Cat Power Read Free

concealed beneath those shaggy bangs, the more I realized how naïve I'd been to imagine that she wouldn't object to someone writing a biography about her. No longer my idealized confidante, Chan became my subject. And as such I started to look at her without the filter of adoration.
    I saw her addiction to fame, the natural flip side of an equally genuine repulsion to it that she often discusses. I saw the absurd hypocrisy in her deliberate self-mythologizing—her willingness to play up her tragic childhood and emotional instability in order to make us look closer, then her scandalized disgust when we do. I saw her as someone who will direct an assistant to secure impossible dinner reservations one minute, then pick her nose in front of strangers the next. I saw
her
.
    In resisting the publication of this book so virulently, Chan showed me exactly why it was worth writing. I could have given the advance money back and gone on my way, and if Chan were one of her merely pleasant contemporaries—Feist, or Norah Jones—I probably would have. But like her idols Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday, and Madonna, Chan is a Gatsby, and while that means very little to the fangirl who started this book, it means everything to the journalist who finished it.
    Chan Marshall didn't want me to write
A Good Woman
and she doesn't want you to read it. But given her protestations, I can only assume that for reasons that are still becoming clear to me, she needs us too.

June 9, Town Hall in New York City. Cat Power's sold-out engagement at the prestigious, eighty-six-year-old venue where Leonard Bernstein and Miles Davis once performed featured the Memphis Rhythm Band, a full Southern soul
orchestra. They were all onstage. Chan Marshall was not, and people were starting to worry. This show was originally scheduled for February, but had been canceled for what were then referred to as “health reasons.” By now everybody in the venue knew what that really meant. Chan had suffered one of the most highly publicized mental and physical flameouts in the modern rock era, with the
New York Times
reporting on the details of her institutionalization and one million fans all over the world wondering if her return to the stage would bring the same vulnerable beguiling presence they'd come to cherish and rely on. Chan Marshall had been long gone all winter, and almost for good. Would she be back with the spring? And if so, how damaged would she be?
    After nearly an hour, the singer finally took the stage barefoot, wearing a strapless beaded Chanel couture dress carrying a hot-pink commuter mug filled with what she kept triumphantly insisting was chamomile tea, not single malt scotch, or wine, or beer, the preferred on-stage beverages for most of her career. So invested in Chan's well-being were many of the fans in the audience that this revelation itself drew applause. The gown's pale, creamy tone showed off her deep tan and lithe frame, achieved during winter months spent trading booze and dark hotel rooms for the Miami sunshine, novels read by the pool, and Pilates. She looked happy, which, for anyone who knew her personally or had followed the evolution of her career, was stunning to witness: the mental-hygiene equivalent of onstage pyro.
    She was tentative as she led the band, who were clearly pulling for her as well, through the first few songs, relying on weirdly equine galloping dance steps to neutralize the tension.
    During the minimalist ballad “Where Is My Love” she left the stage for a while, prompting the background singer to add a wry tone to the lyric. It seemed like Chan was gone too long and a sense of here-she-goes-againnervous energy permeated the crowd. Her eventual return drew another wave of relieved whoops and applause. She flashed a huge grin, cantered over to her piano, and proceeded to sing with such smoky, lived-in authority that it was as if she finally knew her lines after fifteen years of tense rehearsal. It was the best Cat