On the road

By Marisa Meltzer Sunday, May 29, 2011

Alina Simone is just trying to succeed. In “You Must Go and Win” (Faber and Faber), her first book of essays, she chronicles the many barriers to her success: being a successful musician, a daughter to be proud of, an exemplary Ukrainian-American. But it’s her many setbacks that end up being our gain.

The first essay, “The Komsomol Truth,” about going to Kharkov, the Ukraine city where her parents are from and where she was born, reads a bit like a female version of Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Everything Is Illuminated,” complete with wacky tour guide’s broken English. Simone doesn’t reach for our heartstrings in her trip to the motherland, though; her Kharkov is a city whose emblem features “wreaths of wheat, bushels of fruit, and hovering above them both, the symbol for nuclear energy.”

She’s equally non-saccharine when pondering what would have come to her, should her family have never left:

Her mother, one of the most blunt and direct characters found in recent memory, didn’t even think she should go in the first place. “Now maybe you will finally know what a god forsaken hole we rescued you from,” she says. Simone reprints terse emails from her mom on subjects ranging from how her ideas to return to the Ukraine are “pure delirium” to not-so-gentle reminders to return the kitchen knives she borrowed.

“When I started writing about my mom I wanted to be honest,” Simone said on the phone from her home in Brooklyn, N.Y. “If you really, really want to be funny, you have to be honest and dark and explore sides of people’s characters that might not be flattering.” She sent her mother early drafts of the book and was naturally nervous over her warts-and-all portrayal of her. But her mom took it well. “What you see is what you get — she is harsh and abrasive and difficult to love. If anything, I lean towards the side of niceness!

“But she really values honesty and went beyond just approving and edited each chapter and didn’t censor me. It improved our relationship.”

And for anyone who’s ever pursued a creative life, Simone gets all the details of being a struggling musician — she’s released more albums than books — just right. The self-deprecating tales seemingly have no end: There are the “children” who offer to sign her and lose the $43,000 capital they had kept, oddly, in cash; the indignities of looking for bandmates on Craigslist; and the media relations experts who asks, “Tell me — did Pitchfork review your EP?”

Simone thinks of herself as a singer who became a writer and says the processes of writing a book and an album are completely different. “With music, there’s a physical aspect to it. There will be that melody that won’t get out of your head, or sometimes the words come first,” she says. “To my mind, the creativity to access a song has a lot more facets to it, especially compared to autobiographical writing. With writing, it’s just you and that blank paper. There’s nowhere to hide. You’re in the desert staring down the brutally hot sun.”

In between chasing her dreams of musical stardom, she manages a lot of living, including getting baptized by “a renegade priest into an unrecognized offshoot of the Russian Orthodox Church,” reluctantly attending a strip show in Siberia starring a man named Tarzan, and a moving passage about her love affair with a Soviet singer named Yanka Dyagileva.

One chapter is devoted to a road trip with her childhood friend, a pre-fame Amanda Palmer, whom she documents for a never-finished project. Writes Simone: “It turned out that I was in need of a subject at the precise moment when Amanda was in need of an acolyte.”

But for all its humor, the book has a somber ending, in which she decides to give up on her dreams of musical success. “The problem was how to quit,” she writes. “After all, America does not like a quitter.”

“It does end on a down note,” Simone admits. “The original version was a manifesto that I’m done, goodbye to you, I have gone and lost. It’s hard to be a struggling artist — not that I think I’m struggling like a Chilean coal miner, but at some point, you come to a crossroads and have to make a decision about your life. I wondered what I had traded and for what and if it was worth it. At the time I was feeling like it wasn’t worth it.”

Luckily, her real life took a completely different turn. She and her husband decided to have a baby, and her daughter was born just as this book and her new album, “Make Your Own Danger,” were coming out.

She was considering taking her baby — who is “really chill” — on tour to support the book and album, but the only option to make it work was to take her mother with her. Her mother, who lives in another state, “hasn’t yet spent more than ten minutes with this baby. It would be from zero to 60 and we would probably kill each other.”

Then again, she thought she could bring a tape recorder and record their interactions: It has all the makings of a sequel.