Ali Smith has always put pen to paper, whether it was in the form of a journal entry or an opinion piece in The New York Times. Her creativity has brought her around the world with an abundance of opportunities: bass player, photographer, author. For this trip around the sun, she is introducing her memoir, The Ballad of Speedball Baby.

The Ballad of Speedball Baby is technically her third publication - the first two being photography-driven books titled Laws of the Bandit Queens and Momma Love: How The Mother Half Lives. However, this is her first long narrative arc that she said comes with a very specific set of skills she didn’t have at the beginning of the writing process.

“I started, naturally, with memories and bolstered those with conversations with people who were there,” she said. “I was relieved to find my memories basically aligned with theirs and I hadn’t made the whole thing up.”

Her memoir chronicles her years as the bass player of Speedball Baby, a New York-based four-piece that embodied the punk scene of the 90s. She spent a tremendous amount of time pouring through old journals and photographs, fact-checking historical moments and allowing friends to read countless drafts in order to make her story as accurate as possible.

“At first, I wrote like an angsty preteen writing a diary,” she said. “But with each revision, the extra, stray threads of that blurting began to burn off and the story got distilled down and stronger in the process… Also, real life is chaotic and non-linear at best, so turning that into a comprehensible story rather than a rambling series of diary entries also took craft I had to reach out to learn.”

Smith hired a freelance editor, who she credits as being tremendously helpful. It was her step-daughter, however, that suggested writing in the present tense, and helped bring the stories to their final draft.

That doesn’t mean that the entire writing process was smooth sailing. The stories she planned to share were real and authentic but also could be triggering and painful. They are her stories but also someone else’s story, and she made sure to keep all of that in mind.

“I have long been a person who likes to present [myself] as able to handle anything that comes my way,” she said. “But the punks and the artists are always some of society’s most sensitive. So I’ve sat on a lot of pain over the years, letting it out in controlled bursts to therapists, friends and partners. There has been something very powerful and rewarding about letting these things out once and for all to whomever wants to read about my date rape, physical assaults and receiving violence.”

She states there are two reasons why it has been powerful and rewarding. The first is that the shame and misery attached to everything that happened to her was never really hers to hold. The second is that sitting silently in the pain and abuse is no longer the cultural norm.

“I am rewarded by committing to being a part of that change and by the many women (and some men) who now feel they can share their stories of assault and abuse with me,” she said. “It’s not always easy to hear it, but I am deeply honored. I’m not proposing it’s easy to put all this out there. But I can take it.”

As someone who usually found herself as the lone woman in a male-dominated music scene full of addiction, violence and misogyny, there is no better time than the present for Smith to publish this memoir.

“When I was in my 20s in the 90s, women were grabbing the mic - literally and metaphorically - insisting on being heard,” she said. “But record executives still said things like, 'We already have a woman on the roster this season' when considering signing a female act.”

Every area of life has seen the talent of women gone overlooked and undervalued. As the #MeToo movement started a dialogue previously only whispered about, Smith recognizes artists such as Michaela Coel, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Billie Eilish that are continuing to grab the mic and control the narrative.

The Ballad of Speedball Baby is how Smith plans to control her narrative, all while encouraging readers to get in touch with their potential and possibility.

“The older we get, the heavier life does. But power and passion are inside us - sometimes dormant or covered in scar tissue - and can be unleashed by something as simple as hearing the song you used to dance to alone in your bedroom at 13. I hope this book pushes some of the dreck out of the way and gets people back in touch with their most hopeful, most passionate selves. Oh, and that it makes them laugh so hard they pee a little bit!”

The Ballad of Speedball Baby is available here.