Pieces of a Girl

January 8, 2024
Via a strong, captivating voice, Kuehnert spins a kaleidoscopic tale of girlhood, starting when she moves to Oak Park, Ill., at age eight and leading up to her preoccupation with the 1990s riot grrrl movement and beyond. Her tumultuous and traumatic first relationship anchors the narrative, and vignettes depicting this abusive period, instances of self-harm, substance reliance, and depression juxtapose humorous stories of attempting to summon George Washington via Ouija board, falling in love with Nirvana, calling people’s pagers, and reading Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat. Through oscillating streams of consciousness and journal-esque recounting of events, Kuehnert crafts an arc of her formative years, replete with a curation of comics, diary entries, mixtape lists, photographs, teen poetry, and zine pages in a compulsively readable mixed-media collage of grungy aesthetics and 90s paraphernalia. The result is a memoir with sharp teeth and a soft underbelly, the product mirroring the author’s catharsis in creating art: “As broken and aching as I may have felt inside while I wrote and cut and pasted and photocopied and assembled, the sliver of a belief surfaced that I had the power to make myself whole again.” Ages 14–up. (Mar.) ■