The folk singer on her memoir,Hadestown,and reckoning with the 1990s.
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Were sitting at a corner table in the Standard Hotel on Cooper Square.
In 2006, Mitchell created atheatrical productionbased on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice calledHadestown.
DiFranco is overjoyed to see the project make it to the Broadway stage.
She just didnt realize there would be a whole red-carpet situation.
Now Im in a panic because Ifucking…
I didnt pack, she says.
Im going to be underdressed.
I was going to do black jeans and a T-shirt.
I told her that it would be very on-brand for her to stick to the original plan.
I hate dressing up.
But Im thinking,This is the Broadway premiere of a show you helped get up off the ground.
So thats where Im at.
But she never fit neatly into any of those microscenes.
And yet DiFranco and her music always seemed disconnected from the machinery of the music industry.
DiFranco had a front-row seat to those contradictions.
She is a foremother, to be sure.
But, as she herself acknowledges, her feminist awakening was situational.
Thats the human experience, the world begins and ends with me.
She later discovered that the man was sleeping in her bed while she was away on tour.
I will never let my daughter read my book, she jokes.
It took a lot of risk taking just to be free and a lot of gauging the odds.
She performed onLate Night With Conan OBrienmore than once.
Even if she embraced their spirit (and they hers), she wasnt always comfortable with their rigidity.
(The festival ended in 2015 largely owing to criticism for its trans-exclusionary environment.)
God, I would never go to such extremes like theres a straight girl from hell lurking within me.
Shes still haunted by the messages from gay women who said they felt hurt and abandoned.
She wanted to stand outside capitalism completely, not be praised for her ability to game the system.
Last thing I want to do is feed the machine.
And then came the plantation incident.
i imagined instead that the setting would become a participant in the event.
DiFranco tells me that she found the entire retreat experience devastating.
It put a level of fear into me that I had never felt.
I could stand up to anybody, until it was my own tribe.
I would not be taken down by anybody.
But when it became my own tribe, I experienced a crisis … We were experiencing something together in a moment.
Would I have spoken so unfiltered?
Suddenly I was 15 again.
Fuck you / for existing in the first place.
These lyrics are, looking back, almost cringeworthy flippant and impudent, like blowing a raspberry in public.
DiFranco, for her part, is content to be pushed into the gradual position of elder.
The stillness is further charged by the wistfulness of my lonely exit, she writes of the dream.
Such a time we had!
Such an extravagance of love!Is this a dream?
Or … my deathbed?
She ends the book on this note, speaking as if she already feels the dream is evaporating.
As it should be for young people.
I mean see which hat fits me best, and what I feel most me in.
What an amazing change.
Then she adds: I hope this book feels antique.
She sees her story as a lesson in perseverance, in learning to stumble and get back up.
And make your own mistakes.
