Tattered Cover is pleased to welcome Gogo Germaine to celebrate the launch of her book Glory Guitars: Memoir of a '90s Teenage Punk Rock Grrrl! This is a free event open to the public. It will include a reading, Q&A, and signing line.
Ensconced in the black hole between childhood and adulthood, a glorious degenerate-grade freedom endures. A rebellion from respectability. An anathema to normalcy. It is the type of defiance that’s hopeful―hurt by the world but looking to reconcile it.
Enter Gogo Germaine and her girl gang of delinquents.
As manic teens in the ’90s punk scene, they engage in a vivid spectrum of misbehavior―from truancy to tattoos to trespassing. Here, in the underbelly of adolescence, music is God and the rest is a rush of nihilism. Gogo and her friends stumble through sound and fury into questionable firsts at varying degrees of sobriety.
Many of us blunder through that black hole. It is a point of universal convergence, manifested by divergent experiences. Gogo’s rebellion may look different from yours, but the soaring highs and visceral lows will be familiar.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
A neurodiverse girl in a ‘90s suburban world, Gogo Germaine was born with a lollipop swirl brain, gothkitty heart, and lightning bolt soul. She won the Spelling Bee and the D.A.R.E. essay contest in the 6th grade. She was voted “Most Unique” in the 7th grade. Then it was all downhill from there. The rest was the stuff of hysterical after school specials: Gogo began stealing cigs, shotgunning PBRs, snorting cocaine in her jammies, sneaking punk boys into her pink bedroom, and listening to tinny car stereo tunes while glaring into the sun like a muscle shirt dad. Gogo snuck out of her house every night for an entire summer. She fled to California and was put on the National Runaway List, but technically only made it just past her Fort Collins neighborhood before being intercepted. Gogo received a tattoo for $12 on top of a parking garage. She banged the dude whose name was scrawled in bathroom graffiti at the goth coffee shop. She was courted by an aging rockstar who was almost three times her age. She spent her adolescence swiftly running out of all manner of doors. One day, she finally escaped.
She became a band publicist, music journalist, and writer devoted to exploring rebellion and the grey areas of life. She helped start what was rumored to be a sex cult in a haunted bordello in a ghost town, gave birth to two love children, and wrote such subversive things that she was estranged from half of her family in friends in one year. Gogo currently spends her days working in a phantasmagorical wonderland. She wrote Glory Guitars for the singular goal of capturing the feeling of the air as she ran across a field to ditch school, totally free of responsibility. It became a hopeful platform for her to reclaim her agency and make sense of all the heartbreak she was running from: the heartbreak of being a differently-wired girl in a predatory world. She is no longer a danger-seeking asshole.
