Taking Control: Manifesto of a Girl Journalist in the 90s - work in progress
This post is a synopsis of my memoir. To register interest in purchasing the book at a later date ngaireruthsbook@gmail.com
Introduction
This book is not all about how cool I was and the famous people I met during my many years writing for the legendary weekly music paper Melody Maker.
The memoir’s framework is a 6-point feminist manifesto I wrote as an agenda for writing when a music journalist for the Melody Maker (1990-2000). I am uneducated, angry and embarrassingly evangelical about my feminism on a quest to find ‘my tribe’. I have an unusual backstory. I am bang in the middle of the new Angry Women scene, pioneers of Riot Grrrl. I don’t realise it’s a scene. I’m too busy responding.
I am inspired by Vivian Gornick, Joan Didion and Jeanette Winterson, so this work always returns to the story, not just the situation. This is not a music archive with anecdotes. Its themes are gender, class and religion. Being a music journalist changed my life: I went to university and continue my learning journey to this day.
As the book progresses, modern theories and concepts from the fields of musicology, feminism and gender are woven into the narrative, including gender ventriloquism, sexism and sound, and the representation of hysteria on the stage, using case studies in the form of extracts from my past reviews and interviews.
“My feminism let gender sleep on my sofa, and there it stayed, shapeshifting, time-travelling, waiting to be served.” (Example Chapter Extract, ‘Who’s Afraid of Gender?’)
