On an icy afternoon in mid-February, the actress and musician Lola Kirke stood on a crunchy snowbank on West 11th Street in Manhattan, outside the West Village townhouse where she lived for the bulk of her childhood. She struggled to find purchase, slipping in slouchy, ancient cowboy boots.
“They don’t have traction,” said Ms. Kirke, 35. “They’re all I have — and I refuse to wear anything practical.”
She was layered in her signature style: artfully scuffed, and with a back story. She wore a structured pair of rugged pants that once belonged to a cousin (“They’re really cool, and I’m never giving them back”). A silk blouse the color of clotted cream, with ruffles at the collar, peeked out from beneath a voluptuous white fur coat. The finishing touch was a ring in the shape of a heart, made from a bouquet of small diamonds from a jewelry shop around the corner.
Ms. Kirke posed on the steps of the brick townhouse where, as a child, she used 1930s silk piano shawls for her bedspreads, and where her mother kept a rubber replica of 10 pounds of fat on their dining table. It is a house that Courtney Love both flooded and set fire to when she was their houseguest. It is where Liv Tyler babysat Ms. Kirke, where David Bowie smoked cigarettes at their Christmas party.
But that afternoon, Ms. Kirke was just loitering.
Ms. Kirke, whose talents as an actress and a musician converged last year in her ravenously creepy role as a folk-singing vampire in “Sinners,” turned the building into a main character of sorts in “Wild West Village: Not a Memoir,” her new essay collection. The house’s personality is matched only by the other members of Ms. Kirke’s fame-drenched family.
Her father is the Bad Company drummer Simon Kirke; her mother, Lorraine Kirke, is the designer and proprietor of the slinky vintage boutique Geminola (formerly in the West Village, now online). Her siblings are: the photographer Greg Morris; the doula and musician Domino Kirke; and the actress and painter Jemima Kirke, of eternal “Girls” fame, the embodiment of the admired, aloof, enviable girl no girl could actually be.
“Such a big part of my personality is being the youngest child and being the younger sister,” Ms. Kirke said at Tea & Sympathy, a British shop and restaurant where Ms. Kirke celebrated several birthdays growing up.
None of the Kirkes remain in the West Village. Ms. Kirke’s siblings are all in Brooklyn; her father lives on Long Island, her mother in New Orleans. In 2020, Ms. Kirke herself decamped to Nashville.
“The defining feature of Nashville is that it’s filled with edgy Christians,” she said. “All the men wear wedding rings, but they’re black and cobalt.” (Ms. Kirke said that she was unsure whether she had met a Christian before moving there.)
She misses the spontaneity she remembers of her hometown. “Last night, I was feeling particularly in love with New York,” she said — so she picked up “Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir,” the longtime New York Times critic Anatole Broyard’s recollections of (barely) postwar 1940s New York.
She quoted a line from the book in which Broyard, paraphrasing W.H. Auden, writes that “the art of living in New York City lies in crossing the street against the lights.”
“I feel like that really does sum it up,” Ms. Kirke said, alluding to her family as well, “because it’s about learning how to not follow the rules.”
While taking a walk after tea, Ms. Kirke was delighted to learn that, in her time away from the city, jaywalking had been decriminalized. She had mastered an important lesson in rule-breaking — while there was still a rule to break.
Ms. Kirke is the picture of the “younger sister” archetype: precocious, curious, yearning for approval, eager to seem knowing, breathless as if she had just hurried to catch up and is half trying to hide it.
“What is so exciting to me about sisterhood is that you’re pitted against each other by society or your parents,” Ms. Kirke said. “It’s tough. There is so much friction between women.”
But when it works out?
“It’s like, ‘Oh my god, this is amazing,’” she said. “It feels better than anything.”
For Ms. Kirke, these relationships both animated her ambition (to act, to make music, to write) and provided her with material for her art. Sisterly acknowledgment, affection and admiration is her Rosebud of sorts.
With her book as well as her songs, including those on the country album she released last year, the witty and slightly lovelorn “Trailblazer,” Ms. Kirke said that she “wanted to write unconventional love letters and love songs for my family.”
“I think that there’s this sense that for something to be loving, it has to just be flattering,” she said.
Ms. Kirke disagrees with the sentiment, which she said “breeds this notion that the only people that are worthy of love are those that are perfect.”
She is fiercely committed to prioritizing the imperfect. As a product of the sophisticated, determinedly unconventional culture of the West Village in the ’90s, she is adamant about retaining her individuality, defying pressures she says she feels from the entertainment industries (plural, for her: Hollywood and Nashville).
She said she was still wrestling with how to court success while retaining a spirited, distinctive artistry: “‘Should I conform? Or is what makes me special the ways in which I don’t conform?’” she said. “I am much more interested in the latter.”
“It’s why I won’t touch my face,” she continued. “Every time I see someone conform to maintain this connection with popularity, it perpetuates this narrative that you are only valuable if you are like everyone else.”
Much of Ms. Kirke’s art contains elements of loving exposé about being part of her family. They report on becoming a woman under high and specific expectations to be talented, beautiful, stylish, unfazed and, above all else, interesting.
When we chatted recently, Ms. Kirke was back in town on a combination album-book tour that interspersed songs from “Trailblazer” with readings from “Wild West Village,” which she wrote in tandem.
On the tour, Ms. Kirke was shocked by the docile behavior of her East Coast audiences; she was more accustomed “to doing these honky-tonk-style shows for the past five years, where everyone’s drunk and so am I.” The attentive audience members that made her the most nervous? Her siblings.
The day after her well-mannered Brooklyn show at National Sawdust in Williamsburg, Ms. Kirke hung out with her sisters.
She told them about her difficulties making art in an oversaturated culture, and feeling as though no one cared.
“I think a lot of us become artists because we’re trying to combat that feeling from childhood,” Ms. Kirke said. “We want to be seen and get attention that we didn’t get when we were kids.”
“I was like, ‘Why am I out here working so hard if I just got everything I wanted?’” she added.
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