Brandi Carlile - Broken Horses: A Memoir

The Carliles are nail-biters. I started biting my nails at three years old. Everyone told me that if I didnt keep my hands out of my mouth, Id get sick.

I contracted meningococcal meningitis at age four.

We were living in Burien, Washington, in a single-wide trailer near the Sea-Tac Airport.

It was our third house since I was born. Im the first born into my family and the first grandchild on both sides, contributing to my inflated sense of self-importance and burden of perceived responsibility. My life really starts here.

Before all that, though, my parents met at the Red Lion Hotel. My mother was a hostess and my father was a breakfast prep cook. My dad is very intelligent and intense, with a sick sense of humor. Hes one of six siblings raised dirt-poor on a dirt floor by a single mom in south Seattle. Hes got a father, too, but he and my grandmother divorced very young, and like many of the men on the Carlile side very rarely speaks a word. There are some quiet men in my family but none as quiet as Grandpa Jerryyou can feel how much he loves you, but he probably wont ever say it. It almost seems like a genetic trait, this strange brand of anxiety and quiet intensity. He had a daughter later in life, bringing the number of Dads siblings to seven.

My mother had a more comfortable childhood. Shes one of three girls and like her mother has always been very charming and mischievous. She can read a room like no one else. Shes vain. She loves music and art. If shes sunny and happy, then everyone she meets is too. Her enthusiasm cant be resisted. If shes not in a good space though, youre not going to be either.

To put it mildly, theyre specialand sparkly and complicated. When they met, my mom was twenty and my dad was twenty-one. Moms family had temporarily relocated to Colorado, so she moved straight in with the crazy Carlile family. When my mother got pregnant with me, she and my father decided to get married. Like so many people who married this young, they are still marriedand in many ways, are still very young.

For this and many other reasons, we moved around a lot after I was born. Fourteen houses actually. And lots of different schools. Its deceiving because sometimes they were all in the same district. Beverly Park Elementary for kindergarten and then to Hill Top Elementary, from there to Cascade View to North Hill Elementary to Olympic Elementary and then back to Hill Top, then there was Rock Creek Elementary, Tahoma Junior High, Glacier Park. And that was all before high school.

I dont think there was ever a housing transition I didnt want to make. There was always an exciting and dramatic buildup to the moving. Sometimes we moved because of evictions and job changes, sometimes for good reasons, like a better housing opportunity or a step up in comfort thanks to some connection that my charismatic parents had made. Either way, due to my frequently changing scenery and the undercurrent of chaos that poverty often creates, I developed somewhat of a photographic memory. It appears in all of its vivid detail right around the age of two.

Bedrooms change, the color of the wallpaper, the smell of a hand-me-down couch, the hum of a rental units avocado-colored refrigerator. Theres a washing machine that is frequently mistaken for an earthquake, or a friendly neighbor with a horse called Pepper, or someone who lets you hop their fence to retrieve your Frisbee. Different houses sometimes came with different pets and the loss or abandonment of the old ones at the old place. And of course, there were the feuds.I remember every drunk neighbor. The busybodies and gossips, the liberals and the divorcees. I can recall the name of just about every landlord who evicted us and my parents list of grievances against them. I also remember every helping hand. Every nonjudgmental influence over our family and the impact of such relationships on our lifestyle. More than all this I remember worrying quite a bit.

Most people live in their childhood homes for a while. It softens the edges on the memories and gives them a comforting wash, a kind of afterglow, set against routine and consistency. For kids like me for whom every experience is set against a different visual and intense circumstance, its really easy to remember details of an early life. I see this now as a priceless giftbut it isnt one Id give to my kids. Theyre going to have to get scrappy some other way cause I dont have the stomach for it anymore.

Burien is all concrete and strip malls now, but parts of it used to feel like the country.

The airport has since shut down most of the land our trailer was on when I got sick. I think it was in a fuel dump zone, or some FAA law changed and it became uninhabitable somehow.

My little brother, Jay, and I were Irish twins. He was irresistible, with blond hair and blue eyes, full of pure drama, charisma, and conviction from birth. At only eleven months and twenty-seven days older than him, I thought he was adorableand he was mine. He was tougher than me. My parents had to implore me to stand up for myself physically with Jay, because while we didnt really fight in a mutual sense, he fought the hell out of me. I couldnt work out whether he was supposed to be my formidable foe or my protected baby brother. Its an odd age difference. I was getting ready to start kindergarten. My dad wanted me to be homeschooled, but he came up against too much resistance from the rest of the familyI understand both inclinations now. The one to keep your kid at home when they seem so small and underprepared and the one that urges us to overcome all that and send them anyway.