“I’d never written a word, but I took Dan’s advice. I decided to write about men, and how they interact onstage with one another and bond by playing music.
I remember staring endlessly at the books lining the walls of my dad’s study as a little girl. I didn’t know what a sociologist did, but the books had titles like Men and Their Work. What did that even mean? Obviously, men – and boys – spent time, most of it in fact, engaged in an activity knows as work. Keller, for example, had his rock collection, Erector set, and assorted other boy-passions. Whereas whatever I made up or imagined in my own head lacked that builder’s significance or invention, and the train set I presumed would someday magically appear must have died on the tracks on its way to me. Looking back, I was clearly devaluing what women did. How had that happened? Was it just that my parents placed higher expectations on Keller as the firstborn? Did I ask for, and in return get back, a little smile rather than any attention?
Guys playing music. I loved music. I wanted to push up close to whatever it was men felt when they were together onstage – to try to ink in that invisible thing. It wasn’t sexual, but it wasn’t unsexual either. Distance mattered in male friendships. One on one, men often had little to say to one another. They found some closeness by focusing on a third thing that wasn’t them: music, video games, golf, women. Male friendships were triangular in shape, and that allowed two men some version of intimacy. In retrospect, that’s why I joined a band, so I could be inside that male dynamic, not staring in through a closed window but looking out.” 
Buy it here: http://www.amazon.ca/Girl-Band-Memoir-Kim-Gordon-ebook/dp/B00M70S96S
Gillian Sonin 