Often reviews of memoirs use the cliche “unflinchingly honest,” but “Wild West Village,” a memoir-in-essays by actress and singer-songwriter Lola Kirke, is simply unflinching.
Kirke shows no hesitation in the face of scrutiny, and when she writes about something that happened in her life, one might think: 1) this is amazing; 2) this is too outlandish to be true; or 3) truth is stranger than fiction. Perhaps one might relate to having an off-kilter family – the author almost seems to bank on that.
Kirke’s dark humor is on display as she retells stories from her childhood throughout the book. As the youngest daughter of a rock star father, Simon Kirke of Bad Company, and a clothing designer mother, Lorraine, she was transplanted from London to a WestVillage brownstone when she was 5 years old. Yet behind the cool facade, the house was crumbling.
A revolving door of strange friends, celebrity run-ins and eccentric parents – an absent father having affairs and a mother obsessed with vanity – are part of the parade of love and frenzy captured here.
“My mother taught me how to transform a woman’s pain into beauty,” she writes, and we see that sentiment unfold in the pages as Kirke does exactly that.
Growing up with three siblings in an idiosyncratic family – with its offbeat, peculiar array of people and sometimes bizarre, outlandish and just plain whimsical behavior – makes for a fun read. Turn to any page and you might find laugh-out-loud stories or – in a record-scratch sound effect way that brings the party to a halt – divinely crushing heartbreak.
With sparing words she packs a punch. In a four-page chapter called “Murphy’s Law,” she writes about not being a child of divorce, but instead an adult of divorce. The story begs for chuckles as she asks her dad to pick up the credit card she left at a strip club – yet will break readers’ hearts.
When she tells him she will get her card back next time she sees him, he responds that he’s unsure when that will be, because, unknown to her at the time, her parents were divorcing. She didn’t see him again for two years.
Cheeky and at times courageous, this book is not for those who have secondhand embarrassment. Her maverick storytelling mirrors her British-to-American upbringing, and a life spent confronting the unknown. For example, regarding her move to Nashville from Hollywood, she was self-aware enough to reflect on her motives:
“For so long, my fantasy of American culture had been the solution to my English alienation. … Had I just run to Nashville because I didn’t know where I’d fit in in Hollywood, the way I once turned to America because I no longer wanted to fit in with other Brits? Where would I run to next?”
She fell in love with country music early (as a baby her nanny sang her the song “Crazy”) and started learning how to sing and play country music after she ordered a book online as a teen.
“As an actress, I had always been drawn to dynamic female characters,” she writes. “In country, I found them. There, women could be complicated and contradictory. They could be mothers and lovers.”
The book ends as she makes her Grand Ole Opry debut in 2024 (kicking it off with a proper, “Hey y’all!”) and readers will be happy for her, as well as with the book’s ending.
Through all the turmoil, any reader of “Wild West Village” will glimpse familiar familial up-and-down dynamics, including deep affection. Kirke’s family may be unique, but one thing they have that other families do, is love.
“Our love,” she writes, “was just a little chaotic.”