Kim Gordon: Keller

The musician’s tender and nuanced tribute to the life and work of her deceased brother

This volume is an intimate consideration of musician Kim Gordon’s brother’s life and art featuring personal photographs and pages from his journals. Following Keller Gordon’s death in 2023, his sister collected mementos—relics from a shared existence spent dipping in and out of one another’s lives over decades—including drawings, photos, poems and the diaries he kept at various stages of lucidity. The Sonic Youth frontwoman also authored a diaristic essay about their childhood, the complexities of family dynamics and the double-edged sword of creating and maintaining legends about those we love and admire. “I know exactly when the myth of my brother started,” she writes. Designed to evoke the format of Keller’s diaries, this volume features facsimiles of his writings, offering insight into the complicated figure of Keller Gordon as well as his sister’s life. Through Kim’s prose and Keller’s own words, Keller extends and destabilizes the form of the biography, foregrounding the fragmented and the imperfect, echoing how memories themselves dissolve and take new shape over time.
Kim Gordon is an artist and cofounding member of the bands Sonic Youth and Body/Head, and the author of the memoir Girl in a Band.