Wild West Village: Not a Memoir (Unless I Win an Oscar, Die Tragically, or Score a Country #1)

When Lola Kirke and her three older siblings were being raised by their rock star dad, Bad Company's Simon Kirke, and their decorator/clothing designer mom, Lorraine, the question wasn't whether the Kirke kids would become artists but what kind. With the remorselessly oversharing Wild West Village: Not a Memoir (Unless I Win an Oscar, Die Tragically, or Score a Country #1), actress and musician Lola Kirke establishes her artistic bona fides as a writer.

When Kirke was four, she and her loud, loving, hating, fractious family moved from London to New York City. Kirke had all manner of creature comforts--Welsh nanny, Freudian therapist, Park Avenue hypnotist--but with the opulence came excess; at one point when Kirke was a teenager, "everyone in my family was either at Barneys, RISD, or rehab." Through it all, Kirke's sisters, actress Jemima and musician Domino, were her saviors, foils, and rivals.

Kirke puts her spin on the poor-little-rich-girl saga by skipping the pity party. Her book teems with raunchy stories that inevitably morph into vehicles for Kirke's spot-on self-deprecating humor, and when she goes for laughs that are in poor taste, it's with winking awareness ("She had stunted her growth through an eating disorder of her own, but the good kind that made you skinny"). By book's end, Kirke, who wrote Wild West Village at age 33, is onstage enjoying success in a creative field her parents never would have imagined for her--and in which her sisters are, finally, not competition. (Yet.) --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

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