“Wild West Village”
Lola Kirke
Simon & Schuster, $28.99
Fresh for 2025, here is a look-back book by a daughter of rock-and-roll royalty, with a title in the first person that cooks up an apt announcement of what is to follow. “Wild West Village: Not a Memoir (Unless I Win an Oscar, Die Tragically, or Score a Country #1)” steps forward with a telling parenthetical remark: that the book will only “count” as a memoir if something momentous happens to justify it. This note heralds the tone of much of the book: self-deprecation all done up to flirt with a longing for success. Readers encounter a confessional, jokey, and rather enthusiastic voice in Ms. Kirke’s authorial debut.
Lola Kirke is the youngest daughter of the Bad Company drummer Simon Kirke of Montauk and Manhattan and the designer Lorraine Kirke. Her “wild” West Village, the scene of a privileged youth as a child of wealth and status, rolled out in the mid-1990s to the 20-teens. She notes the custom-designed, vintage aesthetic of her domestic surroundings and the host of celebrities who came through. In spite of substantial advantages, she recounts a longing for “normalcy.”
Ms. Kirke indicates family pain and stress accompanying the issues that led to her parents’ divorce. She outlines a sense of disquiet around her own function as her mother’s confidante and counselor: a troubling role reversal. Parental mixed messages and wobbly boundaries seem to have marked her youth.
Ms. Kirke’s relationship to success — her own and her older siblings’ (the sisters in particular) — is a major preoccupation of the book. In a nifty phrase, she describes a sense of herself as “Important Adjacent,” longing to be important in her own right. There is a pervasive sense of inadequacy, and of attendant approval-seeking. A bravado of flippant self-deprecation coats the surface of the writing here, indicating but not evidencing deeper self-awareness.
The little-sister vibe is well rehearsed. Ms. Kirke communicates her sense of being in the shadow of her older sisters’ accomplishments and looks, and the glamour of their coolness. Even their fragilities and disorders seem to hold an allure. Indeed, her sisters do read here as fascinating, whatever the author’s intention. She communicates her feeling of peril as the youngest sister with tales of sibling meanness, competition, and betrayal. The stories seem to point to her sense of herself as a survivor.
She comes, with all her baggage, as far into the present as the book takes us: to her debut performance at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, where a madcap sort of family reckoning unfolds.
Above all, Ms. Kirke reports that she and her siblings were “raised by artists to be artists.” In the family consciousness, fields in the arts were divided up among herself and her older siblings. They were expected and slated to become actors, painters, singers, photographers. And, in fact, they have. Ms. Kirke is an actor, singer-songwriter, musician on the country music scene, and, with the publication of the book at hand, a memoirist.
After all, it is not clear why the book is “not a memoir.” Her age as a millennial-generation musician, born between 1981 and 1996, does not disqualify her from the form. Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, and Britney Spears each published memoirs at young ages. But perhaps, in the calculus of permission to write a memoir, teen pop stars get special approval, and success of a certain type is the ultimate clearance?
When it comes to looking back, what is said about what has been experienced, and the craft of how it is wrought, ought to be as vital as who is saying it (proximity to fame and glory notwithstanding). Denial of engagement with the form provides a flimsy screen should the effort be criticized, but good, bad, indifferent, funny or cringey, thin of substance or otherwise, what it is not called will not change what it is.
Evan Harris is a librarian and writer who lives in East Hampton.