Kirke, Lola: Wild West Village

In this darkly humorous memoir-in-essays, singer-songwriter Lola Kirke untangles an extraordinary upbringing in a family of eccentric, messy artists and how a girl from the big city went a little bit country. Born into a dynastic creative family, Lola Kirke grew up around people who maintained glamorous veneers while turbulence rocked their inner worlds. The youngest daughter of a British rock star and socialite er, Lola and her siblings (including actress Jemima and celebrity doula Domino), spent their childhoods in a sprawling West Village brownstone, which, thanks to the eclectic stylings of its matriarch, became the talk of the City, and was visited by the likes of Courtney Love and David Bowie. But behind the enviable exterior of wealth and coolness, was a family in disarray. Her parents’ marriage was characterized by addiction and affairs. Her sisters’ youths marked by their own stints in rehab, and oriented around a relentless pursuit of beauty idealized by their mother. To make sense of all the madness, young Lola turned to chocolate, masturbation, marijuana, and last but not least, the distant sounds of country music, where singers like Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, and Gram Parsons helped her see that the worst things in life are fine if you can make them rhyme. That women can be complicated. And that men sometimes beg for forgiveness. But before heading south to make music herself, Lola went west to Los Angeles, landing with a career-launching role in Gone Girl that led to starring alongside Greta Gerwig in Mistress America and Gael Garcia Bernal for four seasons on the Golden Globe–winning Mozart in the Jungle . But increasingly dubious of an artistic life lived in only one lane, Lola eventually left LA for Nashville, reconciling the future she was building with the chaotic past she was recalling by writing her own country songs. After a lifetime of trying to fit in with her family and stand out in the world, she finally realized what she really needed was just to be herself—contradictions and all. Darkly funny, high spirited, and just a little bit country, this is the story of a young woman trying to be someone else while secretly learning to become herself, as well as the story of a family that, in Lola’s own words, puts the “fun” in dysfunctional.