‘I do not know her’

The Harder I Fight the More I Love You
by Neko Case

Toronto: Hachette Book Group, 2025
$30  /  9781538710500

Reviewed by Jessica Poon

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Not long ago, a mental health professional I know said, with a humorously grim resignation, “I wish I could say that I’m not like those other therapists that link everything to your mom, but I’m not.” I have a friend who says “girls have daddy issues, boys have mommy issues. The way God intended trauma.” (It is my polite supposition that this same friend has both, so, clearly such issues are not mutually exclusive in the least). All this to say, Philip Larkin’s notorious poem, “This Be the Verse” has never stopped reciting itself rent-free in my head. “What is your relationship like with your mother?” used to be my go-to, invasive question for an acquaintance. I’ve mostly retired from this question, because sometimes people’s mothers are absent, recently dead, long deceased, or the living definition of problematic (admittedly, my favorite kind, on a storytelling level, if not an interpersonal one). But, although I’ve mostly retired from such inquisitions in the name of politeness, I have never stopped being curious about other people’s mothers. And so, Neko Case’s memoir, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, more than fulfills my dubiously limitless appetite for matriarchal horrors. 

Case, a singer, songwriter, visual artist, and founding member of The New Pornographers, describes her parents’ relationship with more realism than romanticism:

My parents were the typical cautionary tale of two teens who have sex for the first time ever in a car (of course!), and get pregnant by accident. … They were seventeen and eighteen and poor as empty acorns. … Needless to say, these two young people had no business being together and even less business forcing a human soul into this world. … So there I was, with no siblings and a pair of stressed and uninterested parents who didn’t actually like each other: a child of children.

Case’s childhood is not bleakly quotidian, however. After her mother catches Case looking in the mirror—who was trying to see her mother’s face on her own—Case is reprimanded harshly for being vain, such that Case “deduced that vanity must be the worst sin on earth.” The incident results in a long-lasting self-erasure of sorts. It’s clear that unconditional love is not forthcoming. With heartbreaking clarity, Case writes about her emotional contortions to become more palatable to her temperamental mother: “In my attempts to make her love for me concrete, I tried to be less wiggly and willful, to make myself sweet and compliant. Almost an invisible child.” 

A musician, or any artist, can have an infinite variety of origin stories, yet I cannot help but feel that it largely comes down to this line from Case: “The ways to be unwanted were inexhaustible, it seemed, and as a child I still had no clue how to claim a spot for myself in the world.” I’m sure there are exceptions, but feeling bereft of security and belonging often becomes a natural prerequisite to longing for artistic autonomy—to be and embody the thing you admire.

Case, as a child, loves horses. The notion of “horse girls” being strange or being linked to an erotic fascination, is one that she shuts down: “They don’t ask “What’s with boys and cars?” … we don’t want to fuck horses, we want to be horses. As simple as that. We want physical equality! We want to run free.” Her love for animals is abundantly clear: “I trusted animals so much more than people—I wanted only to love them. When it came to liking another human, I was perplexed as to why I would want to give my attention to something so unknown, so unpredictable.” Contrary to the capriciousness of human nature, horses are calming and immediately sense when someone is not calm. 

When Case begins to develop crushes on boys, she writes: “On some level, I resented the boys in bands even as I hung their posters. I thought it was because they had usurped the rightful place of my main, loyally held passion, but what’s obvious now is that I wanted to be the boy in the band and just didn’t have a way of acknowledging it.” I felt a great resonance with that passage. As a teenager, there was something distinctly icky, undignified, and painfully mainstream about having a crush on a boy. What did it mean, even, to have a crush on a boy? Was it possible that the purportedly nonchalant ease they moved around the world, the freedom of the presumptuous to occupy space, was what I actually wanted? To have a crush on a boy was, I felt, to capitulate to something unseemly and preordained. To spend time with a dog, or with art, though, felt more pure. Perhaps I haven’t grown up very much, but I still feel that way.

When it comes to the thrill of concerts, Case writes: “We didn’t want to be popular or get laid or get good grades; we wanted to see live music every night of our lives, forever.” It’s a youthful statement, but there’s something wise about it as well. 

Case has spent a lot of time in Canada, including Vancouver. She attended Emily Carr University, lived in a Vancouver Special, and was in a relationship with a man whose family members, unlike those of her own, actually seem … to like each other. I felt a palpable recognition in her description of her then boyfriend’s family: “It was so crazy to see a middle-class family who got along, parents who liked their kids, and their kids’ friends?” Indeed, a “normal” family is far, far more peculiar than anything chaotic or traumatic.

Case describes the Shaughnessy neighbourhood unerringly:

There’s a neighborhood in Vancouver called Shaughnessy. It’s where the very rich people live, and to call it a neighborhood doesn’t seem right, since that makes it sound like there might be activity in it. And I never—not once—saw a person there. Never saw a car in a driveway. Never heard voices or a dog bark. Never even saw an errant cat lolling in the grass or prowling in the bushes.

I don’t spend much time in Shaughnessy, but this description matches my recollection of its expensive stillness.

Case is a demonstrative feminist who writes frankly about sexual violence, trauma legacies, and sexism in the music industry (and in life). There were times I had to put the book down to gather myself, but it was never for long. I always wanted to read what she had to say, even if—especially when—she was breaking my heart. Though I’m loath to perpetuate the romanticization of pain and art, Case’s ability to make her pain compellingly resonant is undeniably a contributor for how she is the multivalent, experimental artist she is today.

It is often said, perhaps not altogether consolingly, that hurt people hurt people. That may help with cultivating perspective, but ultimately it doesn’t change whether harm has been enacted, a burdensome legacy, the curse that keeps on cursing. As Case learns more about her parents’ childhood—not from her parents directly, notably enough—her childhood makes more sense. But understanding is not a real panacea for childhood trauma, nor cruel, neglectful parenting. And yet, the widespread ethos of “Just leave them”—a blanket prescription for anything from a boyfriend who occasionally forgets to wash a dish to an emotionally abusive mother who fakes medical ailments to escape parental duties—leaves no room for nuance, repetition compulsion, or hope. Case understands the difficulty of leaving someone you love, who has repeatedly hurt you. Of her mother, she writes: “I wish it was easy to be done with people just because you want to be. … I do not know her. She is a blur of auburn, of hoof, of shivering teeth. … But I cannot kill her—not because I’m too good a person, but because even now I don’t know her well enough to choose the right weapon.” This memoir is not one where everyone is forgiven and redeemed by the time you close the book, and that’s for the best. 

“I have to pretend I’m wise about love,” Neko Case writes in the prologue. But she doesn’t have to pretend—it’s evident how much knowledge she has about love in her conversationally frank memoir. Often agonizing, but never dull, Case has written an exceptionally lucid memoir.

[Editor’s Note: Yesterday, The New Pornographers announced their 2026 US tour dates.]

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Jessica Poon is a writer in East Vancouver. [Editor’s note: Jessica Poon has recently reviewed books by Karina Halle, Jen Sookfong Lee, Bal Khabra, Léa Taranto, Martin West, and Terry Berryman for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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