When the singer-songwriter Neko Case was growing up in poverty in rural Washington, it did not occur to her to question her parents or their indifference to her. “Kids don’t think things are weird,” Case, 54, says with a shrug. “It’s like: well, this is my reality, so this is what reality is.” So when Case’s father picked her up from her grandmother’s house one day and told her that her mother had died, from terminal cancer she had kept secret, Case believed him. She attended her mother’s wake with her father, her relatives on her mother’s side and 20 or 30 other mourners.

About a year and half later, Case left school to find her dad waiting unexpectedly. He informed her that her mother was at home, apparently back from the dead. Case was told that her mother had faked her death to spare her family the pain of a drawn-out demise, then had been miraculously cured in Hawaii. At the time, she was so overjoyed – and so young – that she didn’t doubt their story. It wasn’t until she was a “full-blown adult” that she grasped the magnitude of the deception – and the fact that her mother, whose description of her illness would often change, had probably never had cancer. “I never even thought it was weird until I told somebody the story one day,” she says.

She never asked why the death was faked, but her mother continued to come in and out of her life in the ensuing years. “That was her grift: to make me want her and then disappear all over again,” Case writes. “That’s what I can’t forgive.” Eventually she decides, in a moment of horrifying clarity, her mother faked her death “because she didn’t want me”.

The “incredibly long time” it took Case to make sense of her childhood reflects the self-deception she had to cultivate to survive it. “When you’re a kid and you love your parents, you will go to any lengths to believe the most outrageous lies,” she says now. “And you will continue the lies yourself, and embellish them and grow them, like they’re your tomato plants, or something – you don’t even know you’re doing it.”

In Case’s new memoir, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, she attempts to impose order on her tangled roots – from her childhood, characterised by poverty and neglect, to her escape into music via the Seattle punk scene. She didn’t want to write a memoir, she says; that was just what she got offered money to produce: “It was during the pandemic and I was in dire straits financially.”

But she had no misgivings about putting the story in print. “I’m an oversharer – I tell my friends these things all the time, and it helps,” Case says. “It doesn’t necessarily make anything better, per se, but it feels good to have somebody hear you.”

Simultaneously a solo artist and a member of the Canadian supergroup the New Pornographers, Case is known for her distinctive, flaming contralto and gothic Americana. Two solo albums, 2009’s Middle Cyclone and 2013’s The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You, were nominated for Grammys; in 2013, she formed the supergroup case/lang/veirs with kd lang and Laura Veirs. Her lyrics – filled with folkloric wisdom, wildlife and natural imagery – invoke a world where human logic ranks second to animal instinct, and “civilisation” is only a flimsy veneer over red-in-tooth-and-claw reality. Case displays those same carnal instincts when she says she is smelly (“so I’m glad this is a Zoom”) and discombobulated by menopause. Her trademark auburn hair is magnificently intermingled with grey; her forearms are tattooed with the phrases “Scorned as timber” and “Beloved of the sky”.

Until The Worse Things Get …, her sixth album, Case said she never explicitly wrote songs about her life. Her memoir, however, reveals her love of animals, music and mythology as lifelines through her “feral” childhood. Case was born in Virginia, the result of a backseat fumble between two poor teenagers who divorced after a few years of marriage. Both parents drank; her dad smoked and grew marijuana. Case spent hours alone in inhospitable residences and was so hungry that she would eat uncooked rice and flour. Bored and lonely at her dad’s, she would kill time by biting the heads off fleas.

Yet hers is not a misery memoir: Case tells these stories with honesty, heart and deadpan humour. “When you tell people how poor you were when you were growing up, they are like: ‘Oh, that’s so sad’ – but it was actually pretty funny,” she says.

There was also trauma. At 14, Case was raped by the 19-year-old brother of a schoolmate. At the time, she blamed herself. Now, she directs her rage at the adults who failed to protect her – chiefly her mother. “There’s a certain amount of saturation that happened to me, at a very young age, of: ‘I cannot take this; this is too much for a human being,’” Case says matter-of-factly. The trauma remains, as does the rage. “I come to it quicker than other people do, but I’m also better at controlling it than I used to be. People don’t talk a lot about women’s rage, or women’s violence – but it’s a real thing. It’s very real, and mostly we turn it on ourselves.”

As a child, Case quickly forgave her mother’s deception, but their relationship deteriorated with time and her mother’s descent into alcoholism. At 16, Case requested a legal emancipation; her mother readily agreed. With no money and only short-term accommodation, Case ended up dropping out of high school, too hungry to learn. “Of course, I didn’t make that connection when I was young – I thought I was a loser.”

Music was Case’s salvation long before she had any idea of making it herself. She embedded herself in the Seattle and Portland punk scenes, taught herself to drum and started playing in bands. After moving to Vancouver for art school, Case founded Maow: a scrappy, pop-punk three-piece that stood out for their homemade fur bikinis. In 1997, she released her debut solo album, The Virginian, and started playing with the New Pornographers. But finding success did not make up for the struggle, Case says. “The idea that you have to suffer to be an artist, I think it must have been made up. It’s like some sort of trust-fund tourism – ‘I’ve really got to be authentic; I need to understand that squalor.’” If her upbringing had been stable, “I would have been a much better musician, because I’d have started earlier – I would have had people backing me up and some sort of safety to experiment.”

Case’s father died in 2004 from a heart attack and long-term alcoholism. She cut all contact with her mother in 2010; Case does not know if she is alive or dead (although she has long allowed the latter to stand in the press). Case still feels the impact of her upbringing in her anxiety. “I have an incredibly hard time trusting people, and also there’s a contradiction, where I trust too easily.” Although she is in a long-term relationship and has a teenage stepdaughter, she never considered becoming a parent: “There’s no way.”

But Case’s anger is tempered by hard-won compassion and awareness of the impact of intergenerational trauma. Both her parents were allegedly sexually abused as children. Her mother was raped again when Case was 18 and still in denial about her own assault. Although she had largely processed her past by the time she started writing her memoir, pulling the threads together made them easier to carry, says Case. “I was able to put a lot of things in the book … [Now] I know where it is and I can go check it out if I need to; I don’t have to walk around with it all the time.”

She sees herself as the family firefighter, surveying the damage done and deciding: “This ends here. I’m chopping that shit down, I’m putting that out, I’m going to do a controlled burn over there: this is not going to go on any more.”

“Yet Case would never have written the memoir if music still paid the bills. “I used to get royalty cheques and they would get me through lean times – not any more,” Case says grimly. Alongside promoting the book, she is staging rehearsals for the musical adaptation of Thelma & Louise she has spent eight years writing with the film’s screenwriter, Callie Khouri.

It is rewarding work, but her struggle to stay afloat financially “is a brand new anger that I’m trying to learn how to deal with”, Case says. She is scathing about the creative industries’ structural exploitation of artists: “The way things are set up benefits them, but not you. Be it publishing, music or theatre – each one of them has their disgusting pitfalls.”

But Case remains committed to the possibility of positive change – and the potential of productive, “protective rage” to achieve it. She has felt inspired by younger generations’ pushback against gender roles and a “patriarchal, colonial” status quo. “It’s heroic; I feel absolutely liberated by the way people talk.” Were she coming of age today, it is “pretty likely” that she would identify as non-binary, Case says. “I don’t really feel like a woman or a man, necessarily – I’m kind of this other thing.”

As a young person, she felt very conflicted about gender: “I couldn’t put those things into words”. Now, she has finally gained mastery over her rage and clarity over her targets – just in time for Donald Trump’s second presidency. Case believes the attacks on women and transgender people reflect not the US public, but “a very small group of very rich people who are pandering to fundamentalism. It’s just such a great way to get people angry and to control them … and people are absolutely going to suffer.”

Her own strategy, for the next four years and beyond, is to refuse to be cowed. “I’m not giving them my fear, I’m not going to be depressed, I’m not going to be afraid – I’m just going to fight like hell and I’m going to love doing it.”

An extract from The Harder I Fight the More I Love You

About a year after I’d moved to Illinois I was standing on a stage, and my field of vision was moving inward, the edges blurring. The summer sun was hitting my body like a hammer, and a wave of nausea surged up in answer. None of this was how I expected to feel playing at [country institution] the Grand Ole Opry.

When my agent called to tell me I’d been asked to play there, in 2001, I was floored. My gramma Mary Ann had been a huge fan of the Opry stars all her life. I was so proud and nervous, and I couldn’t wait to tell her. When the date finally came, it was the height of the hottest July. Boiling in Chicago and only getting hotter as the band and I crept down the cracked highway south toward Nashville.

When we finally pulled up to Opryland, it was 98 degrees [37C] and not a cloud in the sky. The sun was punishing, and the humidity swamp-aquatic. Even breathing was hard. I had to steel myself to keep on task as we unpacked the van. “Load-in” was to an outdoor stage right next to a barbecue pit – it was more like we were playing adjacent to the Opry than in it, which was a little disappointing but ultimately no big deal. It had a roof but no walls, so the Nashville sun muscled across it at different angles as the day went on, magnetised to the black stage.

We did our soundcheck, then retreated to the air-conditioning of the actual Opry building to get ready. I was in my orange “Wilderness Pilots Do It in the Bush” T-shirt, which had a cute cartoon beaver with pontoons on his feet. It was just a silly thing, but I was quickly pulled aside and told my shirt wasn’t appropriate for the Opry’s family atmosphere. I was a little embarrassed. “This isn’t what I was gonna wear,” I said, a little grossed out by this random employee’s seriousness. I’m not stupid, I thought. Yeesh!

But never mind. As I moved through the building’s backstage, I saw Little Jimmy Dickens and Jan Howard. I was star-struck. I was such a fan and thrilled to be introduced by our guide. Little Jimmy was gracious and Jan Howard looked at me like I was a piece of sweaty cheese rind. I didn’t let it get me down – I was at the Opry to make my gramma proud.

Showtime came and we hit the sweltering stage, the sun now beating directly in front of it. The barbecue pit was smoking like a steam engine. Organ meats sizzling away in the pit, me and my band sizzling away on the black skillet of the stage. I have never before or since been that hot. There was no water anywhere.

I was miserable but trying to keep a brave face, so sweaty that my hands kept slipping off the neck of my guitar. We made it through two-thirds of our set and finally I was hallucinating. The world had gone dark in that tunnelled way it does when you’re about to pass out. That I might puke started to seem more and more like a real possibility. I leaned into the mic and said, “Thank you!” to the audience, calling the break before the encore early.

I knew I needed water – badly. As I reached the exit stairs, a woman barred my path. She looked very serious.

“I need 40 more minutes up there!” she snapped. This was the Grand Ole Opry’s manager, who had booked me for the show.

“FINE!” I said. I was so thirsty and so mad. I registered her less as a person and more like a freshly locked gate that was stopping me from getting water.

I staggered back on stage and, as I walked out, I pulled my shirt over my head. I was wearing a bra, so I wasn’t naked, but I also wasn’t thinking. It wasn’t an act of punk-rock defiance. I just had an animal need to cool down in any way possible. The band and I took our positions and began another song (at least I think we did?). Soon the power had been cut and I saw the front-of-house engineer laughing his head off.

We were done. I put my shirt back on and guzzled some water that had finally materialised. I was red as a beet. The manager stormed up to me. She did a lot of yelling. I felt so sick and ashamed. She was that kind of mad where I could tell she was enjoying her own righteousness as she shouted away.

Finally, she delivered the classic line, the one we’d both been waiting for: “You’ll NEVER play this town again!” She stormed away.

We packed up our gear and limped back to the van. I don’t think we even got paid. I was upset that I had let my bandmates down, but they were kind souls and rallied around me. Still, the realisation that I’d blown it was as heavy as the air and twice as uncomfortable. When I got back to Chicago, I wrote the manager a long letter of apology explaining that I wasn’t trying to be rebellious, I had literally just had heatstroke, and that I felt terrible for what had happened. She sent a smug reply to my agent and that was that. I was never going to play that town again.

I thought about what men had to do to get banned from the Opry. Hank Williams got booted after missing several shows (this was when he was in his alcoholic slide). Johnny Cash had gotten drunk and, during his show, bashed out all the footlights with his mic. I hadn’t been drunk. I hadn’t sworn at anyone. I hadn’t sent glass flying out at the audience. I’d been overheated and sick. Granted, I wasn’t a star and never would be. I was OK with that part, but I was just heartbroken I had blown my shot at playing the Opry. I so badly wanted to do it for my gramma, to make her proud of me.

A few years went by, and I was booked to play the Ryman, which was home to the Opry for decades before it moved over to the Opry House. When I got there, no one looked at me like I was a cheese rind or got in a tizzy about what I might wear on stage. Everyone was friendly and helpful. As my band and I went on stage in that glorious old auditorium, I could feel the magic of playing where so many other musicians I loved had played before. This is where it was, not the Christian megapark that had booked me to help sell hotdogs. It was so decent and loving and healing. My gramma had died by then, but I was sure she could feel it anyway. Forever after, I was certain that the institutional cult that’s dedicated to deciding what is “country music” – and what isn’t – wasn’t worth my time. It only exists to exclude people.

No one can stop you from “playing this town again!” or from being yourself or from making dumb, innocent mistakes. No gatekeeper can stop you from playing country music or evolving it past the confines of the tight decades of time they are so desperate to preserve. When it comes to making new things, they can’t stop you for being Black or a girl or gay or divorced. That’s the only real “can’t” – and don’t let them forget it.

• The Harder I Fight The More I Love You: A Memoir is published by Headline (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.