Book review of The Harder I Fight, the More I Love You

Singer-songwriter Neko Case has always had a sort of feralness about her. Case cut her teeth in the ’90s Pacific Northwest punk scene, with a hardscrabble backstory perfectly suited to the era. She joined the Canadian supergroup The New Pornographers, which she still records and tours with today, and she’s recorded seven solo albums over the past two and a half decades. A self-described “critter,” Case embodies an animalistic spirit that’s tangible in the magical, swirling energy of her music. In her richly told memoir, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You, Case invites readers into her origin story.

Case was born to deeply unready teenage parents of Slavic descent who she describes both as “if a tree and a doe had a baby,” and “two young people [who] had no business being together and even less business forcing a human soul into this world.” Her descriptions of their poverty, her nomadic existence moving back and forth between her parents and her fractured relationships with both ring gritty, painful and true. Yet Case employs the same fairy tale-like storytelling language in The Harder I Fight that she uses in her lyrics, casting a veil of enchantment over her experiences, however painful. For example, while in college, Case experienced a mental breakdown that caused her to believe a man was following her wherever she went—a terrifying time. And yet, when she pauses to wait for her pursuer to show himself while walking one day, a coyote, which she names “a timeless trickster god,” emerges from the mist, and the image hangs frozen in time for the reader.

Fans of Case will note that the book shares a title with her 2013 album, a sign that this literary work functions as an extension of her art and music. Even for the uninitiated, however, The Harder I Fight is lush with meaning. Now in her mid-50s, Case came of age as one of the first generations to begin parsing generational trauma, and therein are the best lessons of her remarkably tender narrative. It is a handing down of wisdom on how to turn wounds into magic, and an ode to the persistent ability to love, and how that transforms our lives.

Case describes discovering the literary figure of the psychopomp in her studies of the Slavic tales of her ancestors: a trickster god who guides a protagonist through their story, “dol[ing] out the clues—cryptic but always correct—that allow the protagonist to solve an important riddle or find the path out of the forest themselves.” She felt an immediate attachment to the archetype: “Like a psychopomp, I wanted to inhabit a den in the forest and possess the answers to transformation and growth that I’d croak out now and then to visitors.” Her disappointment was sharp upon discovering that, as a human being, she was excluded from ever being one. This book, however, might beg to differ. Hold The Harder I Fight in your lap like a warm, furred creature. Listen to what the psychopomp has to say, and let it guide you out of the woods.