Kathleen Hanna has been a creative force for over thirty years. From her role as the frontwoman of Bikini Kill, in which she helped kick-start a girls-to-the-front revolution; to her enduring influence in the underground Riot Grrrl movement; to her part in creating the electropunk sounds of Le Tigre, Hanna has proved to be a cultural tour de force. She’s also always been funny as hell and more than happy to laugh at herself when she gets too self-serious. Unfortunately, getting self-serious is a known side effect of writing a memoir and then being forced to talk about your process by journalists on deadline. Still, her process is worth asking about: she wrote her debut book, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk, over the course of five years, while also touring, parenting, and learning to live with a Lyme disease diagnosis that had kept her on the sidelines for a while.
Her memoir, published in spring 2024, takes fans on a behind-the-scenes tour of Hanna’s life, beginning with her tumultuous childhood (to describe it kindly), and moving on to her time at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where she studied art. It was during those formative college years that Hanna tapped into her unapologetic voice and uncompromising artistry—making zines, chapbooks, and art installations; performing spoken word; and eventually taking the mic in 1990 with her now-legendary band. While that era in music has been fairly well-documented for its sea-changing punk and grunge scenes, Hanna’s front-row view is of a landscape that was also rife with misogyny. It’s an eye-opening snapshot of an industry that she has been fighting against for decades now. If you have ever played a Bikini Kill song like “Suck My Left One” or “Double Dare Ya” and someone responded with “Why is she so angry?,” this book offers a pretty compelling series of answers, spread out over her lifetime.
Much of her life was documented in Sini Anderson’s 2013 film The Punk Singer, but in her memoir Hanna holds the reins. She is seizing this opportunity to pull out lessons that might make it easier for anyone walking along the trail she blazed. Hanna is a fierce advocate for gender equality and social justice, and her influence extends far beyond music. Plus, she’s just really fucking cool (and she somehow avoided ’90s eyebrows, a fact that, alone, is worth a memoir).
—Melissa Locker
I. HIGH-INFORMATION NEGATIVES
THE BELIEVER: I feel like we have so many things to talk about, but I guess first and foremost: You have a new book. How do you feel about its release and about having people react to it?
KATHLEEN HANNA: I wasn’t really thinking about how it’d be received when I wrote it. Like, I just really didn’t care. I was writing it for myself and for the few people who it might be a benefit to. I wasn’t really thinking, like, Oh, I want everyone to like me, you know what I mean? I obviously don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings or put anybody down or any of that shit, but I wasn’t trying to write a made-for-TV movie-of-the-week thing, or something that People magazine would be into. When you put something out, when you write something, you don’t realize how vulnerable it is, and then people think it’s so vulnerable, and then I’m like, Oh, now I’m scared.
BLVR: I hear you, but I feel like you have been doing this for a long time—first with art, then with music, and more recently with the documentary. You must have some sense of how people are going to react at this point, don’t you?
KH: No? No, I have no idea. I mean really no idea. When I walk onstage, I never have any idea if it’s gonna be a good show or a bad show, or even if there’ll be people in the room. Before a show, I always pop my head out to make sure there are people there.
Look, I’m just kidding: I really live in the now. [Laughs] Yeah, no, I don’t really live in the now, but I try to. And I try not to think about how people are going to react, which maybe is bad. I just try to have that attitude of, like, fuck it. If people like it and it helps them, great, and if they think it’s stupid, they don’t have to read it.
BLVR: I think that’s good advice, just generally. But I guess this is all to say that you haven’t started drafting your Pulitzer Prize acceptance speech?
KH: [Laughs] No.
BLVR: How did you approach writing this book versus writing a poem or a song?
KH: I guess my whole process was just butt-in-chair. I kept at it.
BLVR: So you just sat every day and worked?
KH: I didn’t sit every day, because it took me five years. I sat every day for periods of time. A lot of the stuff in the memoir I didn’t remember until I started writing it. Some of these stories—it was the first time I’d kind of told myself that they happened. It was definitely the first time I wrote them down on a piece of paper. There’s stuff I had written about in my journal before, or that I talked to close confidants about, but a lot of it I had never really fully fucking processed.
But I was committed to the idea of keeping going as long as I could. The year I started the book, I moved to California, and I was kind of sick and in the process of getting well, so I didn’t write very much. Then after that first year I went full on, but I would go on tour and leave and not write at all, and then come home and be full on again.
I had to start seeing a therapist a whole bunch through one part of it, because it got really hairy. I couldn’t deal with it. I’m sure tons of writers have been in this place before, when they’re writing any kind of difficult material, but I just was, like, walking around my house with this blank stare for what felt like a year. I’m sure I was hideous to be around. It was really hard. It was actually really, really hard. It was a pretty torturous experience, but it was also really gratifying to craft a narrative out of something that didn’t feel like it could ever become a narrative. I feel pretty satisfied with that. I feel like there’s an actual story that kind of shaped itself and there’s an actual kind of arc. The book was six hundred pages and I had to cut it down to three hundred.
BLVR: Oh, wow. So there’s a volume two coming?
KH: Hell no. That would be like if Chubby Checker did “Twistin’ Christmas.” I was just like, I’m gonna write everything, and then I’m going to figure it out. So I wrote way too much. I sort of went at it from a photographic angle. When I first started doing photography, I loved really high-contrast photos, so I would shoot really high-contrast flash photos. I had a teacher who was like, You know, it’s better to shoot looking for details—for every detail you can get—and then you can make the decision later about which ones to take out. But if you don’t have that original information in the negative, you don’t have a choice: you have to print everything high-contrast because you shot high-contrast. I kind of went about the book the same way: I’m going to get down as much detail from my life as possible, and then I’m going to look through it all and be like, Well, what would be one story I could make out of this? The overarching goal was not to have it be a rags-to-riches story, emotionally or otherwise. I didn’t want some Horatio Alger American success story.
II. RETURNING TO OLYMPIA
BLVR: By the way, I grew up in Portland, Oregon, too, and it sounds like your high school experience was very similar to mine. It was fun to read about Portland in the ’90s. Also, as an Oregonian, I loved learning that Walter Cole is your second cousin: the world’s oldest performing drag queen and in the Guinness World Records! That’s so cool.
KH: I’m actually making a documentary about him currently. I am just trying to get the final funding for it. People outside Portland don’t know him and just don’t understand his impact, and that’s part of the reason I want to make this documentary. Because he was like the mayor. He was like the mayor for fifty years.
BLVR: I was very excited to see that in your book.
KH: Yeah, I’m totally royalty. [Laughs]
BLVR: Exactly. I wanted to ask you about what seems like a pivotal moment in the book. You make it to the Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington, and while you are writing poetry in a café there, [Kill Rock Stars records company founder] Slim Moon walks up to you and suggests that you do a spoken-word project together. Did that meeting put you on a path toward everything that came later? Did randomly writing poetry in a café change your life?
KH: I didn’t realize what a big moment that was until I was writing about it. I had a rough timeline of things to jog my memory, and I started thinking about what had happened that year and I was like, Oh yeah. Slim walked up to me and asked me to record. And as I was writing, I was like, Wait a minute: That was the door that opened. That started everything else. You don’t really realize that kind of thing unless you’re, like, writing your life story. So of course, I emailed him and said we should be friends again! I thanked him—and there’s a bunch of people in the book that I went back and found to say, Hey, I never really properly thanked you for, you know, giving me a life. So, yeah, it was a really big moment. Bikini Kill performed at the Capitol Theater recently. Slim and I used to perform in front of the stage, and this time I was on the actual stage and I was like, Wow, I really made it! I’m on the stage!
BLVR: Yeah, and that theater is kind of where Riot Grrrl started. You performed there back in the ’90s. Was being onstage at the Capitol Theater a full-circle moment?
KH: Well, Bikini Kill never used to play on the full stage. We always played on the back stage. So we would play on the stage, but the stage was also where people would stand. It wasn’t until Bikini Kill got back together, when we were in our fifties, that we played on the actual stage, facing the actual audience. So I was like, Wow, this took a long time! But I remember, in college, being in the audience and watching Soundgarden. I never understood that band, but I was just sort of standing there watching the spectacle of it, because it was a real rock concert moment for Olympia. I remember thinking that it must be really wild to be up there and have everybody flipping out—and then I was where Chris Cornell was standing and it’s actually not that big of a deal. It was kind of like a grade-school auditorium or something. It’s not as big as I’d thought it was when I was nineteen, you know?
BLVR: Things always do feel smaller when you’re older. Did it feel weird being back in Olympia?
KH: I mean, I’ve been back kind of a bunch. This trip actually started feeling like it was not a big deal, like I was just coming home for a little while. The time before, I actually rented a car, and Kathi [Wilcox, of Bikini Kill] and I drove to all the spots in the book. I took a picture of Big Tom, which is a hot dog place that’s mentioned in the book. Visiting was definitely more spooky a few years ago; now it just feels kind of normal. But I’m dealing with regrets when I go back there. Like, there’s people who were really kind and good to me back in the ’90s that I didn’t spend the kind of time with then that I wish I had—people who are more into nature, who I didn’t go on hikes with. Now that I’m older, I think, Oh, that’s what I should have been doing. Why was I flipping out over people writing mean fanzines about me when I could have been in the community garden with Nikki McClure?
BLVR: OK, but the Capitol Theater wasn’t the only place to play. Olympia was also famous for its house shows.
KH: Yeah, definitely.
BLVR: What was a memorable house show?
KH: There was a really great drummer—I’m not going to name her—who had a birthday in a basement at someone’s house with her bandmates. We were all downstairs and, you know, underage drinking and playing music really loud. Then these two cops came in and we were like, Party’s over! And we all ran out so we wouldn’t get busted. But apparently the cops put on a tape and started dancing—they were strippers! I think it ended up being just the drummer and her bandmates there with the two cops—strippers—because everybody thought they were cops and ran.
BLVR: That must have been so awkward!
KH: I know, awkward—and they ruined her party! If you hire cop strippers, they need to be full-on Chippendales cops. They can’t be wearing legit-looking uniforms. Like, they can’t even be wearing security uniforms. That’s my advice to the kids.
III. LUCKY BREAK
BLVR: Your book has a lot of photographs in it. Did the photos help you remember stuff?
KH: Because I was a photo student, I was always taking pictures of everything—and this was before digital photography existed. Of course, I actually found the photos I needed only after I started writing the book. But there are times in the book when I’m talking about wearing a certain outfit, and I have a picture of the outfit, or, like, pictures of a parking lot in California that I talk about being in. I documented everything, even before we could easily record video and stuff; I always had a tape recorder with me. I tape-recorded a lot of our tours, us talking in the van. I was constantly archiving stuff. I was lucky, as somebody who lived in kind of a pre-digital era, that I had those photographs and things.
BLVR: You’ve said in the past that archiving is incredibly important because so much of our youth culture and history has disappeared.
KH: Yeah. There was a lot of really fucked-up trauma that came up when I started the project, and I had to dig for the happy moments. And once I found them, I realized they were everywhere. It was this very personal process, but when I had the editing hat on, I had to decide what was important to me, and I knew there were certain things I wanted to say to younger people who are in bands coming up now, who might be getting into situations similar to those I had been in. Sort of like grandma information, stuff I wish I had known. Books played such a huge part in my being able to dig myself out of a lot of holes, and so I was hoping that, if another young singer got into trouble, they could read this and be like, Oh, you know, I’m not the only person facing whatever issue they were facing in their career.
BLVR: What were some of the books that were most helpful?
KH: What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo and Your Art Will Save Your Life by Beth Pickens.
BLVR: Speaking of archives, I wanted to ask you about the Fales Library at New York University, which, as you know, has the Riot Grrrl collection.
KH: I have a whole wing at the archive. There’s a story in the book about how we were going to drive to DC in our green van, to move there. But the driver’s seat broke and it fell completely backward so nobody could sit in it, so I put my black filing cabinet behind it to hold it up. All my stuff was in there, like, every flyer I’d ever made, every chapbook—that’s what we called fanzines—every zine, every essay I’d ever written or xeroxed at the library because it was important to me. I was just going to leave the filing cabinet at a friend’s and then figure out what to do with it and probably end up getting rid of it. But I took it with me because of the broken van. It stayed with me until I was in New York City, and I was able to keep it and give it to Fales.
BLVR: That’s such amazing luck, in a way.
KH: I know: it was like an archive on wheels. The picture of that filing cabinet ended up being on the cover of the Riot Grrrl archives book. It’s one of those things where, had that crappy thing not happened, the really good thing would not have happened. Not to be religious and, like, Oh, every bad thing happens for a reason, because I think bad things do just happen. People are just shitty for shitty reasons that are none of my business, you know?
BLVR: So how did you decide what was going to go into the archives and what was for personal use?
KH: My interns decided. [Laughs] I had interns work on that project only because I was ill. I took out stuff that was very personal and I took out things that had to do with other people that I didn’t feel like it was respectful to share, like private letters and stuff that other people had written. And other than that, I left a lot of really bad poetry and a lot of really bad photography in there. Like really embarrassing stuff. Like me looking like Jesus on a cross with menstrual blood on my cell phone. It’s so bad. I had this curly perm because it was the ’90s, and I’d seen the movie Gas Food Lodging, and I was like, Oh, I need a curly perm. I got a thing called a spiral perm, and there’s a lot of pictures of me with the spiral perm. A lot of self-portraits with the stupid spiral perm.
I left a lot of the crap that I made in there, and it’s not because I think everything I’ve made in passing is great, but because I feel like it’s really important that, if anybody was interested enough in us to look at it, they would see stuff that was in process and unfinished and messy. It wasn’t like, Oh, I just popped out and I wrote this really great thing, you know?
IV. “LATE-STAGE HAPPY DAYS”
BLVR: Speaking of ’90s style, I was looking at some of the photos included in the book, and I don’t know why this stuck out to me, but you seem to have managed to avoid those thin ’90s eyebrows, which is pretty impressive.
KH: I had a friend in junior high who tweezed out half of one of her eyebrows and it never grew back. When you see that, you’re like, I’m never tweezing my eyebrows.
BLVR: I saw a TikTok where people were using Rogaine on their eyebrows to regrow them from their ’90s brows.
KH: This all just seems very dangerous. We don’t know what that stuff does. Like, I wouldn’t put it on my dog, so I’m not going to put it on my head.
BLVR: So you managed to gracefully avoid a lot of ’90s bad style choices, but not all of them.
KH: Oh no. Go ahead, hit me.
BLVR: So much of it has become iconic now, but those tiny dresses with the tights and the combat boots are coming back into fashion. Is it funny for you to see them return?
KH: Did you ever watch Happy Days?
BLVR: Yes.
KH: Do you remember when people on Happy Days started having feathered hair? It was really weird, like, how is it set in the 1950s and they have feathered hair, which was popular in the ’70s and ’80s, which was when it was filmed?
BLVR: Right, like the ’70s just infiltrated the show.
KH: It just sort of worked its way in. Sometimes when I see people doing ’90s fashion now, it feels sort of like late-stage Happy Days. You can’t really keep the current day out of it. Like, you can’t keep the Diet Coke can out of the shot at all times. When people are doing ’90s cosplay, it seems very vague, and flattened historically by the internet. There’s something with the fashion where you can’t tell if something is really from the ’90s or just inspired by the ’90s, where you’re seeing someone’s idea of the ’90s instead of the actual ’90s.
I find it fascinating, but it’s the same way when you live in New York and you see somebody who has really wild style, and then you try to sit there and figure out how it ended up that way. Like, OK, they started with stretch pants because they liked the way they look in them. So they decided they’re always going to wear stretch pants. And then they added a big sweater, because they decided that’s the new thing. But, like, at what point did each of these things happen and overlap? And then the bookbag came and then the teased hair never left and then… How did the style arrive?
BLVR: I have a twenty-year-old niece who is going to art school in Brooklyn, [New York,] and she occasionally shows up with these outfits and I’m like, Oh my god, you walked out of 1997.
KH: A lot of times I see these looks and I’m like, Oh my god, I would have killed for that at the time. It was weird back in the day: I used to wear black tights with really short Levi’s shorts, and that was weird when I did it.
BLVR: Right, and in one scene you talk about wearing boxer shorts.
KH: [Laughing] Yeah. That’s another thing, though I don’t even know if that was a fashion choice or if it was just something cheap that I could get and I thought it looked cute. I’m not a fan of stretch pants, that’s all I can say.
BLVR: But what about spiral perms? Should we bring them back?
KH: You know, I never should have gotten a perm. It grows out and you have half-straight hair. I couldn’t afford to do it more than once, so I was like, Oh, shit. When you’re seventeen or eighteen, you don’t think ahead. You’re not like, Oh, I have to do this again in six months.
That was kind of the biggest move I ever made in terms of doing something to my looks. So that’s why I constantly talk about it: because I couldn’t even be bothered to tweeze one hair on my eyebrows, but I spent every last dime I had on this stupid spiral perm.
V. A TICK-SHAPED CAKE
BLVR: I remember reading a story a while ago where you talked about the first time you ate sushi: it made you cry because it made you so happy. And in the intro to your book, you talk about eating gelato in Milan and crying. Does food make you cry a lot?
KH: Yes. There’s a part in the book where I talk about being on autopilot, and for me, eating food and crying has to do with coming out of being on autopilot, or being numb. You know, when there are difficult periods in your life and you kind of need to shut down and just cruise, out of self-preservation. It’s a coping mechanism that some people have, where you just sort of shut off.
I’ve come to from that state in all different kinds of places. Once, I was in a grocery store aisle and all of a sudden I smelled coffee really strongly, and I was like, Oh my god, I’m alive! I started crying, and I couldn’t believe how delicious the coffee smelled. I’m getting teary just thinking about it, but now I have a ritual where every morning: when I make my coffee, I put my face over the thing. I do pour-over style, and when I pour the hot water in, I put my face over it like I’m steaming myself, and I smell it, and I just remember that I’m alive every day. And I kind of remember that moment in the grocery store in Olympia when I woke up and I smelled the coffee and I came to.
There’ve been these times in my life when I was very, very present. And in those times, I would eat something delicious and I would appreciate it to such an extent that I would cry. Sometimes food brings me back from those states like smelling salts. It’s like I’ve been numb and then I eat something delicious and I’m like, Hey, wait a minute. And as I slowly taste it, it just reminds me that I exist and that I’m alive, and I start looking around the room and realizing that the world is really there. Does that make sense?
BLVR: Yeah, it totally does. It’s beautiful. Food doesn’t really do that for me, but music can, and I will totally end up crying in grocery stores when I hear a song. When is the last time you cried over food? Do you remember? Because now we have coffee, we have gelato in Milan, and we have sushi in New York.
KH: [Laughing] I had to hold it in when I was eating this thing called a cheeseburger pizza.
BLVR: Where were you eating a cheeseburger pizza?
KH: I’m on a softball team, and we went to this pizza restaurant and they basically had all these weird leftovers. It didn’t even have meat on it. They just had a bunch of stuff left over and made a cheeseburger pizza—and it really tasted like a cheeseburger. It was amazing. And then the next day I woke up and I thought about it. And I go back once a week and I’m like, “Do you have cheeseburger pizza?” And nothing. But I didn’t cry, because there were kids there.
BLVR: And you didn’t want to upset them.
KH: No, but I was getting misty over the cheeseburger pizza—and that was, like, two weeks ago. So, yeah, I’m a big crybaby.
BLVR: But now I want to know what cheeseburger pizza tastes like.
KH: It tastes like a cheeseburger. I think it had shredded lettuce on it and some kind of Kraft Singles–style cheese.
BLVR: I think half of Italy just shuddered.
KH: I know, I know, it’s disgusting, but it was really good.
BLVR: Are there other moments that can make you cry like that, or is it really just food that triggers you?
KH: Oh, there’ve definitely been moments, but there’ve also been specific restaurants, you know? I think it’s just when I’m really present. It can be a song. I cry a lot at songs in the car. I get really moved when things are extremely beautiful, and I think I’ve spent a lot of time feeling ashamed about it, and I don’t want to feel ashamed about it anymore. I just feel really lucky that I get to see and hear beautiful things, especially right now, when democracy—did it ever really exist?—is falling apart completely, and, you know, we’re involved in several wars and genocides. And now I’m going to start to really cry.
But the fact that beauty still exists can be kind of stabilizing. I don’t think it has to be hedonistic. I don’t think appreciating beauty has to be the opposite of being a part of change or dealing with difficult issues. I think it can be a bedrock that keeps your feet planted and reminds you that you’re not alone. Like, right now I’m looking at two balloons that I got for my birthday—my friend got them from a balloon warehouse where they sell all the seconds of balloons. They don’t have anything written on them; they are this weird oval shape. One was supposed to be a heart, but it ended up looking more like a gem, and the other one’s white, and they’re kind of puckering and weird. But they are just tied to a rock on a table, and the heater fan blows them and they hit the window, and I’m staring at them right now. I look at them every day, and I just find them really, really beautiful. It’s just stupid stuff like that. It makes me really happy.
BLVR: Whenever I see things like that, I think of the name of that Elvis Costello album All This Useless Beauty. That phrase runs through my head, but the beauty is not useless. It makes you feel. For some reason in these interviews, I always end up asking people about cake, so: Has cake ever made you cry?
KH: Oh no. Oh god. When I went off sugar, I did not eat sugar for at least a year. Like, no sugar. The only sugar I had was blueberries. So it was my cousin Jane’s thirtieth birthday, and I had a surprise party for her in New Jersey. I had all her friends come and I laid a big table and her friend made a homemade cake that looked so super delicious. It was just a lot of great people, a really fun time, really beautiful looking out at the water, and this homemade cake. I just felt like, If I’m going to eat a piece of cake, this is when I do it, right? I love my cousin so much; her friend made this beautiful cake. I took one bite and I just started—it wasn’t just crying like sushi crying; it was sobbing. It was like my-cat-of-twenty-years-just-died kind of sobbing. Everybody got very concerned, and I was like, “No, I’m happy!” And my fucking bitch cousin takes out her phone and starts taking pictures of it and documents the whole thing as bribery material, because I am an ugly, ugly, ugly crier. When she showed me the pictures, I look so out of control. I just look wild. My face is bright red. There’re tears everywhere. I’m trying to hold my hands up. The sugar just made me go out of control, is basically what I’m saying. If I don’t eat sugar for a year and then I eat a piece of delicious cake—the sugar literally had some kind of crazy drug effect on me. It was chocolate. Chocolate with ganache and all that kind of business.
I also had a cake that was shaped like a tick and that squirted blood when you cut into it. It was at my birthday, and I had just been diagnosed with Lyme disease, and I decided I was going to tell everybody about my diagnosis at my birthday party. So I did it through the cake. Everybody was like, Why do you have a cake shaped like a tick that squirts blood? And then I spent the rest of my birthday explaining Lyme disease to everyone. It was the worst birthday of all time, but the cake tasted so good and the blood even tasted like butterscotch.
