MusicSINCE HER 1993 BREAKOUT ALBUM,
Exile in Guyville, Liz Phair, 52,
has garnered a reputation as a fem-
inist pioneer in the music industry,
blending her own candor and
authenticity into her songwriting.
That much hasn’t changed, though
the medium in which she expresses
herself for the moment has. With
the release of her memoir, Horror
Stories, due Oct. 8, Phair unveils
her most personal anecdotes,
mistakes, and flaws, and connects
them to universal experiences of
pain, regret, and guilt. “This is
how I go through life, and I want
to be honest about it,” she says.
Phair’s essays, which range from
experiencing sexual harassment
to getting lost in a blizzard, tout
a through-line of her signature
wit and confront the complexities
of the world around us.
The rocker’s desire to craft
something vulnerable stemmed
partly from the 2016 presidential
election. For two years, she dedi-
cated herself to opening up in her
writing, this time in prose form.
“There was such a rush within me to
want to connect in a meaningful
way because everything around me
was so awful and disconnected,”
she says. Then there was the pass-
ing of both David Bowie and
Prince, along with a conversation
with her manager about the uncer-
tainty of death. “It got me thinking,
‘What would I do if it were my last
piece of art?’ I wanted to do some-
thing meaningful and make a stand
in support of not being shallow, not
hiding and concealing,” she recalls.
Horror Stories in many ways is
just that, as Phair calls it her “war-
rior stance.” But instead of putting
on armor, she’s taking it off. Using
stories from her childhood and
through her career, Phair explores
various “horrors” she’s encoun-
tered, which aren’t always typical
(falling for a bandmate who had agirlfriend, being a bystander to a
girl passed out in a bathroom).
“We’re bombarded with horror all
the time, but what we don’t do
is pull back and look at our own
emotional engagement. I feel like
the world would be better if
we were emotionally literate, and
that’s the hill I want to make my
last stand on.” Phair is also looking
for people to slow down, adding,
“We skip from big moment to big
moment, and that’s the story
we tell ourselves about our lives,
but most of what we do is small,
private, and individually witnessed
and experienced.”
While all of the chapters tell
intimate details of Phair’s life,
there is a section in particular she’s
well aware people will be talking
about: one that details her experi-
ences with harassment while also
shedding light on her relationship
with Ryan Adams, whose alleged
sexual misconduct and emotional
abuse were detailed in The New
York Times. “I pretty much believed
it,” she says of the story. “I didn’t
think there weren’t two sides to
things—I never think that, I always
think there’s a complexity.”S tories
Following the report, Phair, who
had been recording a double album
with Adams, responded to a tweet
asking if she’d weigh in on the situ-
ation. “If I do, I’ll write about it.
But I think you can extrapolate. My
experience was nowhere near as
personally involving, but yes the
record ended and the similarities
are upsetting,” she tweeted. Phair
stood by her words: In Horror Sto-
ries, she gives her perspective on
Adams, revealing that he had tried
to bed her. “At the time, he didn’t
seem that bad to me. I didn’t feel
that I was abused the way the other
women felt. I was also just used
to...a guy hitting on you in the
music business like it’s nothing,”
she admits. “What I [am] trying
to say is: This is how bad it is,
because he wasn’t that bad from
my perception. It was this interest-
ing intersection of this #MeToo
moment and an experience I was
involved in that qualified, and yet I
hadn’t even registered it as particu-
larly difficult. I’ve had worse.”
Phair has not talked to Adams
since the Times piece but does
in some ways seem protective of
him, stating that he tried to help her.
“What happened with the other
women was much more devastat-
ing,” she says. “That’s why I didn’t
want to write the story—because it
didn’t feel like my story, but it
prompted my story.”
But Phair doesn’t want the
focus of her memoir to be on Adams.
It wouldn’t be the first time the
singer has experienced her work
being lost in salaciousness. After
Exile, she was given the nickname
of a “bl-- job queen,” based on a
line in the song “Flower” that was
representative of the sex-positive
nature of her music. Instead of the
music, that quote became the
narrative around her critically
acclaimed debut. “The bl-- job
queen thing, it’s not just about one
line—it took a long time before
Exile in Guyville was [dubbed] a
really solid album from start to
finish,” she says. Phair acknowledges
that we still live in a “sound-
bite culture,” which is why she wrote
Horror Stories. “That’s how our
society works, but it shouldn’t.”← “I want people
to come away from
the book being able
to tell the people
in their lives more
about themselves.”