Mailing List


Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Articles Available Online


There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

‘We possess nothing in this world other than the power to say “I” This is what we must yield up to God’ — Simone Weil   ‘God break down the door You won’t find the answers here Not the ones you came looking for’ — Nine Inch Nails   Photosensitivity warning: Many of the hyperlinks in this essay go to live videos, which feature a strobe light     I was 10 years old when The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails was released in 1994, and I listened to it more than any other record for the next six years, when everything I knew about myself was disintegrating and becoming unknowable It lives in my blood memory, the soundtrack to the most formative part of my life When I think of that time, my memories resonate with those songs, I can’t imagine myself without them, who I would have been Since then, twenty-five years, I regularly go through periods where the only thing I listen to for weeks, months at a time is Nine Inch Nails, and this locates me, returns me to myself When you love a band for more than half your life, something happens as their songs come to live in you, they echo through how you remember the past, and fortify how you are legible to yourself in the present   NIN was the first band that got me in trouble with grown-ups – for this, they have a special place in my heart that no other band will ever touch For Christmas vacation in 1996, when I was 12, I brought the Broken EP with me when I went to stay with my Catholic grandparents Broken was packaged in a cardboard ‘digipak’, so my grandmother, rather than struggle with a plastic jewel case, could open it like a book The lyrics were printed on the inside, though I was singing them aloud all the time too I think Grandma had the biggest problem with my favourite lyric – ‘Gotta listen to your big-time, hard-line, bad-luck, fist fuck’ – but there was enough offensive sentiment on that

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

READ NEXT

fiction

January 2015

Shishosetsu...

Minae Mizumura

TR. Juliet Winters Carpenter

fiction

January 2015

This is an excerpt from the novel published in Japanese as Shishosetsu from left to right (私小説 from left...

fiction

October 2012

Girl on a Bridge

Wayne Holloway

fiction

October 2012

Pirajoux… The middle of a hot endless summer, driving on the A39 through an as always empty central France,...

feature

Issue No. 11

Forgotten Sea

Alexander Christie-Miller

feature

Issue No. 11

I. As I stood on the flanks of the Kaçkar Mountains where they slope into the Black Sea near...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required