MEMOIR

Lola Kirke Takes Us Inside the Wild West Village of Her Youth

Lola Kirke

Lola Kirke, photographed by Celeste Sloman.

It’s fitting that the cover of Lola Kirke’s new memoir, Wild West Village, is pink—and that it depicts her mounting a bucking bronco atop the Washington Square Park arch. Because one thing is for sure of the horny manny’s, Royal Tenenbaum siblings, and cowboys within its pages: it sure isn’t lilac. Kirke’s memoir, both hilarious and poignant, reminded me of Electric Light Orchestra’s “Wild West Hero,” blending saloon-style piano with rock chords. The song paints the mythic figure occupying so many of our American minds: the cowboy, the cowgirl. They’ve liberated themselves from the rough of the prairie and, more recently, done so while wearing their embroidered jumpsuit, on their way back to New York, catching up with their SLAA sponsor and wishing they could leave the convenience of the city for the open range. One day, maybe. I knew Kirke, too, must have seen that contemporary cowgirl under the stars. Country songs sung by the campfire follow a similar structure to the chapters in Kirke’s Wild West Village. Both are succinct and undeniably honest, and might include a reference to George Strait or Julian Casablancas. A few weeks before its publication, when she and I met for breakfast just south of 14th Street, I had one question: did Kirke, who now lives in Nashville, find her Wild West Hero—or did she become one herself?

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LOLA KIRKE: I can’t believe you actually read the book. I’ve done some interviews with people who are like, “I love the book,” and then they have no idea.

RYAN NOURAI: Well, there’s a couple of questions that I wrote down as I was coming here. You mentioned The Who and The [Rolling] Stones in the book. Whose side are you on?

KIRKE: I’m definitely on the Stones side. I never got into The Who. I mean, I can appreciate some dramatic moments that make me feel like I’m in a movie, particularly in “Baba O’Riley.” That made me feel very cinematic and angry, like I was about to win a boxing match as a child or something. But no, I like the Stones.

NOURAI: “Teenage Wasteland,” that part of it?

KIRKE: Yeah, exactly. It’s very rock opera, which makes sense, because they wrote one.

NOURAI: Now that that’s out of the way, I’m curious, with both of these [the album and book] having this kind of Wild West theme, how do you feel now that you are actually closer to the Wild West? You’re now in Nashville.

KIRKE: I really love living outside of New York. I am so grateful for the eccentricities that I grew up around, but it’s really made the appeal of stability quite large for me. I really did think Nashville was the height of culture when I got there, which I suppose is the opposite experience for a lot of people. I feel like the typical journey, if you’re an artist, is Tennessee to New York City, rather than the one that I did. But America continues to be a very exotic thing to me. It’s something that I enjoy studying, and that homogeneity is exotic. There’s a reason that everybody knows the words to these Garth Brooks songs. Everyone was raised on the same country radio. There’s an understanding that is shared that we’re kind of excluded from growing up in places like New York and L.A. 

NOURAI: There’s a different language?

KIRKE: A different language, yeah. I wanted to be part of that. I just felt such a freak my whole life that I wanted to enter a world of normalcy, to a degree. That normalcy is problematic in its own way. But I was like, “Oh, they all know these songs. They all know that you’re supposed to take your hat off when the National Anthem gets sung.” I take my shirt off.

NOURAI: You have that chapter about what you thought was freedom and then, with a cowboy, you have this kiss and you’re like, “Oh, now I just completely activated freedom.” So how do you find freedom once you’re in the land of the free?

KIRKE: Oh, that’s such a great question. That’s better than any question I pose in my book. I mean, for me, it’s been the kind of freedom that I grew up idealizing, which was very, very connected to destruction. Being free enough to completely self-destruct. Then you get older and you realize that that’s not very free at all. That’s a question that I grapple with a lot in my life and do in my book as well, and on Lady for Sale [Kirke’s 2022 album]. Ultimately, I think culture has taken this tremendous shift away from freedom to willingly giving up a larger sense of freedom for fame and notoriety on social media. We’re being watched every second and we are like, “No, no, no, but it’s worth it.” I don’t think it’s very hip to be free anymore. I always aspired to be those mysterious girls where you had no idea where they went for six months, and then they’d re-materialize, and they’d have a tan and a new accent or something like that. But now it’s like, “Here’s exactly where I was every second, every single day, and here’s my selfie about it.” We’ve kind of stopped idealizing freedom and now we’ve started idealizing getting shit sent to you for free. 

NOURAI: Something that really blew me away is that your parents have these illustrious pasts that are vivid and colorful, so if you weren’t careful, that could eclipse you. I thought you did a really wonderful job of slowly introducing them, and then it kind of crescendos with the text message about the divorce. Do you feel like it was just enough of them?

KIRKE: No. It’s really hard to write about them because obviously, I love my parents, despite any missteps. But people who don’t love my parents and who like the book or love me will sometimes say things that make me go, “Oh my god, I didn’t mean to make them look like monsters.” That was just my experience with them. Part of what is important to me about this book is loving people because of their flaws instead of in spite of them. That’s a hard line to toe when you don’t have the personal connection to someone’s father in their book. But I’ve read other books where people write about their complicated parents and it just makes me feel less alone. Some people don’t have a really difficult family history. But for those that do, and there are many, it’s always a relief to be like, “Oh, you loved your dad and he was all these other things that were maybe more difficult to love.”

NOURAI: I grew up with my mom always saying, “Don’t compare your insides to someone else’s outsides.” 

KIRKE: I love that quote. That’s something that I’ve come across a lot in my journey towards maturity. It’s interesting because my family, despite their bohemianism, there was a lot of emphasis on the outside. If it looks good, it is good. So I really brought that with me into my adult life. I’ve always compared my insides to other people’s outsides, because I believed for so long that the outsides were far more valuable. 

NOURAI: We’re getting to some gushy stuff. But you did so many things so artfully in the book, noting the color of his bib, and the birthday cake at the funeral. Right from the beginning, it feels like you’re talking to the reader. It’s light, and not serious. So I’m curious, is this you that we’re seeing? Or is it a voice that took some time to find when you were drafting?

KIRKE: That’s an interesting question that I have been asking myself lately too, because I find that when I’m writing it from my own perspective, there’s this sort of grande dame lady with a fake English accent that starts writing and I’m like, “Who the fuck is that?” I want to write fiction. I want to write in other people’s voices, too. It reminds me a lot of acting where I’m like, “I have to do so much work to understand the way this other person thinks, rather than acting like this character that is this kind of version of myself.” I think that there is a mask element to it. Something I noticed from the way I write was how much it’s connected to this kind of overwrought desperation to be a charming girl, which I developed to survive. I had an experience recently where I was able to just get up on stage. I did this reading last night at Dream Baby Press. It was this erotic reading thing and I read some really hilarious piece of Reddit Brokeback Mountain fan fiction. But I noticed that when I got on stage, I was this kind of heightened version of myself that was charming. Normally, I would try and maintain that throughout the course of the evening, but as soon as I got off stage I was like, “I don’t care.” I was like, “Maybe that’s why I’ve seen so many older artists do that on stage, and then the second you meet them, they’re kind of a dick.” I always resented them for it, but now I get it. It’s fucking exhausting keeping up your appearance. Maybe you have to wilt a little bit and be private. Maybe that’s a form of self-respect that I never had, knowing that you don’t have to be on all the time. I’m curious what it would be like to not care if I was liked this much. But I want you to like me and read the book, which is why it’s devastating when people like Jennifer from Boston on Goodreads say that they don’t like me.

NOURAI: Oh, so you did have a review come out that you were not—

KIRKE: Goodreads reviews.

NOURAI: Okay. 

KIRKE: Plebeians. I mean, I should stop reading them, but I also am very curious. I’m shocked that anybody is interested in it. Then the bad reviews just affirm my worst fears, which are like, “It’s not interesting, and who gives a shit? You’re not even a good writer and no one cares about you. They just care about Jemima.”

NOURAI: I mean, you’ve created some meaning-making, a narrative of your own life here. And I’m curious, now that this is out in the world, is there that feeling of, “Will these ever come into conflict with one another? Will I ever resort to this book to tell me what my memories were?” 

KIRKE: I feel like we’ve gotten to an age where people go back on some of their strongest statements. You have people that are lifelong Democrats and they’re like, “Actually I’m a diehard Republican.” Maybe this is a bad thing, but you don’t have to stick to your word that much anymore, or we’re just more open to people changing their minds. I feel like so many of the stories that ended up in the book were stories that were so narrativized for me. They were the stories that kind of made up my life, the core memories, and they’re already fictionalized to a degree. The more that you work a story over, you embellish certain things, and you leave out certain details that don’t make sense anymore. Sometimes it’s humbling and you’re like, “Oh my god, I collapsed that timeline at a dinner party years ago for the sake of brevity.” But one of the things that’s been so fascinating to me is that people have been like, “Well, you don’t mention this part or that part,” or, “What about this thing that you didn’t even know?” I’m like, “Well, A, that’s a gross misunderstanding of the art form And B, I don’t know, they value their own experience over yours.” It’s funny. They’re making the case that their feelings are the facts and, in doing so, validating your own version that your feelings are the facts. 

NOURAI: I was so excited because I saw Legends of the Fall. I was like, “I know that song.”

KIRKE: Oh, yes.

NOURAI: I connected the two.

KIRKE: Wow. I’m so honored. That’s a story that really happened. I wrote a version of it in a college class.

NOURAI: Should we give some background as to what we’re talking about?

KIRKE: The boyfriend.

NOURAI: It was Ryder, and you did this song about him on Lady for Sale.

KIRKE: Yeah, it was a very impactful relationship for me, clearly. I mean, I’m so grateful to report that, after that relationship, I’ve never dated anybody that didn’t like me ever again. So thank you to him. 

NOURAI: You go from having a song version of the story of you and a boyfriend, and then having a chapter devoted to this story. Was that liberating, confining, helpful?

KIRKE: I don’t know if it was any of those things. I think sometimes you just come across these stories that have arcs. They have a beginning and a middle and an end, and they can exist across mediums.

NOURAI: Is the next album country?

KIRKE: It’s country, for sure, but it’s more expansive. There’s also something experimental about it. Daniel Tashian, who produced the last three Kacey Musgraves records, produced it. He was fantastic. He’s an artist. I mean, not that people who make country music aren’t artists, but I think, largely, there is a factory-like nature to writing, producing, and singing, and I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing. It’s just a different approach. It’s like the studio system or something, like old Hollywood. This album feels like a departure from that. It’s got a lot of Nashville in it, but there’s also a blend of my New York sensibility, just like Wild West Village. It’s definitely got that aesthetic blending of the two worlds, and that’s something that I think I can offer. I think there was a long time where I was kind of embarrassed that my narrative wasn’t as cohesive as other people’s. Like, “Oh, I’m from New York. Well, really, I’m from England and I live in Nashville. I’m a musician, but really I’m an actor.” Just always feeling like a little bit of a fraud. I think that writing this book and just getting older in general has made me realize that I don’t care. I have a lot of different things, like a lot of different people, and that’s easy enough to understand. For a long time, I wanted to be so many other people that weren’t me. And in writing this book, I really did get to find myself. I learned that my narrative and that my identity was worth expressing, even just for me. I’m terrified of the book tour. I’m terrified of reading what I wrote in front of people. I’m so grateful that anybody has enjoyed it, and felt moved by it, and connected to it. That’s the coolest part, because that’s what I wanted.