“Witty, gritty, and flat-out addictive.”
—Emily France, author of Zen and Gone
Glory Guitars: Memoir of a ’90s Teenage Punk Rock Grrrl
by Gogo Germaine
Published by University of Hell Press
October 11, 2022 | 298 Pages | Paperback
$19.95 | ISBN 978-1-938753-45-9
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PORTLAND, Oregon – September 6, 2022 – 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.
For a review copy, or to set up an interview or in-person author event with Ms. Germaine, please contact Erin Barnes, ekbmedia [at] gmail [dot] com
PRAISE FOR GLORY GUITARS
“A synesthetic fireball of beauty, a gut punch in every line, this is the kind of memoir full of gorgeously drawn characters and the wild passion of youthful misdeed that spawns a thousand attempts to live halfway up to the thrill of the original.” —Alex DiFrancesco, author of All City and Transmutation.
“With grit, heart, and punk spark, Glory Guitars is a seething anthem of teenage sex and explosive youth. Gogo Germaine is a voice of her generation, a shriek of darkness and life you never knew you needed … but won’t ever forget.” —Jason Heller, author of Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded.
“Glory Guitars is a vulnerability manifesto that refuses to be ignored. … Heartbreaking and hilarious, all with the perfect soundtrack of sorrow and rage to boot, Germaine is brilliant at masterminding the art of storytelling …” —Hillary Leftwich, author of Aura, A Memoir and Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock
“Glory Guitars is a multi-sensory, tilt-a-whirl fun house adventure of guiltless teenage rebellion that formerly puritanical readers can live vicariously through, retroactively experiencing every school-ditch drunken escapade …” —Amanda E.K., author of The Risk It Takes to Bloom
ABOUT GOGO GERMAINE
A neurodiverse girl in a ’90s suburban world, Gogo Germaine was born with a lollipop-swirl brain, goth-kitty 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.
It was all downhill from there.
The rest was the stuff of hysterical after-school specials: stealing cigs, shotgunning PBRs, snorting cocaine, sneaking punk boys into her pink bedroom, and listening to tinny car stereo tunes while glaring into the sun like a muscle-shirt dad. She snuck away every night for a summer; fled to California, but only made it just past her Fort Collins; paid $12 for a tattoo she got on top of a parking garage; banged a dude whose name was bathroom graffiti in a coffee shop; was courted by an aging rockstar; and spent her adolescence running through every door.
And then, one day, she finally escaped.
Gogo 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 and friends in a single year.
Gogo currently spends her days working in a phantasmagorical wonderland. She wrote Glory Guitars to capture the feeling of the air as she ran across a field ditching 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. Follow her on Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok.
