Lindeen, Laurie 1962(?)-

PERSONAL:

Born c. 1962, in MN; married Paul Westerberg (a singer and songwriter); children: John. Education: Attended University of Wisconsin—Madison; University of Minnesota, bachelor's degree, M.F.A., 2004.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Minneapolis, MN.

CAREER:

Zuzu's Petals (rock band), Minneapolis, MN, cofounder, singer-songwriter, and guitarist, 1988-1995; currently a part-time writing teacher at schools and nonprofit organizations. Also worked as a waitress, c. 1986-88.

WRITINGS:

Petal Pusher: A Rock and Roll Cinderella Story (memoir), Atria Books (New York, NY), 2007.

Also author of the novel My Boyfriend's Dead. Author of the blog Petal Pusher; contributor to the online magazine Morning News.

SOUND RECORDINGS

(Author of lyrics, with Zuzu's Petals) When No One's Looking, Twintone, 1992.

(Author of lyrics, with Zuzu's Petals) The Music of Your Life, Twintone, 1994.

A Pregnant Pause, Redeye Distribution, 1998.

SIDELIGHTS:

Fans of hard-rock, Midwestern, all-girl bands might recall Laurie Lindeen, the lead singer and guitarist of Zuzu's Petals. The Minneapolis-based band was at its limited height in the early 1990s, releasing two albums but never gaining the fame and acclaim of such similar groups as the Go-Go's or Babes in Toyland. Lindeen is sometimes better known for being the wife of Paul Westerberg, former lead singer for the rock band The Replacements, and is now living life as a wife and mother.

Lindeen reflects on her years touring with a rock band in her memoir Petal Pusher: A Rock and Roll Cinderella Story, which covers her days as a musician, but much more as well. She reflects on her childhood and her battle with multiple sclerosis (MS), which began when she was twenty-four years old. The disease has left her weakened and legally blind in her left eye, yet she has managed to live with it. She even enjoyed a reunion performance with her band not long before her memoir was published.

Lindeen described her childhood as "extremely normal" in a CNN.com interview. She attended college at the University of Wisconsin but dropped out before graduating, having spent too much time partying and not enough studying. After being hospitalized with MS she went to work as a waitress in a Minneapolis, Minnesota, restaurant. The disease, however, was a mixed blessing in a way. "I could have decided to roll over and die at 24," Lindeen recalls in the interview, "but I sort of used it like something that's like, ‘Well, this could happen again. What do I really want to do?’ And what I really wanted to do was get that band going."

A guitarist, Lindeen recruited bass player Coleen Elwood and, after the group's first drummer left, a new drummer named Linda Pitmon. Forming the band Zuzu's Petals (a name inspired by the 1946 Frank Capra film It's a Wonderful Life) in 1988, they struggled for three years before finding some popularity in 1991. They then released an album and went on tour. Lindeen decided to break up the band in 1995 after a terrible concert tour told her it was the end. It was not the end of her life, of course. She married Westerberg, with whom she has a child, and she now teaches writing classes.

In her memoir, Lindeen jumps around chronologically, often drawing parallels between events on the road with Zuzu's Petals and events during her childhood. This technique turned off some reviewers, while other critics saw it as an effective strategy. "The narrative jumps back and forth in time quite a bit, leaving the reader unsteady about when certain events actually take place," remarked Jodi Chromey in a review for the music blog Largehearted Boy. For Rob van Alstyne, a critic for Reveille Online, the desultory style provides insight into important connections in Linden's life. "[U]ltimately the gambit works, giving the reader a compelling explanation as to the formative experiences that led Lindeen to pursue the exceedingly unorthodox ‘career’ of aspirant indie-rocker," Alstyne observed.

As a rock memoir, most critics viewed Petal Pusher as a successful portrait of the 1990s indie rock scene. Others, however, felt it fell short. Chromey commented that Lindeen "distances herself and the reader," adding: "While Lindeen's friendly voice makes you feel like she's taken you into her confidence, once you get to the end you realize she's kept you at arm's length the entire time." On the other hand, June Sawyers asserted in Booklist that the author "effortlessly captures the indie-rock world of the 1980s and 1990s." A Publishers Weekly critic called it "a truly wonderful book about life in rock music."