I Live Inside: Memoirs of a Babe in Toyland

Praise for I Live Inside: Memoirs of a Babe in Toyland

It's potent stuff, and the whole book flies by in a flash. Due to the short chapters and concise, vivid prose, it's easy to flip through the whole thing in one sitting. And by the end, you feel like you were not only offered a front-row seat to the rise of one of the Twin Cities' most influential bands, but also a the messy, passionate, and perplexing process of finding your footing in the music world. It's empowering to witness a women telling her own story in her own way, and Michelle Leon has done it tremendously.
---Andrea Swensson, music reporter at Minnesota Public Radio's 89.3 The Current and the voice of the Local Current Blog.

More than a "rock bio," Michele Leon has written a book about loss, the messiness of self-realization, and the provisional salvation of art, camaraderie, and love. It’s also about being in an important all-girl punk band at a remarkable time, documenting a scene that still resonates. It’s profound, poetic, badass, tender, and inspiring. You know someone who needs this, and they might just be you.
—Will Hermes, author of Love Goes To Buildings On Fire: Five Years In New York City That Changed Music Forever
 
Michelle Leon has provided us with a crucial and compelling account of what it was to be a woman making music in the nineties. Leon was the first woman on stage that I wanted to be. I have been waiting for this book for twenty years. Fantastic and ferocious.
—Jessica Hopper, music and culture critic and author of The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic and The Girls’ Guide to Rocking

Babes in Toyland may have showed Riot Grrrl how to scream, but their dirty, aching noise called to hips and heart as much as fists. Likewise, former BiT bassist Michelle Leon’s haunting memoir is more than the story of a girl in a band. This visceral and thoughtful On the Road illustrates a continuing quandary of contemporary life: Is there a way to forge identity beyond what you choose to consume? And what happens when alternatives to the mainstream prove equally unwilling to acknowledge your tender peculiarities, your spidery contradictions, your griefs both ancient and newborn?
—Terri Sutton, freelance writer and former City Pages arts editor
 
I’ve seldom heard anyone capture the surreality of fleeting rock and roll fame as well as Michelle Leon—I once heard her describe going in 24 hours from cheering English fans at Heathrow to mopping a floor in her south Minneapolis apartment. In her book she juggles the historically significant and the prosaic with equal aplomb and sensitivity. The sensory veil of Bonnie Bell lip gloss, velvet wall paper, fingers sliding on a bass, syringes in waste baskets envelops you. No punches are pulled, yet no band members are eviscerated—their humanity revealed. True to the humble Minneapolis narrative spirit, there is little or no name-dropping for its own sake. While Michelle tells the story with a wide-eyed wonder and naïveté of one first initiated to the vortex of Minneapolis music, you never lose track of the significance and place of her band in the big picture. She’d never say it but: Where would Pussy Riot be without Babes in Toyland?
—Adam Levy, singer-songwriter (The Honeydogs)
 

Maybe you know the words to every Babes in Toyland song; maybe you’ve never heard the band’s music at all. No matter: by the end of this lyrical, tough, and moving memoir, you’ll not only feel like you know Michelle Leon, you’ll also want to talk and dance and listen to music with her. Most of all, you’ll want to recommend this book to anyone who’s ever wondered what it’s like to be a woman in the strange, sometimes brutal world of contemporary American rock & roll.
—Scott Heim, author of Mysterious Skin and We Disappear
 
I Live Inside feels as real and personal as reading your own memories. Michelle tells the bittersweet story of Babes in Toyland’s nonstop touring/recording schedule and all the grime, laughs, jealousy, love, pain, horror, and glory that came with it. Parts read like a fairy tale while others are so haunting they will never leave you.
—Kelli Mayo, musician (Skating Polly)
 

I wanted to buy a copy of this book for all my friends and family as soon as I finished reading it. Babes in Toyland’s work ethic is beyond inspiring, and Michelle’s fear of not being quite good enough is all too relatable. You’ll feel like a fly on the wall as Babes navigate through the underground rock scene.
—Peyton Bighorse, musician (Skating Polly)
 
Michelle Leon’s story of indie rock stardom is both raw and readable. I love this book for its close intimate details. Leon draws you right into the Babes in Toyland van, shows you the after party tensions, and what is in the mind of this particular girl in a band.
—Darcey Steinke, author of Sister Golden Hair: A Novel and others
 

Beautiful, sad and happy, poignant yet humble. The prose is lyrical and witty, and Michelle refreshingly nails the truth of the “shit happens” loop of life as a touring musician in a van, mixed with moving yet always unassuming explorations into love and loss and the human psyche. I never had too many chances to see Babes in Toyland—I too was living in a parallel yet not entirely different version of “my own inside”—but when I did, they scared the hell out of me, which I can only assume was the point.
—Daniel D. Murphy, musician, songwriter, and guitarist (Soul Asylum, Golden Smog)
 
I Live Inside is Michelle Leon’s thrilling, riveting, and sometimes heart-wrenching account of her years as the bassist for the seminal indie rock band Babes in Toyland. Her prose is stunning, her eye is wry, and her heart enormous; the result is a compelling memoir filled with pop culture, travel, intrigue, and a young artist’s quest to find her voice. I Live Inside is loud and clear, and I could not put it down.
—Laurie Lindeen, author of Petal Pusher: A Rock and Roll Cinderella Story
 

If Orpheus played bass, Virgil wore lingerie, and Persephone ever told people how she really felt. . . . This masterful, gentle soul is the perfect guide through the sensual, destructive, rich, and violent times in the underground rock scene of the 1980s and ’90s. Unique and poetic, Michelle’s prose is a voice, rhythmic, resonant, and our conduit to a forbidden world. We knew her, were her, but we never did this.
—Kevin Kling, author, playwright, and storyteller
 
Tough chicks tenderly portrayed, one girl’s view into the bubbling energy of the Minneapolis rock scene—filled with vivid, personal detail, evocative lists, and reflections on a time that still feels raw. The form is clipped and episodic, propelling the reader through the alternating kaleidoscopes of boredom and self-inflicted chaos that typifies a life in music. Michelle feels and tells the story as one who was at the center of the swirling energy that characterized a unique moment in music.
—John Munson, musician and bass player (Trip Shakespeare, Semisonic, the Twilight Hours, the New Standards)
 

Michelle Leon writes with rare insight and sensitivity not about a life in rock and roll, but of the rock and roll in her life and how one nourished and informed the other. She describes as no other music memoir the struggles and transcendence that playing in a band brings: The love and impatience she feels for her bandmates and they for her; how to find her true identity within the band and completely outside of it; the forced intimacy and alienation of life on the road; the sacrifices and rewards that rock and roll demands and provides the perceptive introvert alone on a stage yet wholly engaged with the music and her audience. A singular, insightful, brave tale of an artist coming to terms with her art and herself.
—David N. Meyer, author of Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music
 
In finely drawn vignettes, Michelle Leon’s memoir I Live Inside captures not only the exhilaration of performing but also the quiet loneliness found offstage. A vivid tale of rock-and-roll’s thrills and secret heartbreaks awaits you on the pages of this haunting book.
—Jacob Slichter, musician, drummer (Semisonic), and author of So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star
 

It is always exciting to have another side to a story, and here is Michelle’s, touring through the time when she played—first with lent bass, in the desire to join, along with Lori, “badass, a punk cave girl, tattooed and dressed in black,” Kat’s notes going “pink to red as the words travel from a place that is primal, formed to communicate some kind of pain.” Complicated, consoling, and true in all the enchantments of dress, the candid colors, songs and background in girl loving music and that lost Joe Cole.
—Douglas A. Martin, author of Once You Go Back
 
“What’s it like to be a girl in a band?” Ugh. Next question! Michelle Leon’s I Live Inside tells what it’s like to be a person in a band. And then—suddenly, painfully—a person who used to be in a band. A vivid, poetic memoir.
—Mark Yarm, author of Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge
 
Michelle Leon’s intimate, heartfelt, and heartaching portrait of an emerging Minneapolis female (punk) rocker. Real names’d be proof. This is Planet Leon.
—David Markey, filmmaker, author, and musician