The first song I ever heard by Lola Kirke was “Monster.” In it, she sings, “No I’m not a monster, just someone who wants to belong.” Now, having read Wild West Village — her self-proclaimed “anti-memoir” — I understand her fear of becoming monstrous, as well as her yearning for belonging.
Actor and musician Kirke is the daughter of famous British drummer Simon Kirke (of the 70s bands Free and Bad Company). Her father’s success meant that Kirke grew up in a huge brownstone in New York’s West Village neighborhood with unlimited access to acting lessons, family trips to international spas, and a star-studded rotation of houseguests. “Courtney Love both flooded and set fire to our sprawling home,” Kirke writes. “When Liv Tyler wasn’t filming installments of The Lord of the Rings, she babysat me. Did I just drop something? Yes, a bunch of names. Sorry! The housekeeper’s coming by later to pick them up.”
From afar, Kirke’s life was glamorous. Up close, her family’s rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle meant constant exposure to drug use, rampant obsession with beauty, and predatory older men. Kirke is well aware of her nepo baby status, but she does not shy away from exploring its sinister underbelly. “I craved a safer kind of love,” she admits.
Wild West Village is a collection of stories that are at once unsettling, hysterical, and endearing, providing access to Kirke’s musings as she retraces her steps from London to New York to LA to Nashville. Each tale colored by self-analysis, Kirke theorizes on how her deep-seated insecurities and wounds impacted her art, identity, and relationships.
Reflecting on her struggles as an actor, Kirke writes: “I found myself feeling as confused about my place and my worth as I had once been at home: in the way, even though I was assured that I belonged. Important yet not. Was I doomed to recreate this dynamic over and over throughout eternity? Or was I just seeking out the spaces in which it already existed, to feel comfortable, because that discomfort was all I’d ever known?”
As a child, Kirke was routinely forced into situations for which she was not ready, striving to keep up with the escapades of her older sisters (Domino Kirke-Badgley and Jemimi Jo Kirke, leading lady in Lena Dunham’s Girls). In one anecdote, Kirke recalls winding up alone with an older actor, trying to charm him by dancing awkwardly. “I wondered if my mother would be proud of me. Or if she’d kill me,” Kirke writes. When the man asked her to sit on his lap, she refused: “I plopped onto the sofa across from him, like the tired child I hoped he’d see I was.” Wild West Village is rife with perturbing juxtapositions.
Within her family, Kirke also grew up at an accelerated rate. As a child, Kirke worshipped her alluring, unavailable older sisters. But following their father’s descent into addiction and adultery, Kirke became her mother and sisters’ emotional caretaker, relegated to “the one who’d believed she had to hold it all together as others tore it apart.” Later in life, Kirke also cared for the severely disabled son her father had with his mistress, then failed to parent.
Luckily, distance from the tribulations of her youth enables Kirke to find the humor in the disturbing. “’You either have to accept him as he is or just leave,’ I often found myself saying, though I still wasn’t even sure how to correctly use a maxi pad,” Kirke recalls telling her mother. “Solving the problems of my parents’ marriage was trying work, but it had to be done.”
While Kirke too dipped her toe into self-destructive tendencies — forays explored in Wild West Village — she did not have the luxury of losing herself in her vices: “I needed to be there for my sister and my family. Even if I was left to wonder: who was going to be there for me?”
Eventually, Kirke learned to be there for herself, turning to her childhood fantasies of normalcy, honesty, and love, dreams she realized in Nashville. “Throughout my teens, country remained to me what New York City is to a lot of people,” Kirke writes. “A world that I fantasized would accept and understand me more than my own.”
In Wild West Village, Kirke presents a vision of country music that diverges from its typical depiction as a beer-guzzling boys’ club. “I had always been drawn to dynamic female characters. In country, I found them,” Kirke writes. “Not to mention, in country, men cried and apologized.”
Ultimately, Kirke’s story is a testament to the power of introspection to interrupt the harmful cycles of family dysfunction and fame. Plus, she got to perform at the Opry in June Carter’s dress. What else can a girl ask for?
Bianca Sass, a Nashville native, is a writer, director, and scholar whose work probes the intersection of the personal and the political. She’s a recent graduate of Amherst College, where she majored in English and Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, as well as wrote and directed many theatrical productions. In 2023, Bianca workshopped her play Babydoll at the Looby Theater in Nashville. Bianca is now based in Boston.
Tagged: Book Reviews, Nonfiction
