‘Women’s rage is real. Mostly we turn it on ourselves’: Neko Case on songwriting, survival – and her mother’s faked death

The Grammy-nominated indie icon has written her memoir, and confronted a shocking deception by her family. But now, she says, it’s the music industry that really angers her

When the singer-songwriter Neko Case was growing up in poverty in rural Washington, it did not occur to her to question her parents or their indifference to her. “Kids don’t think things are weird,” Case, 54, says with a shrug. “It’s like: well, this is my reality, so this is what reality is.” So when Case’s father picked her up from her grandmother’s house one day and told her that her mother had died, from terminal cancer she had kept secret, Case believed him. She attended her mother’s wake with her father, her relatives on her mother’s side and 20 or 30 other mourners.

About a year and half later, Case left school to find her dad waiting unexpectedly. He informed her that her mother was at home, apparently back from the dead. Case was told that her mother had faked her death to spare her family the pain of a drawn-out demise, then had been miraculously cured in Hawaii. At the time, she was so overjoyed – and so young – that she didn’t doubt their story. It wasn’t until she was a “full-blown adult” that she grasped the magnitude of the deception – and the fact that her mother, whose description of her illness would often change, had probably never had cancer. “I never even thought it was weird until I told somebody the story one day,” she says.