Lola Kirke, the Original West Village Girl

On an icy afternoon in mid-February, Lola Kirke stood on a crunchy snowbank on West 11th Street outside the brick townhouse where she spent most of her childhood, slipping in slouchy, ancient cowboy boots. She wore rugged pants that once belonged to a cousin, a clotted-cream silk blouse under a white fur coat and a heart-shaped ring made from a small bouquet of diamonds from a neighborhood jeweler.

As a child she slept under 1930s silk piano shawls; her mother kept, on the dining table, a rubber replica of 10 pounds of fat. The house, she recalled, was once both flooded and set on fire by Courtney Love when she was a houseguest, and it hosted Liv Tyler babysitting and David Bowie smoking at a Christmas party.

Kirke returned to New York on a combined concert-and-book tour, blending songs from last year’s country album Trailblazer with readings from Wild West Village: Not a Memoir.

United States, West Village, New York

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