With a darkly funny memoir-in-essays, the acclaimed actress and musician is re-writing her own script. Here, Lola Kirke speaks to Emma Firth about the shape-shifting nature of beauty, the freedom of her thirties, and the gift of failing to fit in.
It’s a little before noon in Nashville and Lola Kirke is experiencing a bout of zoom face. “I’m shocked!” she says, half-joking, brushing her hands through her newly cropped hair, “I feel like I look like Margaret Thatcher.” You look beautiful, I almost say audibly because it’s true, but don’t. Partly because I have just spent the last day in a reading frenzy finishing her uninhibited new collection of essays, Wild West Village: Not a Memoir (Unless I Win an Oscar, Die Tragically, or Score a Country #1), which is as much a meditation on the blurry lens of beauty as it is a paean to the surrealism of sisterhood and her bohemian upbringing in New York City in the noughties, raised by a rock star father and vintage boutique owning-socialite mother.
A decade ago, the actress, musician and now debut author had a breakout role in Noah Baumbach comedy, Mistress America, starring opposite the queen of mumblecore, Greta Gerwig. In it she plays an 18-year-old college freshman, Tracy, who looks to her thirtysomething stepsister-to-be as a creative force field and role model of sorts. Re-watching it the other day, I was struck by Tracy’s opening narration:
She would say things like: “Isn’t every story a story of betrayal?”
No, that’s not true, I thought. But I could never say that, I could only agree with her. It was too much fun to agree with her.
Kirke, too, is particularly good at dissecting those unquestioning years. “My idea of beauty growing up was just my mum and sisters [Girls actress, Jemima, and singer-turned-doula, Domino],” she says. “I mean they are incredibly beautiful women, and I was told they were really beautiful.” By themselves, she laughs, or people around them. Confusing, in many ways, when up-close she would witness how much “ugliness went into creating that beauty”, from intense periods of rivalry and eating disorders. “There was this mythology around us, to anyone who cared,” she expounds. “And yet, there was this lack of intimacy between us that felt so painful to me [and] I think a lot of that comes from the competitive spirit of beauty that was part of our family. I think my mother’s way of making sure we were OK in the world, making sure we wouldn’t be abandoned, was to ensure that we were incredibly desirable. I think the intention [was] wonderful but misguided.”
Lola Kirke. Image by Ohad Kab.
Growing up, people would often tell her how different she was from her sisters. “It made me happy and sad at the same time,” she admits. “I didn’t want to share in a lot of the chaos, but I also loved them and wanted to be a part of them. I’m writing about them from the perspective of, yes, it was crazy. But also, like, people are crazy! People are loveable in spite of their craziness…”
Which, incidentally, would make a neat blurb for the book. Exposing the cracks of the idealised image we’re sold of sisterhood and taught that we should be automatically granted. Instead she reveals a much bigger picture: rage, envy, yes, but also the tenderness, the in-built protectiveness, the love that was always there but just looked a little different than what you thought it should.
Despite a fair few celebrity cameos that crop up, from David Bowie at one party to former live-in house guest Courtney Love, Wild West Village is neither a gossip-ridden tell-all, nor a literary pity party. Painful recollections—affairs, her parents separation, secret siblings, family loss and frequent rehab visits—coexist with riotously funny observations (a sexual awakening via a shower head, say, to interviewing her friend’s ‘Aunt Joan’ for a high school assignment, only to realise years later she was Joan Didion).
“I wanted to find lightness in darkness,” Kirke says. “I mean, no one can be as funny as my mother, she has a black sense of humour and so much of the sense of humour is her ability to laugh at herself. My sister Jemima, similarly, is hilarious in that way.”
I think my mother’s way of making sure we were OK in the world, making sure we wouldn’t be abandoned, was to ensure that we were incredibly desirable. I think the intention [was] wonderful but misguided.”
Lola Kirke
The last four years have been transformative for Kirke. During the pandemic, unable to act or go on tour, she started experimenting with prose after a friend of hers started sending her writing prompts. “I was living with The Cowboy [my boyfriend] and I would just write a story and read to him at night,” she reflects. Telling stories she says, whatever the medium, comes from a deep-rooted craving so many of us share: a longing to make meaning out of the chaos of her life. Launching into her thirties, proved a ripe period for self-reflection. I ask her what she feels she’s gained as she’s gotten older, moving further away from girlhood?
“I think about this a lot because youth is so commodified, and wisdom is not,” she says. “I was observing Brat summer [last year], and I was thinking, what a funny thing. I’ve been called a brat so many times in my life and it’s never made me feel good about myself. And I get that it’s taking back that word, or whatever. But when I am acting brat-illy, it’s when I’m my least wise. I feel like we’ve put this premium on youth to the detriment of wisdom. It’s sad. I feel like we live in this world where we’re meant to reject life instead of accept it. For me, when I’m in a place of rejecting life without accepting it I’m miserable. Getting older has made my life a lot easier—I generally feel happier in my life now.”
Lola Kirke, Wild West Village: Not a Memoir (Unless I Win an Oscar, Die Tragically, or Score a Country #1
London-born, New York-raised, now Nashville-based… Kirke is used to feeling like an outsider, though it is only in recent years she’s celebrating that part of her. “I don’t want to fit in anymore,” she says. “I like who I am, and I think it’s exhausting trying to be someone else, so I think that’s part of why I like it.”
This spring will also see the birth of her latest album, Trailblazer, collaborating with Grammy-award winning producer, Daniel Tashian. “I had this idea that I’m so glad Daniel turned me away from, that I would make this more down the middle country record. He said, but that’s not who you are. So, we ended up making this record that’s a little bit country, a little bit rock n roll. He really elicited my authentic voice out of me.”
The title itself is lifted from a song on the record. “The chorus of that is: when you think you’re a failure, well maybe you’re a trailblazer. That song sums up the place I’m at in my own life; when you don’t get the things that you want, you are opened up to experiencing life on life’s time. So much of this book and this album is a result of my life not going the way I thought it would. And, through that, finding things that have been beyond my wildest dreams.”
Wild West Village: Not a Memoir (Unless I Win an Oscar, Die Tragically, or Score a Country #1, £18.99, published by Simon & Schuster, is out now
