What does it look like to have permission to embrace all the various pieces that make up your identity, at an age when society and culture are working overdrive to push you into a box? For renowned writer and author Stephanie Kuehnert (‘Ballads of Suburbia’ and ‘I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone’), it means picking up all the pieces from her past and recognizing that when put together, they make up the brilliant, layered, complex and talented person she is today.
Stephanie is sharing her journey with the world in a new book called ‘Pieces Of A Girl’ (Dutton, on sale March 26, 2024) with the hope it will inspire others to find healing in art.
The author, writer, former Rookie contributor and teacher is sharing her experiences with abusive relationships, self-harm, addiction, and art in this Zine-style memoir that serves as an ode to the creative communities that left a positive mark on her in her darkest of times. Through real journal entries, illustrations, photos, and poems, Stephanie provides an authentic picture of the situations and relationships that shaped her teens and twenties.
With the inclusion of mixed media and rich and engaging sequential art from Musician, author, and LA Times columnist Suzy Exposito in ‘Pieces Of A Girl’, readers get to venture with Stephanie to the 90s music scene as she marches to the beat of her own drum, even when the odds are against her.
Stephanie longed to be a part of a community, surrounded by healthy female friendships. During her formative teen years, she felt like an outsider and was further silenced by substance and relationship abuse. As she explored different identities and subcultures, she realized that she was all of them and began to put the pieces of her life together through healthier avenues. Finding solace in communities like Riot Grrrl and the music scene to express herself, zines and multi-media art provided Stephanie with tools to work through the healing process and take back her voice.
As an ode to the creative tools and communities that saved her life, Kuehnert hopes that sharing her story in ‘Pieces Of A Girl’ will inspire others to put together their pieces to live. Here’s what shared with us on the eve of her release, delving into the topic of mental health, writing as a form of catharsis, and seeing the current resurgence of 90’s fashion and pop culture!
When did you first begin to write, and what did you write about?
I’ve been writing as long as I can remember. I got my first diary when I was seven and recorded my thoughts, ideas, what foods I liked to eat (ha!) from that point on. I started writing stories shortly after that. There was one about talking cows from outer space (my only ever attempt at sci-fi or fantasy despite my intense love for those genres) and one about a girl wasting away of a strange disease in a prison. I switched to writing realistic fiction in high school, but wrote mainly poetry and my zines during that time.
How has journaling been an important part of your life?
I’ve been journaling since second grade. It became a hugely important part of my life from around eighth grade onward, though. I’ve been using it to make sense of my life. It is how I process things and work out my feelings. Sometimes, especially when I was a teenager and in my early twenties, it took an extremely long time to work through those feelings and they got pretty dark along the way, but my journal gave me the safest space to be honest. I also like to have it as a record of how I’ve changed over the years. And finally, it is a place where my fictional ideas are often born and first played with.
You’ve had a successful career creating feminist zines and writing for other publications such as Rookie, not to mention releasing your own books. How has pop culture inspired or informed what you write about, and how you relate it to your own life?
Pop culture and particular subcultures have been hugely influential on my writing and on me personally. I came of age in the 90s. I was in seventh and eighth grade when grunge hit big and until that point, I’d felt really out of step with everything—the culture, my peers—so discovering music that I related to on such a deep level was huge for me. Nirvana and Kurt Cobain had a lasting impact on me. They are the reason I felt like maybe my voice mattered enough to be a writer and an artist.
And because I wouldn’t have access to the Internet for a couple more years, I really relied on interviews with artists I liked to lead me to more pop culture. Oh, and MTV! MTV was really about the music at that time and I was watching music videos day and night. So I discovered punk and Riot Grrrl, bands like Hole and Bikini Kill, through MTV, Sassy magazine, and interviews with Kurt Cobain who always talked about other bands he liked.
I really curated the pop culture I loved in the early to mid-nineties and I think that’s why I still feel so connected to it. You’ll see that connection in my memoir, but also my first novel, I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone, which is basically my ode to the music and pop culture that mattered to me.
One very special thing I have to mention is that writing for Rookie and being part of that community really taught me to enthusiastically and fully embrace the pop culture I loved. One of the dark sides of the 90s was that you had to be cool and standoffish. You loved things ironically. If stuff got too popular you backed away. There was all this nonsense about being “a poseur” if you came to things too late, which because of when I was born—the very tail end of Gen X and beginning of the Millennial generation—I always did.
So I spent my teen years playing aloof and hyper critical. And don’t get me wrong, there was a lot to be critical of. One of my teenage zines was called Kill Supermodels because my friends and I were reacting to the tall, skinny, white girl ideal that dominated the beauty standard of that time. But when I wrote for Rookie, I got to gush and be a fangirl, and like, make playlists inspired by the show, Supernatural, which I was so in love with. It helped me find balance between being able to be critical of pop culture and also being able to love what I loved.
In your new book ‘Pieces of a Girl’, you detail your experience with abuse and addiction, using art, journal entries and poetry to give readers a window into your journey. Why was it important for you to share this with readers?
Both addiction and abuse thrive in silence. Breaking the silence, being honest about my experiences to help remove the stigma is really important to me. Also with both addiction and abuse, especially with abuse, I spent so much time questioning if it was really happening to me. I wrote off what was happening in my relationships as “not that bad” because it wasn’t physical—and also because there was a lot of gaslighting and that’s the whole point of gaslighting, to make you question yourself.
When it comes to addiction, whether it is to drugs, alcohol, or self-harm, you also tell yourself that it is “not that bad” because it doesn’t look like portrayals of addiction that you’ve seen in pop culture—or in my case, that you’ve kind of glamorized. I needed a lot of different stories, a lot of different things to see abuse and addiction for what they were in my life.
With my abusive relationship in high school, it took literally seeing the Duluth Model Power and Control Wheel to see what had happened to me. For others, it might be relating to my memoir on the whole, or it might be a particular comic or one of my zine pieces. I wanted the book to be an open, gentle hand for anyone who might need it. Because that is what I needed.
There was not a lot of shared information about the reality of mental illness or mental health in the 90’s. What do you hope your book will dismantle in terms of misinformation or mythology surrounding artists and mental health from that time period?
It is honestly so wild to think about how we’ve grown as a culture in terms of talking about mental health in my lifetime. I thought we’d already come a long way in the 90s because I’d read things like the story of Frances Farmer who was an actress in the 1930s-1950s and was notoriously institutionalized and maybe or maybe not lobotomized. I knew about my grandfather receiving electro-shock treatments. And I thought, ‘Well, we’re doing better than we were then.’
But the situation in the 90s wasn’t great either. Growing up as a white kid in the suburbs, I had a lot of friends whose parents sent them to institution for a few weeks and/or put them on Prozac or Zoloft because they were acting out. The “why” of their behavior wasn’t addressed. Their needs weren’t discussed. They were just drugged.
I had a moment which I describe in the book where I have a breakdown and I basically beg my parents to institutionalize and drug me because that was really all I knew about how to care for mental health. You hid it, you broke down, and you probably eventually died from it like Kurt Cobain did when he died by suicide after battling depression and addiction.
As a teenager and a young adult, I’d both stigmatized and glamorized mental health struggles. I was scared to reveal, especially to adults, that I was depressed, but I also thought being depressed was key to being an artist. There is an amazing graphic memoir by Ellen Forney called Marbles that I discovered through conversations with Tavi Gevinson when I was writing for Rookie that really helped me see how I was pathologizing being an artist. It was also validating because I saw that I wasn’t the only one avoiding treatment because I feared it would change my writing, my art.
I hope my book shows the complexities of mental health and addiction and how keeping it secret stifles and kills. I don’t think, for example, that Kurt Cobain’s pain is what made him a talented artist who so many related to. It was his empathy and his unique way of seeing the world—things that were there despite rather than because of his struggles with depression and addiction. If we’d talked about mental health openly, destigmatized it, he might still be here, and what I wouldn’t give for his perspective on the world today.
Can you tell us a bit about your healing journey, and what you hope readers will be empowered by?
My healing journey was very messy and it was not linear and I beat myself up for years about those things. I was still beating myself up when I was writing my memoir. I was ashamed of how many times I slipped into old patterns, coping mechanisms, whether they be self-injury or alcohol or staying in a relationship that I knew wasn’t healthy. I write in Pieces of a Girl that I didn’t have one singular breakthrough moment and I hit “rock bottom” so many times that if I were a character in a novel, I would have wanted to throw the book against the wall because it seemed like I’d never learned my lesson.
But that’s the lesson. The lesson is that it isn’t linear, that it is messy. And you don’t have to feel weak or ashamed of that if you are fighting your way through something similar.
What kept going through it all was self-expression. This meant both writing in all different forms—poetry, fiction, personal essays in my zines—as well as how I dressed and the music I listened to. Leaning into what I really loved gave me strength and led me to the people I needed. It helped me to keep a little seed of myself alive during even the messiest times.
You also talk a lot about the various subcultures and identities you inhabited, discussing how they were all pieces of who you were. Can you share more about this and the idea that none of us can be put into a box or restricted by labels?
I was very conscious of labels as a teenager. I spent most of high school trying to fit into a box. This, as I mentioned before, was one of the dark sides of the 90s. Authenticity was pushed so far that it felt restrictive—at least to me. This might be because I was on the young end looking up at folks in their twenties who seemed very established in their identities (but probably weren’t).
I honestly felt guilty exploring different subcultures. I felt like there was something wrong with me that I couldn’t pick where I fit and just… stay there. In retrospect, this totally went against all of the “ethos” or whatever of those subcultures which were to unapologetically be your unique self. Also trying out different things, imagining myself in different was so key to probably the most important piece of me—the piece that is creative.
There is no way to know who you are if you don’t explore your different interests. Those different aspects of myself—the pieces that loved grunge, punk, Riot Grrrl, goth; the piece that was just weird and silly—they shape how I look at the world and the insights I have to share. That is true for all of us and repressing our essential pieces robs the world and our community of what we have to bring.
It can also limit our personal tools to survive in the world. When I was in my late teens and deep in addiction—to alcohol, drugs, and a bad relationship—I’d also let go some key aspects of myself that I would have to access again to heal. You need all the aspects of yourself for the good of the world and of your own life.
Can you talk about the creative process of working with musician and author Suzy Exposito on the illustrations, and what are some of your favorite pieces of hers in the book?
I loved working with Suzy. This book was a years-long process. It went through many different iterations, but from the proposal, I knew I wanted illustrations and I wanted Suzy to be the illustrator. I knew her from Rookie and she contributed original art to my book proposal. She is younger than me, but we were both punk and goth and zine makers. We also both love astrology and tarot and had been through some shit. Basically I just knew—even though we hadn’t met IRL—I knew that she would get my story.
When we finally got to the phase where we were talking about illustrations, my editor brought in Dutton’s amazing book designer, Anna Booth. Anna asked me who I wanted to work with and I shared that my number one choice was still Suzy and she said that Suzy was hers as well. Suzy was in a super busy time in her life, but thankfully she was committed to doing the project.
Anna was the one who identified the moments to be illustrated—the moments that felt most poignant, like turning points that we wanted to emphasize. Julie Strauss-Gabel from Dutton and I reviewed and immediately agreed with her choices and then we sent this spreadsheet to Suzy. I also sent Suzy some pictures or descriptions of people. Then she went to work. She’d send me little previews and I was always impressed.
It is hard to pick favorites of Suzy’s illustrations. My top two are definitely the scenes with my best friend. In particular there was this moment with a firefly that was so pivotal for me and so perfectly embodied our friendship. Suzy’s illustration nailed it so completely. I also deeply appreciated what Suzy did in the section called ‘True Bad Romance’, which is about my abusive relationship.
Originally, I hadn’t wanted illustrations of that at all, but since they were pivotal moments and I trusted Suzy, I agreed to them. The one she did at the end of that section is probably one of the most powerful images in the book—at least to me—because she chose the imagery that really summed up those painful moments and she did it in a way that was not at all exploitative, but just… true.
Now that we are seeing a resurgence of 90’s nostalgia in music, fashion and pop culture, what were some of your best memories that made you who you are today?
My best memories are going to shows. I never saw Nirvana live, which was one of my biggest regrets as a teenager. I was fourteen when they played their last show in Chicago and I’d already bought tickets to see Smashing Pumpkins that month. I begged to go see Nirvana too, but my parents told me I’d see them another time. Oh, did I hold that against them. Anytime there was an argument about whether I could go to a show, I’d be like, “Remember that time you said I’d see Nirvana another time and then I never got to?”
So yeah, from sophomore year on, as long as I paid for my ticket (and I was an epic saver of babysitting money), I went to all the concerts. I was front row at Lollapalooza 1995, which I describe in the book, but I also basically spent my junior year at the Fireside Bowl, which was bowling alley that had been turned into a punk club. It has appeared in both of my novels because it was such an impactful place for me.
I will also say that discovering Riot Grrrl via the Internet was huge for me. Those early days of AOL (America Online) were a trip. I mean, they had the same issues as the Internet does now—trolls, inappropriate sexual behavior—but having this space to meet people from across the country, and eventually throughout the world, who shared the same interests as me and could share things I hadn’t discovered or thought about or resources I needed, that was like a whole new universe. And it was community. That is what I loved so much about writing for Rookie was that it was very much that space, that community. And without the trolls even!
Finally, I’ll say that there was something beautiful about just sitting on the couch watching MTV. Watching music videos and live performances and discovering new bands. I didn’t appreciate that as much as I should have at the time. I’d love a weekend of just watching old school MTV now!
Writing and art can be such cathartic ways to process difficult periods in our lives. How would you encourage readers to utilize these mediums to become a source of healing for them?
As I mentioned earlier, my journal was so crucial for my own healing. It was my safe space, my place to process. I think everyone should have a notebook (or several…) and would encourage them to use it however best serves them. For some folks, that might be writing. It might be ranting and having a space to be very direct. It might be a place for poetry or fantastic stories as a way to put a different lens on something or simply to escape. It might be an unlined journal to draw or make art in a different way.
For me, even though writing is the thing that comes most naturally to me—that I feel like I am “good” at—collaging was also a huge outlet. The very physical act of cutting and assembling and pasting was powerful for me, but also since I wasn’t trying to be “good” at it, I really just follow my instincts when I am doing it. Having an art that really gets you into a flow state, where you are just following your own impulses can be so healing, especially if trauma has taken that sense of intuition away from you.
Finally, if folks need ideas to play with, there is still a whole library of creative prompts on the Rookie site here. In fact, here is one that is literally about putting together the pieces of you!
If you were to describe all the pieces that make up Stephanie Kuehnert today, what would they be?
It was a process to assemble all of those pieces for Pieces of a Girl—an incredible growth process and healing journey. There were pieces that I didn’t fully accept until well into revisions of the book. So everything in there is a part of me. And now, in addition to that, I am a mom (to a human child and two cats), a partner, an aunt, a neighbor and community member.
I’m a person who attends therapy weekly. I’m queer. I’m actively and consciously working to be anti-racist. I work to support community-centered and driven change. I’m a lifelong learner and an avid reader of everything from science fiction to nonfiction about political activism. I believe in the power of education and especially of books. I’m still healing and hope to be an advocate for others who are as well.
You can order a copy of ‘Pieces Of A Girl’ HERE, and follow Stephanie Kuehert on Instagram. You can also sign up to Stephanie’s newsletter via her website to keep up to date with all her work.
