In my first phone conversation with my soon-to-be college roommate, Esther, she asked me what music I liked. I said Ani Difranco, and we knew we were a perfect match. It took awhile for her to get past my obsessive dustbusting, and for me to get used to her sleeping past noon, but this Spring—almost twenty years after we graduated— I went to New Orleans for her wedding and we got to see Ani together at Jazz Fest. It was a completely perfect day.
Esther and Jill!
Not only did we get to see Ani perform, but we got to hear her talk about her memoir, which was just coming out. Typically, I read celebrity memoirs standing up in Barnes and Noble like a surreptitious teenager paging through porn at a 7/11. Their lure is the narration of media events from the perspective of the media’s object, a titillating combination of familiarity and novelty. My ex-girlfriend, Sandra, and I read Monica Lewinsky’s memoir in the Union Square Borders more times than I care to admit.
For lifelong Ani fans No Walls provides this exciting combination when it addresses Ani’s sudden rise to fame, and her beefs with the Michigan Womyn’s Film Festival or Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls. But it’s more focused on the music, what it is like to play, and write, and record. For an artist whose work is as intimate as Ani’s, stories about the recording of Out of Range, for example, add layers to an already rich experience of songs that have been soundtracks, and anthems, and carefully timed to fit perfectly onto mixtapes.
It’s also perfect to read at this particular moment when #MeToo feels like such a novel way of seeing the world. Ani has been developing a critique of patriarchy based on the experience of living in a female-gendered body since her days busking as a teenager, and it’s only grown more urgent.
And that’s what makes this book so incredibly satisfying. It is more of a feminist bildungsroman than a memoir because she can identify and articulate injustice in her writing, as she has in her songs, but she can also describe how impossible it is to escape:
“For a girl, the fear of not being pretty is the fear of not being a valuable object, which is the fear of not being loved. It is a conflation that is instilled so early on and runs so deep that, even when you know it’s a fear perpetrated by patriarchy, goaded by fashion magazines, and used to manipulate you into buying stuff, you still can’t stop the way it affects you.”
No Walls reads like a very personal and ongoing reckoning (it ends after 2001, so certainly there must be more to come). In it, she describes her gradual transformation from a singer/songwriter to the founder of Righteous Babe Records, a record label that gave her creative freedom and an overwhelming amount of responsibility. She grapples unflinchingly with her abortions, from the perspective of a mother of two and the young woman who sang in “Tiptoeing” “to the son/to the daughter/I thought better of.”
But she also takes us through how her sense of those events has changed. How understanding herself as an individual, a musician, and a woman is an ongoing conversation between her earlier songs and the ones she has yet to write. And it comes with a literal mixtape that enacts that conversation musically - she’s re-recorded songs she references in the book. They sound different and incredibly familiar.