Neko Case Has Sung Hard Truths. Now She’s Telling Hers in a Memoir.

An emotionally somnambulant year and a half later, her father just as suddenly announced that her mother was alive and, actually, they were on their way to see her just then. When mother and daughter were reunited, Case writes that her parents informed her that her mother had been sick with a potentially fatal disease and fled to Hawaii for treatment, so her daughter would not have to see her suffer. Case was too young and vulnerable to question the story. “I forgave her with such desperate haste, I didn’t even have time to be mad,” she writes.

Her mother flickered in and out of her life for the next several decades, but even when they were living under the same roof, Case came to experience her mother like “a deer, always just out of reach,” she writes.

After a final, failed attempt at reconnection when Case was in her late 30s — her mother moved in with her when she was living in Tucson and suddenly left without a word — Case cut ties with her mother for good. Shortly after, as she writes in the book, she had a revelation: Perhaps her mother had never been sick at all. The thought was at once crushing and profoundly liberating.

“There was much I could have forgiven,” she writes. “But it was the grift of her that ground that down — that love held out to dance before me, always snatched back just as I reached out my arms for it.” (Attempts to reach Case’s mother for comment were unsuccessful.)

“I guess I was an over-sharer out of desperation, like, ‘Please, notice me,’” Case said, noting that there is nothing in the book about her childhood that her closest friends do not already know. Newman, though, is relieved that others “can now read her story” and understand the scope of what she has endured. “Sometimes, when Neko was being kind of hard to deal with, I’d always have that in the back of my mind,” he said. “Like, I can’t tell you guys, but holy [expletive].”

When asked if any of these revelations were difficult to disclose in such a public manner, Case just shrugged. “So much has been done to me where I haven’t been considered,” she said. “I don’t have any guilt.”