Beth Ditto in The Advocate

I meant to link to this last week, but got busy with NaNoWriMo and the election and forgot. Sorry.

Anyway, Beth Ditto, of Gossip fame and all around fabulousness, did a great interview with The Advocate's Diane Anderson-Minshall this month that you really need to read right now. Ditto's memoir, Coal to Diamonds, was released in October.

Here's what she has to say about growing up poor and queer in rural Arkansas:

"Women in Judsonia never had a break to catch their breath or to ask themselves what the hell happened.… Young women pull a bunch of children into the world behind them, without a rest for their brains or their bodies or their hearts. No space to understand the abuse that had happened, never mind time to figure out how to unlearn what they didn’t even know they’d been taught, or to have a fighting chance to break the cycle.”

She also talks extensively about being diagnosed with sarcoidosis, an autoimmune disorder, and the realties of being a touring musician without health insurance:

When she was 24, she began losing her vision and her voice, her weight plummeted, and she lost equilibrium in the shower. She was terrified that she would never speak, much less sing, again. “I was losing my voice. I literally couldn’t speak, couldn’t swallow, my throat was paralyzed,” she recalls. “I was thinking, I have to think of something else to do, but I don’t know how to do anything else. And that was really frightening.” [...] I kept thinking, I don’t have money to do this. I don’t even have a hundred dollars in my pocket to pay for the fucking co-pay, let alone [the rest].”