger, a woman, a sinewy and brighter, her hair shinier, her breasts and
form devoid of curves, angles only, rib cage and stomach softer — but rather her presence. She
clavicles protruding, like some sort of moving was noticeable: she was in the car and in the
body diagram, inside out. The driver of the car, kitchen, putting curlers in her hair and shopping
my friend’s mother, said the word that we did for clothes, talking with her friends, helping
not know. What it described was what we had me with my homework, attending school plays,
just seen: a skeleton in Nikes. walking, talking, sitting, eating, being, existing.
The word “anorexia” was like a prize I had In a photo from several years later, the last
won in a drawing someone entered for me family vacation we would ever take, my mother
on my behalf; unexpected, sure, but I would is standing on the beach in Hawaii. Bikini-clad,
find a use for it. And I did. At the dinner table I burnt red like she’d been dipped in cherry Kool-
inserted it into the conversation. I added it to the Aid, bags of white pus forming on her sternum,
lyrics of popular songs and sang them while my bones for days. Thin, brittle hair — it had been
mother slowly pushed her food around a plate, falling out for a while now. Hollow eyes and
rarely lifting the fork to her mouth, every morsel cheeks. She is somewhere between rotting and a
a lame horse on a track, never reaching the fin- fossil. Maybe she hoped that the smaller she got,
ish line. I taunted my mother with the word as if the easier it would be to disappear.
anorexia were something she might desire, not After consulting a doctor and nutritionist, 5
something she already had. and probably not at all on account of my singing
My mother was fair-skinned with a delicate, or tormenting, my mother finally did admit — to
bony strand of a nose and dark, straight hair. us, to her friends, to herself — that she was ill.
Her eyes were a deep brown, and I think of her And when I was fourteen, she checked herself
as unblinking, as if she were always looking into an eating disorder unit at a hospital in
at something suspended between horror and Ballard. She would be gone nearly a month.

Uncorrected proofs have been used in this sample. 203
Copyright © Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.

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