How Writing Her Feminist-Punk Memoir Put Kathleen Hanna on the ‘Happiness Train’

Kathleen Hanna has always been dead serious and slyly funny at once. More perspicacious than angry invective alone, that alchemy of tones has been her signature since the early ’90s, when a 20-something Hanna fronted Bikini Kill, the punk band that became the most visible act associated with the third-wave feminist movement known as riot grrrl. “Suck my left one,” she growled, in the face of an abuser, on one of their most famous tracks. Her subsequent solo project, Julie Ruin, conjured visions of a subversive...