When Sonic Youth first toured England, music journalists would ask Kim Gordon the same question over and over: “What’s it like to be a girl in a band?” Gordon came to rock music sideways, via the art world, and at the time, she says, she had “never really thought about it”. She had started making music to contribute to a greater cultural dialogue than the one available to a studio artist. The first time she encountered the underground art and music movement known as No Wave, “some equation in my head and body pieced together instantly”. But beyond these reasons, music promised her entrée into a gendered form of power, access to a certain male camaraderie. “In retrospect,” she writes in her memoir, “that’s why I joined a band. So I could be inside that male dynamic, not staring in through a closed window but looking out.”

Girl in a Band is a study of her subsequent disillusionment. The book begins in 2011, with Gordon looking out at the audience in São Paulo during Sonic Youth’s last ever concert. The band is on a tour of South America following the end of Gordon’s 27-year marriage to guitarist and fellow singer Thurston Moore. As they take to the stage, the two are not speaking to each other. Moore has left the marriage for another woman after a secret years-long affair. The tour has become a forced march, where Gordon endures the performances of her ex-husband as “an adolescent lost in fantasy again”. His “rock star showboating” feels phony; it grates on her nerves. She pulls through with bitter resignation and the occasional Xanax. The news is now known, by their audience and everyone else: “The couple everyone believed was golden and normal and eternally intact, who gave younger musicians hope they could outlast a crazy rock’n’roll world, was now just another cliche of middle-aged relationship failure – a male midlife crisis, another woman, a double life.”

It’s telling that in this passage Gordon actually describes two cliches: the other is a contemporary rendition of a fairytale, the idealised marriage where two creative minds produce art and children in an atmosphere of gender equality and intellectual fulfilment. Girl in a Band passes through some key nodes in American pop culture – southern California in its post-1960s malaise, downtown Manhattan’s art scene in the 1980s, grunge rock in the 1990s – but Gordon’s memoir is as much an attempt to parse her own misplaced expectations as it is a celebration of her many achievements.

She was born in upstate New York in 1953, but grew up in Los Angeles, “a place of death, a place people are drawn to because they don’t realise deep down they’re actually afraid of what they want”. Her father was a sociologist at UCLA and her mother a seamstress who worked out of their house. The dominant figure in her early life, however, was Keller, her “sadistic, arrogant, almost unbearably articulate” older brother.

In his early 20s, Keller Gordon developed symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. It was the early 1970s in Los Angeles, a time when any number of people could be found wandering around in white robes making obscure prophecies. Kim’s parents ignored her suggestions to send him to a psychiatrist, and much of the initial burden of understanding and discussing his illness fell to her. Still, before his first psychotic breakdown, it was Keller who introduced Gordon to Shakespeare, Flaubert and Nietzsche. In contrast to his “obsessively verbal” personality, she moulded herself into his opposite: shy and hypersensitive, with a facade of fearlessness on top.

“The codependent woman, the narcissistic man: stale words lifted from therapy that I nonetheless think about a lot these days,” she writes in a passage in which she contemplates what drew her to Moore. “It’s a dynamic I have with men that began, probably, with Keller. Growing up I needed to believe he was bigger than life, a distorted genius, declaiming and wild in white.” Teenage photos reproduced in the book show the siblings, with their alliterative first names, as blond and tanned, like extras from a 60s surf movie – a middle-class California childhood that Gordon soon set out to discard.

From an early age, she knew she wanted to be an artist. The centre of the contemporary art world was in New York, and she moved there in 1980, driving across country with the artist Mike Kelley, a close friend. Her descriptions of the downtown New York art scene in the early 80s are an elegy for a lost city, with cameos by Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Larry Gagosian, David Salle, Richard Prince and many others. It was by way of the artist Dan Graham that Gordon began following No Wave, an art and music scene defined by its rejection of New Wave pop music and its attendant commercial signifiers. Her first musical performance was playing in an all-girl band for Graham’s performance piece Audience Performer Mirror.

She met Moore shortly afterwards. They started dating, then playing music together. Moore spoke of wanting to reclaim the word “noise”, and Sonic Youth was born, with Gordon on bass. “Knowing what I know now,” she writes, “it’s hard to write about a love story with a broken heart.” The book occasionally takes on the cast of a talk therapy session as she works through the process of repositioning her memories. She and Moore married in 1984, a personal commitment that was a simultaneous decision to prioritise music over art. “I loved playing music,” she writes. “What could be better than sharing that feeling of transcendence with a man I was so close to in all other areas of my life, someone who was having the same experience?”

Gordon’s descriptions of the band’s first years will be more valuable to long-time fans than to those unfamiliar with Sonic Youth’s music. Instead of an attempt to integrate the band’s particular sound into a larger musical history, she offers personal anecdotes around particular songs or albums that “I have the most to say about or remember the best”.

Sonic Youth signed with a major label in 1990, and slowly moved into the mainstream. They toured with Neil Young, passing on cassette tapes by Nirvana and Dinosaur Jr to the veteran rocker. As the 1990s progressed, these younger bands found popular success inspired in part by Sonic Youth’s unique mingling of “noise” and pop Americana. Gordon writes movingly of her friendship with Kurt Cobain, a tenderness balanced only by her dislike of Courtney Love, whom she describes as “someone to avoid and ignore”. She concludes by asking if the resurgence of rock music in the 1990s represented an aberrant blip in mainstream taste, a dead limb of pop’s family tree. “Did the 1990s ever exist?” she wonders. “Mainstream American music today is just as conservative as it was back in the 1980s.”

In 1994, Gordon and Moore had a baby, Coco, and moved to the liberal, semi-rural enclave of Northampton, Massachusetts. The decision by a pair of rock stars to move to a small town in New England leaves both of them slightly off-kilter. Gordon describes Moore’s affair with disgust, noting that it first manifested itself in the symptoms of adolescence: a sudden addiction to text messaging and a renewed fondness for cigarettes. What could simply be described as a story of two people who fell in love and then fell out of love with all of the usual emotional squalor is thus depicted in terms of the midlife crisis, a narrative frame that reads as unnecessarily punitive to all concerned. Moore is probably not a preening cad any more than Gordon is Betty Draper.

Girl in a Band ends with her back in Los Angeles, focused with renewed determination on her work as a visual artist. The plot is not quite Medea, but this memoir is a kind of setting ablaze of a life’s work that for Gordon is now inextricable from heartbreak. “Marriage is a long conversation, someone once said, and maybe so is a rock band’s life,” she writes, of the sad and rainy day Sonic Youth took to the stage for the last time in Brazil. “A few minutes later, both were done.”

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