Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk

Kathleen Hanna

Hardcover | 15.9 x 3 x 24 cm | 304 pp

William Collins Books | 2024 | 9780008365349

This is an electric, searing memoir by the original Riot Grrrl and legendary front-woman of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre.

Kathleen Hanna’s rallying cry to feminists echoed far and wide through the punk scene of the 1980s, ’90s, and beyond. Her band, Bikini Kill, embodies this iconic time, and today their gutsy, radical lyrics of anthems like ‘Rebel Girl’ and ‘Double Dare Ya’ are more powerful than ever. But where did this transformative voice come from?

Hanna’s raw and insightful memoir takes us from her tumultuous childhood home to her formative college years in Olympia, Washington, and on to her first years on tour, fighting hard for gigs and for her band. As she makes blindingly clear, being in a ‘girl band’, especially a punk girl band, in those years was not a simple or a safe prospect. Male violence and antagonism threatened at every turn, and surviving as a singer who was a lightening rod for controversy took limitless amounts of determination.

But the relationships she developed during those years buoyed her – including with her bandmates Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilcox, and Billy Karren; her friendship with Kurt Cobain; and her introduction to Joan Jett – and they were a testament to how the true punk world nurtured and cared for its own.

Hanna opens up about falling in love with Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys and her debilitating battle with Lyme disease, and she brings us behind the scenes of her later bands, Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin. She also writes candidly about the Riot Grrrl movement and its decline, documenting with love its grassroots origins but critiquing its later exclusivity.

In an uncut voice all her own, Hanna reveals the darkest, hardest times along with the most joyful – and how it all fuelled her revolutionary art, from the 1980s to today.

‘In Rebel Girl, Hanna amasses an impressive arsenal. Every time another man diminishes her and her work, she sharpens a sword, carves out another space for herself and her friends and starts filling it with interesting material’ New York Times

‘Raw, candid and often bleakly funny’ Guardian

‘Capture[s] the life of a young woman trying to navigate a sexist culture while simultaneously finding her creative voice. There is an equal sense that Rebel Girl was written as a sort of road map for a new generation to pick up their own instruments and rock the world’ Vogue

‘Brutally honest’ Rolling Stone

‘Rebel Girl is Hanna in full: politically radical, funny and fearless. Just as Hanna has never held back as a performer, she writes unflinchingly about misogyny’ Vanity Fair

‘A startlingly generous account of a life spent surviving worlds of male violence both personal and professional in order to build a better world for herself and the people she loves. It’s a riot’ Surface Magazine

'Kathleen Hanna’s ability to flip – and flip off – expectations has made her one of the most riveting frontpeople in recent musical history … Her story, along with Bikini Kill’s upcoming tour, couldn’t feel more necessary' New York Times Book Review

'An unblinking, purple bruise of a memoir … stoic and empathetic in equal measure … The best parts of Rebel Girl detail Hanna’s difficulties navigating a world she and her peers had to make for themselves' Washington Post

'Hanna’s new memoir applies [her] caustic, introspective, politically astute and often mischievously playful voice to the ups and downs of her own life story … Candid and reflective, Rebel Girl tells the stories behind her best-known songs’ Time