**Bob Mould: **No. No. I think it's a matter of one's comfort with being a spokesperson for the community, and if you really feel like that's your reason for making your art, definitely. Had I been out sooner, would things have been different? Yeah. I don't know which way, but definitely things would have been different. The music may have been branded specifically gay which might have, at that time, hindered the audience, or the scope, or the reach. And then we got into the '90s where there was lesbian chic, and it started to be OK, and then there was "Will & Grace" and now kids come out at 10 on Facebook. So you know, to say what is understood and normal now compared to 30 years ago...culturally, it's a gigantic, gigantic difference. And even from the '80s—think about being an out musician in '84, and being an out musician in '57.

GQ: Huge difference.

**Bob Mould: **Yeah, you know, the good news is we've come an incredible distance, and it's sort of exponential as time goes on. But, wow. I never even thought about if you were in the early '60s and you were a gay musician, what would you do?

GQ: Marry someone.

**Bob Mould: **Yeah, I mean... and hope for the best. Hope you don't get found out. It's really, it's just pretty astonishing to think about how far the LGBT—which wasn't even a community then—has come. It was just like "the gays." The gays who were dying. The gays who were morally corrupt, in the '80s. Anita Bryant, Ronald Reagan and all these people that, you know, made life really, really hard for everyone.

GQ: There are many instances in the book describing when you hole up to make a record and it's a very intense experience—an emotional purge. You use the word catharsis. In that regard, what was writing a memoir like?

**Bob Mould: **The book was a lot more emotional than any record. Actually, to me the book ended up being really cathartic. I should have known. I didn't see it coming. I had never done it, so I was naïve to the whole process. And again, I was lucky to have Michael Azerrad as a collaborator and a coach, there's no way I could have done this book without him. Just especially writing about myself. There's no perspective. And Michael's very familiar with the work, and when he got to see my personality and how I think about things, I think he was able to find a way to get the stories out. Not so much the stories like "Oh, in 1983 this happened" but the story. He was able to extract that. Seeing the anecdotes, and the tales. Especially "family of origin." Once he saw that, then he was like "OK, wait a minute, there's a lot going on here."

GQ: How long did it take you to write it?

**Bob Mould: **Two and a half years.

GQ: That's a long time.

**Bob Mould: **It is. We worked in fits and starts. We did the me-just-telling-stories, and then I would be writing stories on the side, and putting everything in timelines. I was assembling everything chronologically, and writing, and putting it all together, and then when I would get these chunks of time I would send them to him. He'd mark it up and then we'd start to really put the threads together. We did that side by side, like I think most writer-editors do. Albums are so much easier. That's like when you go on vacation and take a bunch of pictures and then you take all the good ones and you put them in some semblance of order and then you share them with people.