Hersh was married to her former manager Billy O'Connell for 25 years until they divorced in 2013. She has four sons. , she is engaged to former Throwing Muses bassist Fred Abong. Hersh has talked openly about her bouts with mental illness and its role in her musical process. When she was 16, she was struck by a car while riding her bicycle, suffering a double concussion that affected the way she heard sounds. She described it as hearing ambient sounds continuously and "...the sounds would alter their sonic vocabulary until I was hearing syllables, and drums. And then all these words would come". She's stated that hearing "pieces of songs" in her mind compelled her to take the pieces apart and craft songs from them. She also claims that she doesn't remember writing her early songs—that "they wrote her". She has had more than one diagnosis (and misdiagnoses) for her condition, including schizophrenic disorder, bipolar disorder, and most recently post-traumatic and dissociative disorders, which she says have been successfully treated with eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy. Hersh has synesthesia; she sees musical chords in colors. Solo works discography Studio albums Hips and Makers (1994) Strange Angels (1998) Murder, Misery and Then Goodnight (1998) Sky Motel (1999) Sunny Border Blue (2001) The Grotto (2003) Learn to Sing Like a Star (2007) Speedbath (2008, under a Creative Commons License) Crooked (2010) Wyatt at the Coyote Palace (2016) Possible Dust Clouds (2018) Clear Pond Note (2023) With Throwing Muses With 50FootWave Cover songs "Wave of Mutilation" (Pixies) – American Laundromat Records, High School Reunion: a tribute to those great 80's films!, 2005 "Like a Hurricane" (Neil Young) – American Laundromat Records, Cinnamon Girl: Women Artists Cover Neil Young for Charity, 2008 "Panic Pure" (Vic Chesnutt) – Columbia Records, Sweet Relief II: Gravity of the Situation, 1996 Books Toby Snax. Delicate, 2007. . Rat Girl. New York: Penguin, 2010. . Paradoxical Undressing. Atlantic, 2011. . Don't Suck, Don't Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. . Toby Snax. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. . Don't Suck, Don't Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt. American Music Series. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. . With a foreword by Amanda Petrusich. Nerve Endings: Selected Lyrics. Unbound, 2018. . Seeing Sideways: A Memoir of Music and Motherhood. University of Texas Press, 2021. . References Sources Evans, Liz (1994). Women, Sex