Author of the week: Bob Mould

last updated 8 January 2015

Bob Mould has packed plenty into his 50 years, said Chris Richards in The Washington Post. In a new memoir, the musician, best known for fronting the seminal 1980s punk band Hüsker Dü, recounts fleeing an abusive home, starting a few bands, struggling with addiction, getting clean, coming out of the closet, working in pro wrestling, writing The Daily Show theme song, and reinventing himself as a DJ, all in just a few hundred pages. Fans of Hüsker Dü looking for Mould’s take on the band’s acrimonious breakup in 1988 may be disappointed in See a Little Light, he warns: “I wasn’t trying to tell the story of Hüsker Dü. I wasn’t trying to tell the story of anybody but me.”

The heart of that story is Mould’s struggle to embrace his sexuality, said Michael Crowley in Time.com. The testosterone-charged punk scene wasn’t a setting conducive to shifting into an openly gay lifestyle, and the stereotype of the effeminate gay man, he writes, made him “hate the fact that I was gay.” When Mould finally declared his sexuality publicly, to Spin magazine in 1994, it felt like a disaster. He was quoted as saying, “I’m not a freak.” “When I saw it, I just said, ‘The gays are gonna kill me,’” he says. “It’s just like, how self-hating.” Fortunately, the gay community took no offense. These days, Mould has found new purpose in DJing large gay dance parties. “Now that I’ve integrated who I am and what I do,” he writes. “I finally feel whole.”