Can magical thinking make you a rock star?

Do you believe in magic?

Most of us do, even if we don't call it that. Maybe we have a lucky pair of underwear, or are convinced that by watching (or not watching) a favorite sports team play a white-knuckle game, they will win or lose. "Magical thinking is ubiquitous," Matthew Hutson, a former editor of Psychology Today, told Forbes. "Everyone is susceptible to it. And while we tend to think of distorted perceptions of reality as inherently bad, sometimes they're actually good for us."

It is this "good side" of magical thinking that is at work in Brix Smith Start's new memoir, The Rise, the Fall, and the Rise. The title is as much a description of the memoir's narrative action as it is clever nod to the band that made her famous; Smith Start was once the wife of Mark E. Smith, the front man of the influential English post-punk band, The Fall. Although the band already had a reputation when she joined, Smith Start is recognized by Fall fans for being the creative force behind the sound of some of the band's most major albums.

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The Rise, the Fall, and the Rise is the most recent in a slew of recent rock memoirs by women, with everyone from Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon to Sleater-Kinney's Carrie Brownstein to The Slit's Viv Albertine choosing to tell their side of the story — and that's not to forget Patti Smith's incredible, Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Just Kids, the crown jewel of the genre. Perhaps what is so attractive about these memoirs is that they belong to a voice we seldom get to hear; to quote Gordon's memoir, there is so little anyone typically cares to know about women musicians, other than what it's like to be "a girl in a band." Even the women who front groups like Sleater-Kinney and The Slits face dismissal in the sexist, male-dominated world of rock and roll.

Smith Smart — who was first the girlfriend and then the wife of The Fall's lead singer, and who joined the band seven years after it was founded — knows a thing or two about confronting this male-dominated world. In addition to her time shaping The Fall, she also trail-blazed with her own side project, The Adult Net, and later, Brix & The Extricated. Smith Start went on to launch the successful East London boutique Start with her husband, Philip Start, and thanks to her high street reputation, she became a fashion pundit on the TV show Ultimate Shopper. And that's not even to mention standing up to her father, a "controlling, mercurial genius," her entire life.

But rather than write with the bitterness of unprocessed wounds, Smith Start records a life of positive magical thinking that helped her rise (if you will) into an independent and formidable public figure.

Critic Simon Reynolds once described The Fall as a kind of "Northern England magical realism"; The Rise, the Fall, and the Rise, despite being a memoir, is in much the same tradition. Smith Start bookends the book with her dreams, and does not shy away from depicting the unexplainable (ghosts, Jungian psychology, and astrology all play roles). But for many women, particularly women in roles more easily or socially attainable by men, embracing "magic" is key to more than just writing great songs.

Put simply, "magical thinking" is when people believe in the cause-and-effect of rationally separate events; say, hitting green lights all the way to work is a "sign" that you're going to have a good day. "Human survival depends on recognizing patterns. If a red berry makes you ill once, it makes sense to avoid red berries in the future. But magical thinking takes this association to another level. It's thinking that if you avoid all red foods, then you won't get sick," Psychology Today explains.

The term is often used by psychologists to describe processes of grieving, or disorders like anorexia or bulimia, and magical thinking certainly shows this dangerous side in Smith Start's memoir. But it also shows the possibilities for achieving happiness, too:

This kind of statement is not just for people who believe in tarot cards and crystals; for a woman to "make it" in an industry overwhelmed by men, the mindset that one is meant to be there (whether due to divine force or the belief that everything happens for a reason) can ultimately mean one's survival in an otherwise unfriendly or unwelcoming community. Smith Start's memoir embraces philosophies pushed by projects like Ask and It is Given by Esther and Jerry Hicks (Smith Start's choice of a guide), or The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, all of which boil down to the premise that if you envision a future of success and happiness, it will come to you — the universe will make it so.

"Instinctively, this was the way I operated," Smith explains. "When bad stuff would happen in my life, it would block out the naturally good. Sometimes I'd obsess on the bad stuff, and my life would become harder. When I learned to turn these thoughts around, when I accepted the duality of life and stopped trying to fight it, my life became easier again."

Women have been doing this for years, with or without a guidebook to help them. If you want to make your way in a male-centric world like rock (or engineering, fashion, media, film, and a whole host of other industries), you need to feel like you belong and that you deserve your success. You need to see it, to taste it, to visualize it, to feel like you're living it — even before you are.

Science can actually address why this kind of thinking works: "We stimulate the same brain regions when we visualize an action as we do when we actually perform that same action," Srinivasan Pillay, a Harvard M.D. and the author of Your Brain and Business: The Neuroscience of Great Leaders, told Business Insider. Studies have proven that by just thinking about things — say, watching a movie or imagining ourselves exercising — our brains go through those same motions as if we were actually doing what we are seeing or imagining. Thinking I will achieve this or I am not good enough can actually manifest physically in our lives.

Oprah Winfrey has long been an advocate of the power of visualization, claiming that even as a child she promised herself, "My life won't be like this. My life won't be like this, it will be better." Winfrey would later encourage her hundreds of thousands of viewers to make vision boards and "create the highest, grandest vision possible for your life, because you become what you believe."

Rock and roll is more often than not a man's world; you'll be hard-pressed to find a woman musician who doesn't point this out in her memoir. And in order to overcome these forces, Smith Start says she felt as if the entire universe were working to make her a musician.

"Everyone needs a belief system of some sort," Smith Start writes. "If you are lucky, you find something that resonates with you; something that can give you hope in your lowest moments. Maybe it's God, maybe it's meditation, maybe it's being in the silence of nature, or music, or therapy? Everybody is different. But for me this worked. This way of thinking was my magic bullet."